Second half of the Alps crossing, and on to Munich where my 2022 European cycling trip abruptly ended. The last 30-odd kilometres of the Alpe Adria Cycleway going into Salzburg are fairly ordinary, and so are the next 30-kilometres heading out of Salzburg towards Munich, truth be told, but the other 250-odd kilometres of this stage were as spectacular as usual. First, the Salzach gorge and river path, and then the magnificent cycleways of Bavaria centred around the town of Wasserburg am Inn.
Sunday 18 September 2022. Sachsenburg to Ellmauthal |94 km: 1,107m vertical|
The 20 kilometres from Sachsenburg to Obervillach were a steeper climb than anything I did yesterday, and on poorer-quality dirt track too. After that the track improved but it did get seriously steep – 500m vertical in under 10 kilometres – coming in to Mallnitz.
Just past Mallnitz is the southern terminal of the Motorail shuttle service that goes through the 8.7 km long Böckstein – Mallnitz Railway Tunnel. By taking the tunnel you only save about 20 kilometres and 1,000 metres of climbing, but at this time of year the alternative route through Sankt Michael Im Lungau is subject to closure due to snow. So I decided to take the train. I was the only cyclist going north on my trip, though a good 20-30 eBike riders were man-handling their bikes off the train as I was waiting to get on it. My loaded bike took up the space of at least 3 normal bikes, so I doubt I would have been allowed on at all if that lot had been going my way. [I found out later that the Sankt Michael route over the high pass had indeed just been closed by the first serious snow falls of the season].
The rail trip through the tunnel only takes 12 minutes to Böckstein, then there was a lot more up and down (mainly down) to Ellmauthal.
I made a poor choice in stopping for an hour to charge up at Antonio’s Peperoncino Pizzeria in Dorfgastein. Antonio is a bit of a salesman, standing out front and spruiking you in. A poor choice because it was expensive (€38) for a crap meal, and because just 100m further on, so I found out afterwards, there were any number of nicer-looking Austrian restaurants to choose from. My bad – for panicking and being talked in to taking the first charging opportunity I came across because I thought everything else might be closed on a Sunday.
The season for ideal cycling in Europe is definitely drawing to a close by late September, and it was downright inclement up there in the alps today – it only mustered 2 to 7°C, with almost constant drizzle.
Camping Verthaler in Pfarrverfen, where I pitched my tent for €10, was also right at the end of their season, and the small campsite was almost empty. The woman running it opened up her bar for a little while so we could buy frozen pizzas that she heated up for us, and small bottles of beer that she chilled for us – ‘us’ being myself and 2 other hardy souls. So for €14, I got a greasy supermarket pepperoni pizza and 2 beers and called it dinner. But this campsite was okay in my book, its key attribute being the glorious view of the Tennen Mountains, as you can see by clicking on Tripadvisor’s Camping Vierthaler link (or by looking at the photos below).
Monday 19 September 2022. Ellmauthal to Waging |132 km: 794m ascent|
I got away from Camping Vierthaler at 8.05 am to cold (1°C) and wet conditions after packing a wet tent. It had rained most of the night, and I had drizzle to contend with most of the way to Salzburg. It was beautiful scenery for the first 30-odd kilometres going down a narrow alpine canyon, but then it got a bit tedious going through industrial estates, until the pleasant again final 12 kilometres into Salzburg centre on a cyclepath alongside the Salzach River.
There were simply masses of tour-guided parties in central Salzburg. I stayed for all of about 2 minutes and shoved off again! There was then another 15 kilometre haul to get out of Salzburg through one of those zones of light industry that Austria seems to specialise in.
I had looked up one of those websites for paid eBike Touring trips to use their map to find a route to Munich via Inzell. I thought if people are willing to pay €200 per day (€1,400 total cost on their 7-day itinerary) just to cycle that way, it must be really good.
Once I’d crossed into Germany over the River Saalach on a delapidated bike bridge after about 10 kilmetres of cycling around lumber mills on the edges of Salzburg, the scenery picked up again as I found myself heading along the river in a mainly SSW direction back toward the alps.
