7th Leg: Mattrei - Vienna
Wednesday
Back to some serious travel today, with a combination of two buses and two trains taking us from the Alps to Vienna, in the far east of Austria. The countryside continued to be unrelentingly bucolic throughout the journey, but Vienna seems to be more like a real city, with rubbish in the streets, garish signs, immigrants and vagrants.
In Mattrei we climbed some significant mountains yesterday. I think we reached over 3000m, aided by chairlift for the first 500m or so, plus the base-camp altitude of Mattrei. Getting down again turned out to be the most difficult part, as we lost track of the path, and thus had to find our way down some slopes so steep they were almost cliffs. These slopes were covered with long, thick grass that dropped down with gravity, and we found that the most efficient way of descending this incline was sliding on one’s bottom. To our surprise, we actually covered a few hundred metres of otherwise-tiring descent in this way, wearing out nothing except our bum cheeks.
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