05.09.2009
Adventures in
Bavaria
After five days of travel, I’ve finally
found a little stretch of time to get caught up with the journal. I’ll
have to squeeze every part of our trip to the Alps, as well as the brief visit
to Oktoberfest and Regensburg afterwards, into one entry. Four different
towns and two very different types of activities (hiking vs. beer-drinking
festival) but at least one common thread runs through all of them—they all took
place in the area of Germany so distinct and unique in terms of culture and
dialect that it’s practically its own country: Bavaria.
1 – Garmisch-Partenkirchen (30.09 –
01.10)
On our first day in the mountain town of
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, we woke up at 6:45 with the intention of hitting the
trail as soon as possible. We got ourselves ready and took a bus to the
nearest Information Center where we asked about possibilities for hiking that
day, and picked the route that seemed to suit us best.
We rode the bus to the Olympia
Skistadion, where I suppose a part of some Winter Olympics many years ago was
held. Behind the stadium is where the trail began, beginning with several
hundred meters of road and finally wandering into the Partnachklamm, a really
beautiful gorge that you climb up and up and up until you’re looking down at the
little mountain stream about a hundred meters below.
We continued on and up, already feeling
quite tired, until we reached a little clearing with a couple of houses on a big
mountain field with goats grazing in a pen. It looked like the trail only
continued through their private property, we weren’t sure which way to go.
We ended up picking a direction that led us back down the gorge until we finally
saw a sign pointing us back in the other direction. We got right back to
the clearing, but this time saw other hikers going along the trail that looked
forbidden, so we followed them until reaching another intersection where we
didn’t know which way to go. Having just passed an old German lady who
seemed nice enough, I went back and asked her in German which direction we
should take to the ‘Partnach Alm’, the first little peak on our tour of several
peaks to get to the top. Due to my terrible accent, which I’d deliberately
laid on quite thick as I often do in these situations, she answered in English
and proceeded to bust out her hiking map and give us superb instructions on
which route we should take. Feeling extreme levels of gratitude to this
mysterious old German lady who was apparently in amazing enough shape to go
hiking alone, we continued on our journey.
We reached ‘Bayern House’ shortly after
that where we got our first good view of the village below, the continued on up
to another little peak called the ‘Jochspitze’, which required lots of steep,
strenuous hiking. Finally we came to the first ‘major’ peak—the Kreuzeck,
which had its own cable cars running up to the beer garden the Germans had put
there. As such, the trail got a lot more crowded now with people who don’t
like to manually climb up to the top but instead just take the cable car and
walk around. We could have stopped there but we still had another hour and
a half before the day’s final destination: the ‘Osterfeldkopf’ (literally
‘Eastern Field Head’) which required even longer stretches of steep, strenuous
hiking. When we finally spotted the beer garden on the top of the hill it was
still another good twenty minutes of extremely difficult walking, now even
harder due to the relative thinness of the air.
But we finally reached our goal, a beer
garden 2 vertical kilometers up in the mountain, and we took our seat with a
spectacular view and treated ourselves to a nice rewarding brew there on the
mountain.
After debating what to do next we finally
decided to walk back down to the Kreuzeck along a different path and then take
the cable car down. We were a bit worried we might miss the last cable car
because we thought the last was at 4:30 and it was already 3:00, but I figured
we’d be able to make it considering it was all downhill. But Krissi hates
walking downhill because it hurts her toes and knees, so we didn’t make very
good time, arriving at the cable car station just before 4:30, and I was so
concerned by the time we were making that I barely appreciated the spectacular
views (though I made sure to force myself to do so every few
minutes).
But when we got there it turned out that
the cable cars would actually be running until 5:30, so we went and got
ourselves another beer, then rode down the mountain at 5:00. Unfortunately
we missed the bus at the bottom of the mountain by just a couple of minutes and
had to wait another 45 for the next one, but to make a long boring story short
we got back to the hostel about an hour and a half later, then went to eat at
the same Italian restaurant again before going back and passing out at around 11
p.m.