But 15 kilmetres past the town of Piding, and after a ½-hour of strenuous uphill, I came to an abrupt stop: the road was closed due to tunnel reconstruction. There was no way to get through to Inzell. So much for using that website’s map to find a route!
It was already 2 pm and there wasn’t much range left showing on the batteries so I pulled in to a swanky guesthouse/ restaurant called Alpengasthof Madlbauer on the edge of tiny lake Thumsee. There, I had lamb chops and a Radler beer for €25 while keeping out of the weather and waiting to charge back up to 4 cells (80%). It was nice and cosy inside their restaurant and bitterly cold and windy with intermittent rain out of it, so getting back on that bike was damn hard – and yet a bunch of hardy German highschool kids were swimming out to a pontoon in the lake and clowning about with hardly any clothing on, as teenage boys trying to impress teenage girls do.
I had no option other than to backtrack all the way to Piding again (at least the last 8 kilometres are along a nice bike path in a patch of forest next to the River Saalach) and I used phone maps to get me to Camping Schwanenplatz on the southern shore of Waginger See.
Schwanenplatz campground was still doing a roaring trade for so late in the season (I’d tried another two before theirs, and they were both closed), and it was virually full except for a couple of vacant tent pitches. Even my pitch was a bit of an afterthought, and was mostly just a huge tree jammed-into a lane-intersection – it took me ages and a trip back to the office to find it. They have a really nice restaurant built out over the lake and I had some nice home-style Austrian food to warm my belly – a pork knuckley kind of thing it was, with all the trimmings.
Tuesday 20 September 2022. Waging to Munich |109 km: 694m ascent|
Looks like I forgot to take a lot of pictures yesterday, or I didn’t upload them properly off the SSD card, more likely. I’m sure I can remember taking some.
I was eager to get to Munich, and so left that excellent Schwanenplatz campground quite early, 08:05 am, with a still-wet tent. There were intermittent showers and it was cold all the way, but at least I was riding on ultra-wide bicycle super-highways most of the time with no traffic interference. I pulled-in to a workers’ Turkish food-cart at Kirchseeon about ⅔ of the way to Munich that was run by a very friendly and accommodating Turkish cook and had a nice kebab wrap while sitting around for over an hour putting some charge back into the batteries.
Wasserberg am Inn was an interesting university town I passed through on the way as well.
Part of the reason I was so keen to get to Munich was that I’d realised the Oktoberfest was just getting started and I wanted to go check it out. From off a website, I used Google Maps on the iPhone to navigate me to the official Oktoberfest campground that is way out in the suburbs at a place called Trudering-Riem. But little did I know that I had been viewing last year’s website, and this year, and for one year only, the camp had been relocated to an entirely different location. So I couldn’t find it – no one I asked even knew it existed – and I ended up just staying at a very expensive hotel, H2 Hotel, in the Messe district for €190! At least it was close to a U-bahn station, Messestadt, and I could get in to the Oktoberfest showgrounds at Theresienwiese by Ubahn + Metro.
I had an afternoon/ early evening at the Oktoberfest and really liked it, so thought I’d come back the next day for a more concerted effort. When I returned to the hotel I googled my mistake re the campground and found out that the actual location this year wasn’t all that far away, so I called up and made a booking there.
Wednesday 21 September 2022. Munich |not much travel|
The official Weis’n Camp for Oktoberfest was just around the corner from Hotel H2 really, but still not all that easy to find using Google Maps on the iPhone. There was hardly any need for me to book – most comers want to stay in their demountable hut ‘village’ where all the young fun happens – they have their very own ‘fringe oktoberfest’ going on – and there were only one or two tenters when I arrived (but it fills up later in the week, I was told).
I’d checked in early and got the tent all set up to dry out, and around 2 pm went off on the S-line from Riem station into the city once more. I wanted to wander around the city centre for a while before going over to the Theresien fairground.
