Fourteen hundred kilometres, twenty hours, two pizzas and a... love hotel?

The 'adventure' part of our European travels are over - no more lazing on the beach or hiking for us (well, at least for a while anyway). We now have a week in southern France with Tamlyn and Sami for their wedding, then a week in Paris with cousin Stef & Vanessa and our baby godson Jack.

Now to just get from southern Austria to southern France - 1,400km. First day: Southern Austria to Turin in Western Italy - 700km, and supposedly a nice easy 7 1/2 hour drive. Second day: Turin to Carcassonne in southern France - again, around 700km, and about 7 hour's driving. Easy peasy, aye.

Haha, nah, just jokes - of course nothing went quite as planned. It is us after all.

Leaving behind Austria's Hohe Tauern national park, our favourite camping spot and the superbly relaxed Virgental valley, we tootled into the Defereggen valley, then headed up and over the Austrian / Italian border pass on the crazily-winding Defereggentalstraße. The road is so narrow and sinuous that traffic is single file only, with each direction timed by traffic lights on each half hour. We made it past the green light at the top of the pass with only about two minutes to spare. Today's driving omens were good ... for once!

Then we hit the Italian motorway and a hundred kilometre traffic jam of German holiday-makers. Yaaaaay... the seven hours driving slowly turned into eight, then nine, then ten, then, by the time we finally made it to Turin in Western Italy, we were almost at eleven hours... maybe the good omen thing was a bit premature. At least we made it in one piece.

Our on-the-go (lets-not-camp-because-this-drive-is-taking-so-long) choice of hotel ended up being slightly... interesting. Matt reckons it was a 'love hotel': the outside was all pink neon signs, and the inside, well, you can see for yourself below! Still, it was late, and even if the bed was better suited to someone of spherical shape (wtf!), we were tired, and so this was it for today.

We were also damn hungry and, although the neighbourhood looked somewhat lacklustre as we drove in, we had noticed a couple of little local corner restaurants. So off we fußbänged (mispronounced/New Zealand-glished German) with fingers crossed and hope in our hearts, one of these would be a little gem. Please. One of them was buzzing with locals, so this looked like us - a tiny place specialising in pizza, mussels and gnocchi (don't know the name, but it was just here). Absolutely no tourists around, and whoooo-boy, had we hit Italian gold... mmmmmm mmm mmmmm. Matt was in pizza heaven. So good, and so cheap.

Matt even snuck back with an extra pizza for a midnight snack in our room... mmmmm... real Italian pizza... mmmmmmmmmm. 

("nom nom reeeaaal piiiizzaaaaa nom nom nom piiiizzzaaaaaa nom nom", goes the Matt)

The next day's driving was not as bad, but still with a similar travel-time extension: seven hours turned into almost ten hours. On top of that, the last two day's driving had lightened our pockets by more than €150 in motorway tolls... ouch. This included the border crossing from Italy to France through the 14km Frejus tunnel for €45. Not all that cool, particularly given we'd driven through longer tunnels in Norway for free, and those included spectacular glacier views at the other side (although, yeah: road should be paid for by road users, not everyone, so, we're not really complaining - tolls make sense, so long as they're not run for profit!).

In the end we made it to the wedding location - Château La Villatade, close to Carcassonne in the south of France... but it was cold! Sort of. Actually, not really, but we weren't used to this 18c-ish temperature... singlets changed to t-shirts, shorts to trousers and Matt even put a jersey on... now... time to meet all of Tamlyn & Sami's rellies, help put this wedding together, and of course, Matt needed to get back to writing that best man speech (how come it wasn't writing itself??).

Hohe Tauern alps: an overnight trek to the Sudetendeutsche Hütte (Osttirol, Austria)

We left our heavenly campsite at Virgen to head up into the Hohe Tauern alps for the night. The aim was to climb up to Sudetendeutsche Hütte (German Alpine Club Hut), stay there the night and then climb back down the next day.

