The Epic Eurotrip--Chapter 13: The Wolfgang's (Austria--Salzburg, Wolfgang Lake)

Okay, this one will be fast......hopefully.

Remember this? It's the Hohensalzburg Castle. In that afternoon when we visited, there was an optional tour to go to the castle for like 18 euros. Again, I was already out of money by then (still had a week to go) so I chose not to go with the group. I walked around the city and found a way up to the mountain. Of course, I went up to discover what's up there.

A small alley that leads up to the hill.

The roads weren't windy or narrow. It's the slope that killed me. Gosh I really need to get back in shape. This road forks out into two parts. One goes to the castle (the group took trolley up to the castle. It turns out that you can actually walk up to save the trolley fee. You still need to pay for entrance, though.) while the other leads to another hill with a watch tower.

There weren't many people hiking. I was by myself for a good 15 minutes (kinda scary with the thought of getting lost.) I saw only 2 couples and 1 other traveler (I think she's from Japan. She had that unique accent when I talked to her.) The entire trip took about 25 minutes uphill (15 min downhill.) I got to see the wilderness of Salzburg and a good view of the city from top.

View of the city. The Cathedral stands mightily.

I think this road was one of those old roads they used for transferring materials to the castle. Some parts of the road i walked through have walls and watch towers. These were mainly used for scouts alerting the castle if there were enemies. I believe there were also gates around there to slow down or stop the enemies from advancing.

One of those mini watch towers.

I finally got to the top of the hill. There was another watch tower there. Too bad they didn't allow me to go in. Still, I got a good view of the castle.

Probably the best view of the castle without being in the castle.

The watch tower.

Honestly I don't even know if I can call this a watch tower. It doesn't really have many windows (thus no view.) It feels more like a storage or one of those "last resort defense" where you eventually surrender or burn yourself in the building if you don't want to surrender.

Now, take a look of this picture:

Take a look at the building near the bottom middle. When I took this picture, i was only planning to capture the view of the Alpine mountains and some city scene. I didn't realize this building was in the picture until I organize the pictures after uploading into my computer. It's called Schloss Leopoldskron, a palace used in Sound of Music! Okay, actually, according to Wikipedia, this palace was never actually used for filming. They only filmed a the outside and some grounds around this place. The idea, though, is that the Von Trapp family lived in here. Well, I guess I can say I've been to this place after taking this picture, lol.

Now, crazy story time. After the free time (when some people went up to the castle,) we gathered in front of Mozart's house. Guess what? 2 people are missing, and they barely speak English. Of course they don't know any European language. We tried looking for them, but to no avail. The tour guide called the police, the local tour guides, and even the agency back in US and London to make sure if they have contacted them. Still, these two people are like evaporated from this world. After 2 hours of search, the tour guide let us go to the next destination while he stayed and continued searching for these 2 people. I'll continue the story in a bit.

Our next stop is the Wolfgang Lake, named after Mozart. This lake, like every other lake we've visited so far, is a lake...... I mean, there's only so much to say about a lake. After visiting like 3 or 4 of them, I got tired of lakes. The result is I did not join the cruise for lake tour. Instead, I walked around this little town next to the lake and took some photos.

The Wolfgang Lake

Cafe by the lake.

I'm kinda sad the person who took this did not lower the camera a little more.

The tour was relatively short (30 mins) and we met up after the tour. We then waited for the tour guide for another good hour after he said he was coming to meet up with us. Apparently the taxi driver from Salzburg didn't really know this place (this place is about 20 mins from the town.) That being said, our schedule is completely delayed, big time. We had to cancel the concert we signed up for in Vienna that night, and we had to call the restaurant that we're going to be late. We left the contact info at the police station so that they can call us if they found the missing people. Then we had to move on.

On the way to Vienna, the tour guide got a call from the office in London saying that there were two people checking into the hotel in Vienna already, and they were exactly the 2 missing people! Great, now at least we knew where they were. But then the next question is: how did they get there?

Here's google map showing the distance between Salzburg and Vienna.

Check the time and distance between these two places. It's pretty much the distance between LA and Vegas. We thought they took train, since it's probably the cheapest way to get there. No, they took a cab. They did not know how far it was from Salzburg to Vienna, so they only showed the cab driver the address of the hotel. The cab driver originally was going to charge them 700 euros ( more than 1000 dollars,) but they bargained down to 500 euros. Still, that's a lot of money.

We eventually arrived in Vienna that night, had the best Chinese meal ever in my life (I was starving, otherwise it was a poorly made meal.) Then we headed to the hotel and got ready to go to bed. This concludes the Salzburg trip (finally!)

Before I end this post, I gotta say something. Some of our group members don't speak good English. It's fine. With some key words and some gestures, you can still survive in Europe. However, some DON'T speak English at all! To these people: you really have some guts to travel by yourself to these countries. It takes a lot of courage (or ignorance) to travel like this. I experienced several times on this trip that I could not communicate with Europeans, whether it's for ordering food, asking for direction, or simply chatting. I felt really vulnerable, but at least most of people still know some English, so I could at get what I was looking for. If you don't even speak English, it's almost impossible to survive by yourself. So, props to you, non-English speakers, for your courage to travel around the world.

Next stop: Vienna (probably will take another 2 or 3 posts......oh god.......