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 ;)
(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!
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