The next day we asked the lady at the
front desk for a bit of an easier hike, and she recommended we walk up Wank
Mountain (it’s pronounced differently) so that’s what we did. Of course
this ‘easy’ hike turned out to be quite difficult as well, as we’d come to
understand that when you’re talking about hiking the Alps there’s really no such
thing as easy the way people used to the mountains of New Jersey or Santa
Barbara might think of it. We were so sore and out of breath even by the
time we reached the half-way point that we considered riding the cable car the
rest of the way to the top and then walking down like the rest of the cheaters
do. But after stopping for a little bit to eat some fruit and trail mix we
got our energy back and decided to go for it. Two hours later and lots and
lots of zig-zagging up the side of the mountain, we finally reached the
summit. Unlike the other peaks, from this mountain you actually got a good
360˚ panoramic view of everything from Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1600 meters below
to the Austrain alps in the other direction. The only downside was that it
was a particularly hazy day so things weren’t quite as crisp as they could have
been.
At any rate, we drank our obligatory
mountain-top beer, then rode the cable-car back down into town. We’d
considered taking the car up to the Zugspitz, the highest peak in the German
alps at just over 3 vertical kilometers, but it was such a hazy day and the peak
was enshrouded in a cloud anyway so we figured the €47 it would cost to get us
up there just wouldn’t be worth it. Instead we took the bus back to the
hostel, got ourselves packed and ready to go, then killed 45 minutes before the
next bus to the train station came by playing ping-pong outside the
hostel. We reached the train stations just a few minutes after one train
to Mittenwald had left so of course we had to wait an hour for the next one,
which we spent walking around, buying a few random things at the drug store
(sun-tan lotion and whatnot) then sitting on the train platform with our I-pods
until the train came to get us.
2 – Mittenwald (01.10 –
04.10)
Unlike the hostel at
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the place we were staying in Mittenwald was a little
family-run bead & breakfast only 5 minutes from the train station.
Getting in was quick and painless, and another ten minute walk brought us into
town where we stopped for an incredibly delicious meal at a little place called
the “Kleine Kartoffelsack” (‘Little Potato Sack’). Mittenwald is a much
smaller town than Garmisch-Partenkirchen and I liked it a lot better, but I
think Krissi prefers bigger towns as there was really absolutely nothing going
on. So we just got a bottle of cheap wine from the supermarket and brought
it back to the bed & breakfast, sipping on it and watching the news on my
computer followed by some German television which was in our
room.
This bed & breakfast, called the
Schmuzerhof, was easily the best place I’ve ever stayed overnight in
Germany. For basically the same price as the hostel we got our own giant
room with a TV, big bathroom, and the most comfortable beds and pillows I’ve
ever slept on. We’d had our own private room in the hostel in Garmisch as
well, but it was much smaller and the beds had been extremely hard and
uncomfortable. On top of that there had been a huge group of 10-12 year
old kids occupying our floor who were running around screaming and yelling all
afternoon and evening. At first I’d thought they were part of a tour group
but after two nights I began to suspect that they all lived there, that they
were orphans or something whom the government paid for them to live in that
particular hostel.
In any case, the Schmuzerhof was
fantastic and getting out of that super-comfy bed in the morning was no easy
task. But we managed to get up at a reasonable time and head into town to
find an information center for hiking recommendations. We decided to do an
easy hike the first day and a longer, more difficult one for the last day.
The woman at the tourism center sold us a map and sent us up a little ‘mountain’
to the southwest of town, which was actually more like a hill. It was
supposed to be an hour and a half climb to the top but we did it in 45 minutes,
getting there shortly after noon. That was the only time we reached the
summit of our climb and didn’t stop for a beer, though we could
have.
From there we walked down the other side
of the hill to a lake called the ‘Lautersee’ and walked around that for awhile,
stopping at one edge for some more of our trail mix. Another 30 minute
walk brought us back to the village, and it still being relatively early we
decided to go to the cable-car place to the Karwendel, the tallest peak
reachable from Mittenwald. It was the least clear day of the trip, and the
top of the mountain had been enshrouded in cloud all day up until the time we
actually were walking to the cable-car building. But the cloud was back by
the time we got there and we had to decided whether to spend the €16 for the
round-trip ticket or wait until the next day when it was supposed to be clearer
but when we knew we’d be on a longer hike and might not make it back in
time. Because we had nothing better to do we spent the money, then rode to
the top of the mountain.
