(the campsite looks cool from this view, right? Just look at all that green and the beautiful bubbling brook)
(yeah, not so much from here: chock-full of tents and campervans, plus that's a main road in the background that you can't see. Sigh)
Then we ran out of cooking gas. Not a problem, right. Right? How could that be a problem? Cooking gas is universal, right? Right?? BAH. We had been looking for gas for ages now - since Albania. That's six countries. Six!! Dang. We have a Primus Omnifuel cooker, which either uses a "universal" screw-on gas canister*, or literally any type of fuel that could be poured into the bottle. So the cooker could use pretty much any fuel in the entire world. Any fuel. In the whole wide world.
Problem is that for some reason the screw-on gas canisters seemed impossible to find on mainland Europe: they only has the puncture type canisters - which are stupid, because once they're on, you can't remove them. We also hadn't been able to find any liquid fuel anywhere... so we were now at last-resort stage, which meant buying a 5l container and filling it with petrol/diesel down at the local petrol station, then using that in our cooker fuel bottle. Looks like 95 octane petrol it is then, eh! Maaaan that stuff stinks when you use it in a cooker.... plus it was damn annoying to get the cooker started with it (the cooker head/spreader had to be pre-heated for aaages to get it really hot before it would evaporate the petrol properly).
* September 2015: thanks to the internet we now have an Edelrid adaptor to add to the 20 boxes in storage in London. It allows the Omnifuel to also take puncture-style cartridges, by converting them into screw-type canisters... next time we'll be sweet as!
(that is so not cooking with gas: pure 95 octane petrol coming out of this baby now, although I suppose that once it hits the red-hot head/spreader and evaporates, it technically is gas then?? Hmmm)
We quietly busted out of the not-so-totally-awesome Lampenhäusl campsite, cutting our supposed week-long stay down to two nights. Inga had found another campsite that looked like it might be big old a bag of sweet paradise, so, off we set, with the aim to drive over the 48km Großglockner Hochalpenstraße (Grossglockner High Alpine Road - originally created after World Word I, specifically for tourism) and through the Hohe Tauern national park: we were greeted by a lovely toll-booth at the start asking for the insignificant sum of €34. Wait. What? €34?? Wowsers. Good things don't come cheap in Austria. Sigh. Money makes the world go round I suppose.
That scenery though. Stunning. At the top, in the spot known as Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, we followed in the steps of uncountable other tourists through a seemingly-never-ending set of tunnels (they used to mine seams of gold high in these mountains) to the Pasterze glacier. Along the way we met some cute furry little Marmot friends (the largest member of the squirrel family - although they're miners, rather than tree climbers!) - they hibernate for up to nine months of the year, so we counted ourselves lucky to see them... and they're darned cute little (big, fat) balls of fluffynesss.
(you can see where the gold veins breached the surface and the tunnels breach the rock face)
We made it to the next campsite - Camping Virgental, in the small, sleepy town of Virgen. Finally. This is what we have been looking for - there was only one other tent (a nice Belgian couple), with the campsite sitting in the middle of a valley surrounded by steep hills and topped with oh-so-very-Austrian mountains. Yeah yeah yeah, we had hit camping gold. And that weather! Sun, sun and more sun. No more soggy tent! It was only getting better. Ahhhh... smiles all round. We put the tent up --oh, look at how it drys out, lovely jubblies-- and settled in for the next six days.
Well, at least our tent settled in for a week of calmness anyway - this campsite was nice and close to an overnight hike we planned up to the Sudetendeutsche Hütte (German Alpine Club Hut), so we planned to give the tent a break from our smelly butts for a night, while we clambered up and down some more mountains...
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