To Europe and Back

The Ice Caves and Going With The Flow

The Good: Salzburg is a small city, and we had hit most of the major sights, so we decided to take a daytrip to the Eisriesenwelt Caves. There are a bunch of tour companies that organize trips from Salzburg, but it's cheaper to do on your own, so we took a train from Salzburg to Werfen and then a shuttle bus to the caves. It was much more strenuous than I had imagined -- good thing we've been so diligent in our gym-going before the trip. There was a 20 minute hike from where the shuttle drops you off to the cable car and then another 20 minute hike from where the cable car drops you off to the entrance to the caves. Of course, the views were amazing, so that made the hiking went by easily.

Visiting the caves involves a 75 minute guided tour with 700 steps up and 700 steps down total. The exercise is helpful though, because inside the caves it's 0°C (which I suppose isn't that surprising since they are ice caves). We had worn all of the (few) warm clothes we had packed, but the Austrian tour guide took pity on Cate and gave her a jacket to wear during the tour. (Cate has noticed a theme that we seem to always have cute Austrian tour guides, we will see if this continues for other countries.) I wish I could post my pictures, because the views en route to the caves were amazing. We were up over 1700 meters and the mountains and valley views were just amazing.

The Bad: We got an email in the morning from Hostel Celica that they had no rooms available, which was a major let down for me, as I had my heart set on staying in this former prison that had been converted to a hostel. I emailed them about ten days before we left New York, but never got a response to the room request. There are only a few hostels in Ljubljana, and we would be arriving in mid-afternoon, which is tough time to get a room without a reservation. We emailed an alternate hostel, and hoped to hear from them by the end of the day. The train to Werfen (which then goes to Vienna) was a popular choice, so we had to stand for a while since most of the seats were reserved. After an uneventful return to Salzburg, we decided to book a reservation for our train to Ljubljana. Even though we'd managed seats for our train to Werfen, we didn't want to be crouched in the aisles for the 5 hour ride. While we booked the reservation, we did some research about our trip from Ljubljana to Prague, and discovered that the least expensive option would require spending 4 hours in the Salzburg train station in the middle of the night, and the expensive option would require changing trains in the middle of the night -- and both options would take nearly 20 hours of travel time! So now we had a)no where to sleep in Ljubljana and b)an unpleasant 20 hour trip back to look forward to. After some contemplation, we decided that it didn't make sense to go to Ljubljana and instead that we would head to Munich in the morning. Munich was en route to Prague, rather than in the opposite direction, our current hostel was able to call Wombat's Hostel to confirm a reservation for us and the ticket would only cost about 26€, rather than 41€ (though it ended up being mostly a wash once we deducted the ticket change fee). It was a bit disappointing, as I was very much looking forward to Ljubljana, but sometimes it just makes sense to change your plans.

The End: Once we got over the initial disappointment, we were actually excited about Munich and headed to Augustiner Bräustübl Tavern at Mülln (Salzburg's most famous beer garden) for some dinner and a few celebratory beers.

posted by Heather @ 5:30 PM