It was a pretty spectacular ride, but by
the time we reached the peak, a little over 2 vertical kilometers, we were
literally inside a cloud in the sky. As we walked out we felt the cold,
thin air and the whole lifeless landscape shrouded in cloud looked awesome and
other-worldly. We walked out and to the edge of the mountain where you
would just stare into the white abyss of nothingness, looking down as the side
of the mountain and the cables to the cable car just disappeared into
nothingness. But if you looked long enough, occasionally there would be a
break in the clouds and little patches of scenery would become visible for a
moment, such as a few of the rooftops from the village or another part of the
mountain, before disappearing again. At one point it became clear enough
to get a really good view of everything, but the clouds quickly thickened back
up again and there was nothing to see. Krissi seemed disappointed that the
view was obstructed but I thought that in many ways this was even cooler than it
would be on a clear day. I mean, we were literally inside a fucking
cloud in the sky. Between me and Krissi standing five meters away
you could actually see little cloud whisps blowing by.
As we sat there in silence, I suddenly
noticed my phone indicating a text message was being received. How odd to
get a text message at the moment like that, but when I opened it up I saw it was
the automated message sent to your phone whenever you’re roaming.
“Wilkommen in Österriech!” it said. Apparently we’d crossed the
mountain-border to Austria, which was totally awesome because it meant we could
technically add one more country to the list of where we’d been on our
trip.
Once we’d had enough of the cold we went
inside and had our obligatory beer, listening to the pop-music station they had
playing in there for some awfully non-atmosphere-appropriate music, and took the
last cable car down.
We dropped our stuff back off at the
Schmuzerhof, then went out to dinner again, this time at a place for some
spinach rizzoto which was good but a little too cheesy, not nearly as good as
the potato sack. We bought our cheap wine again and the fell asleep in
much the same way as the first night.
Krissi was up before me the next day, as
I’d had a somewhat rough night due to what appeared to be allergies the night
before giving way to an extremely dry and plegm-filled throat which was quite
painful every time I woke up. When I went downstairs to join Krissi for
breakfast I learned she was having the same problem. We figured it was
allergies but we knew it might also be some kind of bug. It definitely
mitigated the enjoyment of the day somewhat, but it couldn’t ruin it
completely.
We were going to hike up to the
‘Hochlandhütte’ (High Land Hut) and back down again (there were no cable cars
going there) and the woman at the tourism office had given us instructions for
which bus to take and which stop to get off at. We got off at the
recommended stop but it looked nothing like what the map said it should look
like. We’d already gotten a late start so I was worried we might not have
enough daylight for the five-hour hike if we had indeed screwed
up.
I asked a German guy walking along the
trail to point out where we were on my hiking map, and he confirmed that we were
in fact not where we wanted to be. But he was an extremely helpful fellow,
and gave me all kinds of advice on routes to take and which trails were more
beautiful or more strenuous and whatnot. He turned out to be more helpful
than the woman at the tourism office.
We ended up walking all the way to where
we were supposed to have started, but then going up the mountain a different way
than the woman had recommended, a way which turned out to be more strenuous but
also way more beautiful and rewarding. This was serious hiking, much
moreso than any of our previous trails. The path wasn’t a wide road with
lots of steps built in and little benches all over the place, but genuine
hardcore follow-the-marks-on-the-trees-
And before we knew it we were at the
highest elevation of the day. It was only half-way to the Hochlandhütte
but the second half was all along the edge of the mountain, some of it pretty
sketchy, in that one false step would send you tumbling to your death, but all
at pretty much the same elevation. It was a really nice part of the walk
in any case because you constantly had a good view, and we were extremely lucky
that our last day there was also the clearest in terms of weather, and this was
probably the nicest of all the trails we’d taken so we really had saved the best
for last.
We reached the hut without much
difficulty, only taking it slow on some parts of the mountain where you had to
hold on to the wire they’d hammered in there or risk slipping off the
edge. When we got to the hut I was shocked to find that they actually were
serving beer there, as there were no cable cars or roads there to speak
of. Someone must have either walked up there with all that beer or else
had it delivered by helicopter. But leave it to Germans to have cold beer
waiting for you in the middle of the fucking wilderness. Apparently
they’ll find a way.
So we had our last mountain-top beer and
then continued along the edge of the mountain to the next trail down. It
was a long grueling walk down, first with about a hundred little zig-zags
through the woods and then along an actual road, which despite its
straight-forwardness was actually the hardest on the legs due to the sustained
downhill decline. We were both in significant pain when we finally reached
the base.
