Innsbruck My Treat

I’ve always wanted to visit Innsbruck. I’ve passed through Innsbruck on my way to the Linz Electronica Festival twice. I’ve been ski mountaineering in the Stubai but simply went straight through Innsbruck. As for the Tyrol, I’ve been piste skiing in St Anton and one summer, after exploring the Silvretta, walked over to Switzerland via Piz Buin.

So I happily await the direct train to Innsbruck on a wet day in Munich. Chatting to a couple from Connecticut, I warn them that the train is an Italian rubbish train which should have been destroyed forty years ago. They cannot believe it until the train comes into the platform and the first door they see is broken and kept shut with tape. It is a disgusting train similar to the Rome airport line.

No worries!! I’ll soon be in Innsbruck but the people around me are travelling all the way to Verona and Venice. I chat to a dancer who “does the boats”, as we used to call them. “We call them ships now!”, she says. She used to have a “day job” but found that dancing on the “ships” suited her better. She works on one of the best lines , Crystal. She performs in the evening and teaches dancing sometimes during the day. The crews change over in Venice. If I go on her ship, she says, she’ll teach me to dance. It turns out that ALL the people surrounding us go on cruises once a year. She says it doesn’t really fit in with my philosophy of staying long enough to “feel” a place, but apparently their West Indies cruises do act rather like a floating hotel on some of their routes.

Thankfully, I leave them on the train at Innsbruck. I spend the evening wandering around the town. I find the nearest Aldi – hang on – it’s called “Hofer” in Italy!!! This is a bit of a mystery to me. Why has a shop taken the name of Austria’s hero? I buy my supplies and promise to look into it later.

The following day is beautiful. Perfectly blue sky. I lean out of my room at dawn and take a picture of a nearby peak reflecting the colour of the rising sun. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. This is too good to miss my first treat.

I have always been fascinated by the fact that Innsbruck is a city from which mountains rise directly at the end of the city streets on two side and in the distance on the other sides. After gazing at advertising posters for years, here I am walking around the streets looking now and then at the mountains rising at their ends between the houses.

But today, while the sky is blue, I must take the stubaitalbahn up into the mountains. It doesn’t go as far as the glaciers I have skiied down, but this will just have to do. The snow line is quite low at the moment but I suspect this hot day will cause some melting.

Innsbruck has really got its act together as far as transport is concerned. The tram service is superb. They have even linked the stubaital mountain railway with the city tram service. So you take the tram from the railway station and it will suddently turn towards the Stubai valley and start the ascent of a single line railway.

The view over Innsbruck is superb as we ascend the line of this old railway. It operates on the section principle with double lines only in stations at the end of each section. As I have said before, I love a tram which charges through woods and fields with none of the normal surrounds of the main rail lines. The railway does not have fences on either side all the way and I like travelling across a meadow in a way impossible by car or bus.

As the tram ascends, we pass through ski resorts and very nice villages from which people commute to Innsbruck using this railway. I try to take photos of the trip but my photos simply do not convey the beauty of the view from the tram as we travel along the side of the valley, way above the houses below.

Eventually we reach the end of the line and I take a short walk into the village. It is off season so the place is not very busy. I can imagine it is a hive of activity when the snow is covering the area. Today, it has become very hot, as the air is clean after so much rain and snow. I fancy I can just see the Stubai glacier higher up the valley

The descent is equally enjoyable. The line runs high above the valley so there is a very steep slope on the starboard side as we go down to Innsbruck. We soon see the city far below then the enormous ski jump with its huge tower. Then we join the city street tram tracks and I jump off as we pass the “Hofer” Aldi supermarket.

The next day does not have a blue sky so I am happy that I chose the day before for my stubaitalbahn treat. Today I visit the exhibition about Hofer, the hero of Austria. He was a great man who was executed by the Italians after his activities on behalf of Austria. He is their hero.

So, I ask myself, how come Aldi gets to steal his name? Hopefully the exhibition called “Hofer Wanted” will answer this question.

I’m allowed to photograph anything in the exhibition so I start taking shots of the enormous amount of Hofer material in the exhibition. There are literally hundreds of pictures of him. They are also showing films about him. Then there are talking heads all over the place discussing him. In the end, I am almost hypnotised by his image.

Poor Hofer is used in every way possible. He even appears on a Nazi poster and all sorts of other material. The exhibition has been designed to be a contemporary representation so there are a lot of features, rooms presented at an angle for example, I do not understand!! But, by the time I have walked through, I am sad that this man has become a sort of advertising icon. There’s no exact parallel for other countries so it is difficult to understand how this has happened.

I come out of the exhibition and, as if to confirm my fears, I see Hofer advertising ice cream!!! His visage is clearly recognisable after almost two hundred years of Austrian history.

Later, I do the usual tourist things. I admire the ‘golden roof’. I look round the over-baroqued cathedral. I enjoy some incredibly beautiful buildings. I take photographs of streets with the mountins rising at the end. I notice that the opera house is doing ‘My Fair Lady’ after ‘Rigoletto’ two days before.

But I have another treat. This is the journey to my next destination the following day. As I board the train, people tell me, “You know this is the slow train?” and I say, “Of course, but it’s a nice route” The two ladies in the compartment – it’s another old train – nod in agreement.

The train goes by a route which takes us high above the present snow line. The line winds violently from side to side and the wheels give out a very loud screeching as we ascend. It has two lines but it looks as though it was once a single line route. Now and then the ‘up’ line separates completely from the ‘down’ line where there is not enough room for the two. The other line then enters a tunnel until there is again room for the two parallel lines.

After about an hour, we reach the snow line and pass through Kitzbuhel, a very famous ski resort for anyone who has watched those crazy world cup skiers. This is ski resort country and I remember some of the names of some of the places we pass from those ski brochures which come out each year

Then we come to the beautiful lake at Zell am Zee. This is where Ferdinand “Ferry” Porsche spent the last years of his life. In 1898, his father conceived a four-wheel drive electric car, which became 1900’s prize-winning Lohner- Porsche Chaise. Seventy years later it was used by NASA for its lunar buggy. But “Ferry” himself and his father designed and produced the first VW beetle, using slave labour during WW2, and of course his sports cars.

After Zell am Zee we begin our long descent with the wheels screeching even more. The valley is very narrow at some points and the new road going down the valley above us looks amazing as it shoots across from side to side. Eventually we reach the wide valley leading to Salzburg. The journey has taken three and a half hours.

During the journey, one of the ladies in my compartment repeated says confusingly, “Sehr schön ist” and I repeated agree with her slightly strange German.