Hmmm... the Sudetendeutsche Hütte, that brought back a memory or two. According to the interwebbers, Austrian alpine club huts were renowned for sticking to speaking German and not being so welcoming to English-only speakers. Back in August when we were in Albania we had a lot of trouble booking this hut. Their website said that the staff 'spoke English', but multiple emails were ignored (they all included Google translations of the message as well), and Inga's attempt at speaking a few words of German over the phone resulted in a hang-up in the face of faltering understanding after a default back to English. Luckily a friendly couple who was staying at one of the Albanian guest houses helped us out over dinner by booking a room in our name.

When we got there, surprise-surprise, the staff spoke English just fine... except, no room was reserved for us... hmmmm... luckily it wasn't too busy and they had space in one of the Matratzenlager (common room/dormitory - one huge, wide bed that everyone sleeps on!). So no worries, all good in the end... just standard travelling confusion reigning supreme as usual ;)

The hike started with a gondola --of course-- taking us from 950m up to 2,150m. This gave us a lovely slow start as we wound our way around the side of the mountain, and started the ascent up to the hut.

(hey: there's our lovely basecamp, waaay in the distance, down there in the far valley - hiiiiii tent!)

The hut sat at 2,650m height, so we had about 500m in elevation to gain today - this sounded like a nice easy stroll in the park for professional mountain goats such as ourselves. With the gondola ride, we were already out of the treeline, and after some climbing the alpine flora gave way to surreal rocky moonscapes where nothing but lichen and a few wiry grasses were growing. As we closed in on the ridge containing the hut, the path also decided to give way, making us clamber hand-over-foot through a steel rope course round the side of the mountain! Good fun, and easily navigable by our now masterful ziegenhufen...

(that's the hut on the night - yaay, we can finally see it...)

"Trip, trap, trip, trap!" went the bridge.

"Who's that tripping over my bridge?" roared the troll.

"Well, come along! I've got two spears,

And I'll poke your eyeballs out at your ears;

I've got besides two curling-stones,

And I'll crush you to bits, body and bones." the billy goat said.

Reaching the hut, and with sighs of relief, we de-booted and ordered up a well-earned beer (or two). Over the next couple of hours in the sun, inspired by the mountains and lubricated by beer, we brainstormed for Matt's southern-France best man speech, dragging up some nice memories from 'the old days' in Hastings and Wellington in the process.

As you can see in the picture, the hut is located in a pretty special spot - it sits in the Granatspitz mountain range, quietly watching over the valley below, surrounded by the craggy 3,000m+ Muntanitz summits and nestling up to a ridiculously picturesque little mountain lake.

After a slightly interesting and very potato heavy dinner (this mountain hut in Austria didn't really do vegetarian but they did make 'gravy' that gave a mean salt burn), it was time to sort out how these Matratzenlager dorms worked. The blankets were helpfully emblazoned with the words 'fuss' and 'kopf' so you didn't end up getting the last persons stinky feet cooties rubbed all over your face! It ended up being three of us to a five person mattress ...so plenty of space ... and almost like camping out in the lounge when you were a kid... ahh memories, aye. 

The next day we made an early departure and started the day's 1,700m descent - pretty-much straight down a vertical cliff face! (okay, not quite, but it felt like it to our legs at times). All up, the day's hike would see us covering around 16km, with the last third on the flat roads at the valley bottom.

(Matt's favourite photo from the hike!)

Before reaching the flat, the last part of the morning's descent saw us winding our way through some little hamlets in full swing of collecting hay. The steepness of the alpine hills meant that the grass cutting and collecting techniques were very much not what we were used to... hand scythes were used in places too difficult for even the specialised machinery to reach.

They had self propelled hand mowers, similar to that we would use on our own lawns, but with these half-meter-wide steel wheels with huge spikes to keep them firmly planted to the hill face. They also used tractors with huge stabilisers for the other 'flat' parts of the hill (that we looked at and still thought they were completely crazy for mowing that hill face with a tractor!).

But damn. Poor feet. 1,700 meters is quite a descent. Luckily we had our lovely campsite back at Camping Virgental all ready, tented, and waiting for us - and a few more days there to rest, recover and just generally enjoy the sun... before we head across to southern France for Tamlyn and Sami's wedding!