From there we just walked straight into
town where I found a pharmacy that was still selling allergy medicine. I
wasn’t sure we’d be able to get any because it was not only Saturday but a
national holiday (Germany’s reuinification day) so everything was close
including supermarkets. But I got some allergy medicine and some
cough-drops, then we went to the nearest restaurant, a Chinese place, so Krissi
could try what German Chinese food was like. I’d warned her that it wasn’t
very good, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite delicious (though it
may have had more to do with having just hiked for 6 and a half hours through
the mountains with only some trail mix for nourishment) and it winded up being
the best Chinese food I’ve ever had in Europe.
Because the supermarkets were closed we
couldn’t get our cheap wine again, so we went into a nearby sports bar (quite
possibly the only bar like that in all of Mittenwald) and bought a few beer
bottles to take back to the hostel with us. We spent the night watching
the German-dubbed version of “The Empire Strikes Back” on TV, which I helpfully
translated for Krissi knowing both enough German and enough about the movie to
allow her to follow the plot.
The next morning we both felt a bit more
sick, but it was less of a phlegm-in-the-throat thing than a full-on virus kind
of thing so although the allergy medicine had helped me sleep better I was now
unsure as to what the problem was exactly. But I took two more allergy
pills before we left, which might have been a mistake because it totally zonked
me out. In any case we said our goodbyes to the nice German lady who ran
the bed & breakfast, took our five minute walk to the train station and
boarded the train. It had been four days of strenuous activity and our
bodies were feeling it, but it had been an undeniably worthwhile
experience.
3 – Munich and Regensburg
(04.10-05.10)
Neither of us were feeling particularly
excited about going to Oktoberfest. Every German I’ve ever talked to about
it has been quite discouraging about going there, saying it’s extremely crowded
and it’s mostly tourists and whatnot, but Krissi knew that her friends would
never forgive her if she went to Germany during Oktoberfest and didn’t even go
check it out. Besides, I haven’t felt quite right about having spent so
much of my life in Germany and not having been to one of the events that Germany
is most famous for.
So we got off the train in Munich and
looked for a locker to store our very heavy and annoying backpacks. But
nearly every locker-section of the train station had been closed off by the
police for some inexplicable reason. The only room with any lockers left
had a line outside that looked at least 30-minutes long, and we weren’t sure
there were enough lockers there for everyone anyway. So we decided to just
take them with us.
The line outside the tourist information
center was also very long, so we just grabbed a map and walked the distance to
the festival area ourselves. As we approached we were stopped by police
who told us our backpacks were too big and we’d have to let them search them if
we wanted to go any further. It’s a bitch to pack these bags so we weren’t
too excited about having to unpack and re-pack again, and the police officer,
who seemed like a nice enough guy, warned us that we would be checked again once
inside. I told him about the locker situation at the train station and he
said that they normally had places for people to leave there bags but for some
reason they didn’t have that option today. But he told us not to
worry—that after two beers everything would be fine.
We managed to walk into the festival area
without getting checked again, finding it very much like a carnival in the U.S.
only with less rides and more beer-gardens, but we knew to get the real
Oktoberfest experience you had to go in one of the giant tents and get served a
“Maß Bier”, one of those giant glasses of beer you always picture when you think
of Oktoberfest. We went up to the first tent and approached the security
guy, expecting him to search our bags and then let us in. But he said they
weren’t allowing any backpacks in the tent today, which immediately
pissed us off to no end. What the fuck, Munich? First you don’t let
us store our bags anywhere and then you don’t let us into a drinking tent with
our bags?
At that point, Krissi had her pictures
and we were about ready to just get the fuck out of there and leave, but we
figured we’d try another tent. This time, the guy let us in after making
me dispose of my water bottle and searching our bags. So we got into a
genuine Oktoberfest Beer Tent and found that it was everything we’d
pictured. A big band of men all clad in Lederhosen playing Bavarian brass
music, waiters and waitresses also in the traditional garb carrying six to ten
giant glass mugs of beer to any of hundreds of picnic tables, all packed to the
brim with drunken people pounding back their beer, stuffing themselves with
Bavarian food, and many smoking cigarettes.