The side-show amusements and food stalls at Oktoberfest are massive, but the real drawcards are the beer halls. There are 17 large ‘tents’ and 21 small ones, with capacities ranging from 4,000 to 10,000 people each! They look like permanent solids structures but are actually erected and dismantled each year just for this festival. Each one has a central stage with live music and lots of buxom wenches running around bringing 1-litre glass jugs of beer to the tables and various local food and snack platters.
I wandered in to the Paulaner tent around 4.30 pm. It’s known to be where a lot of the Brits, Irish, Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and Yanks congregate. You can usually pick the Brits – they’re the ones running around like dorks in traditional lederhosen outfits, thinking they look uber-cool (hint: they don’t).
A retired Texan was on the fringe of one of the large tables and I joined him down the ‘quiet’ end of it. The others, a mixture of all of the above, were getting quite riotous and tended to start smashing their beer steins together to literally smash them, but this isn’t nanny-state Australia after all, and they just got told-off mildly instead of thrown out on their ears by a bouncer.
They were also passing around a legal snort called Wiesn Koks that is just a mixture of glucose and menthol, or maybe they slipped something else into it judging by their increasingly erratic behaviour. I only had two steins of beer – my Texan friend ordered me another one but I never drank it as I was beginning to feel a bit out of sorts – had been since yesterday in fact, when I’d also only had two beers and then also felt downright seedy all the way back to the hotel.
So, after 2 beers spread over a couple of hours I decided to leave. Perhaps someone spiked my drink because I remember walking non too steadily up the couple of steps of my U-bahn station, slipping on a mulched leaf and then tumbling (more like diving) down the concrete steps into the concourse. And broke my left leg.
A dark chapter now, that I shan’t dwell on – I spent the next 14 days in hospital and flew home to Melbourne. The people at Weis’n Camp were absolutely terrific and packed up all my gear and arranged for everything to be brought over to me at the hospital. I was able to arrange for my German friend Dieter to store the bike and camping gear at his home in Voerde, near Cologne, and found a reliable and honest Czech guy on the internet, Marcus, who charged me only €150 to transport everything the 600km from Munich to Voerde in his van. Nice guy!
This is the only view I had for about 10 days:
…until I could hobble over to the window and gaze down at my sturdy steed Ziggy – that’s him next to the street light – who someone from the Weis’n Camp had very kindly delivered, together with all my stuff, over to the hospital.
– ends –
Day 84: Europe in 2022 so far: 6,872 km in 66 days of cycling
Nights in hotels 30
Night on ferry 1
Night in B&B 2
Nights in tent 39
Nights in hospital 13
Bike maintenance:
-
-
- Rohloff oil change (Toulouse): km 0 (20,505 km on bike)
- Repairs to rear kickstand (Toulouse)
- 13 punctures:
- 2 punctures rear (Toulouse to Agde): km 250
- 4 punctures front (Toulouse to Agde): km 300
- 2 punctures rear (Hull to Birtley): km 2,730
- 4 punctures rear (Alnwick to Berwick): km 2,940
- 4 punctures rear (Sorges): km 5,016
- 1 puncture rear (Les Arcs): km 5,268
- 1 puncture (rear) Spittal an der Drau km 6,430
- 2 new tubes (Montelimar) km 780
- Two new Ortlieb Front Roller panniers (€140 Koblenz): km 1,870
- 2 sets new brake pads (£8 Boston): km 2,710
- Rear pannier rack broken; temp fix with cable ties (Bamburgh):km 3, 020
- 2 new tubes (Scremerston, UK): km 3,050
- 1 new tyre (Scremerston, UK) km 2,030
- New Gates CDX Carbon Belt (€87 Lyon): km 5,045. (25, 550 total for the belt)
- New Goretex rain jacket (€220 Lyon)
- 1 new tyre, Schwalbe Racing Ralph, (€62, incl. tubes, Cavaillon) km 5,167
- 2 new tubes Cavaillon km 5,167
- Refit rear tyre due to kangaroo-ing effect (Nice) km 5,426
- 1 new tyre, Schwalbe Racing Rod, (Spittal an der Drau) km 6,435
- 2 new tubes (Spittal and der Drau) km 6,435
- 1 new set of brake pads, rear. Spittl an der Drau km 6,435
-