We’d been warned that you can’t buy a
beer unless you have a seat, so we knew we had to find a table but it seemed at
first like an impossible task. We walked the whole length of the tent and
didn’t spot so much as one free place. Most of the tables had reservation
slips on them. But just as we were beginning to despair, a waiter pointed
us in the direction of a table with a couple of open spots at the end and told
us in German that it wasn’t reserved until 4:00. That was three hours from
then.
So we took our seats, ordered a couple of
beers, and breathed a sigh of relief that we’d actually made it and we were now
going to get a taste of the genuine Oktoberfest experience. Our beer came
along, we toasted and drank, figuring we’d have one and maybe one more after
that before getting the hell out of there. As we drank, the people sitting
next to us raised their glasses to toast about a hundred times before we
finished the first glass. So we ordered a second one as well as a giant
pretzel and continued.
About half-way through the second giant
beer I noticed that I was now significantly buzzed. The atmosphere, it
seemed, had gotten to me. Either that or it was the mixture of the alcohol
and the allergy medicine, but soon enough I was feeling the whole jolly vibe of
the place get ahold of me. We started talking to our neighbors, some
tourist from Thailand and some genuine Bavarian Germans from a nearby
town. They were amused that we were from New Jersey but the conversation
didn’t really go much beyond that point. But the band started playing
again, everyone was singing and clinking their glasses together and it was all
the clichés you envision it to be.
Before I knew it we were having a third
glass, and our first friends went away so we slid down to the center of the
table and met the people on the other end, whom we’d be toasting with again and
again from then on. Replacing us at the table was a German family of four, with
two young kids, one too young for beer so he just drank soda out of a little
mini-beer glass, but the other who only looked about 12 but apparently old
enough for a genuine beer. Both looked like they really didn’t want to be
there, but after about 15 minutes the atmosphere seemed to envelop them as well
and we were toasting with them just like everyone else.
But after that third beer I was
officially drunk, and we both knew it was time to go. We stumbled out of
the tent, snapped a few more pictures, then made our way out of the merry
festival area and back to the train station, where we missed our train by about
two fucking minutes and had to wait 45 more for the next one. In my
drunken state I was quite aggravated by this, so without a word I left Krissi on
the platform, went and bought some water, then stumbled outside for a
cigarette. I don’t know how those two little tasks took up the whole 45
minutes but before I knew it I looked at the time on my phone and saw it was
time to go. I found Krissi again on the platform and we boarded the
train.
I was dozing off throughout the whole
train ride, and I was so unsure of myself that I kept asking the ticket-checkers
whether or not this train actually did go to Regensburg, the town where we had
our hostel reservations for the night. It seemed to take much longer than
I expected, but we did eventually get there, and we managed to get to the hostel
and get into our room in spite of the fact that there was no staff there.
It was actually the night-time security worker who showed us in and gave us our
key, then a couple quick recommendations for a bite to eat and place to
drink.
We had our kebab dinner, then went to an
Irish pub for one last beer. I was ready to pass out, and had been for
quite some time, but somehow Krissi was still going at it, and she stayed up for
awhile doing shit online with my computer while I passed out as early as 10
p.m., only to wake up later at 2 a.m. with the worst headache of my life and
tossed and turned for the next four hours attempting to get back to
sleep.
I still had the headache when I forced
myself up at 9:00, got myself together and left the hostel with Krissi around
10:00. We walked to the train station to drop off our stuff and buy the
few remaining tickets we’d need for the rest of our journey through Germany
(from Prague to Dresden, Dresden to Leipzig, and Leipzig to Hannover), then
spent the next hour and a half just walking through the lovely little town of
Regensburg, where I’d been once before with the exchange student crew.
Krissi and I didn’t do much—just walked along the Danube, checked out the nice
cathedral they have, and wandered around the streets of the Old Town before
getting back to the station and beginning our journey to the next destination on
our tour, Prague, where I currently sit after a nice easy evening of dinner and
non-alcoholic beverages (I needed a day of recovery), finally writing down this
journal entry.
There are five days left on this trip, and they should be quite enjoyable, assuming this annoying sickness, whatever it is, goes away. Prague is a lovely and fun little town, and I’ve always wanted to see Dresden and Leipzig, so I’m looking forward to those as well. But I don’t think anything will compare to Bavaria. As I expected it might be, that was probably the best part of the trip, perhaps the highlight of this entire time I’ve spent with Krissi this Fall.