The alarm went to soon again this morning with another
6.15am wake up call. We were breakfasted and on the road by 8am and on our way
to the first of two countries that we visited today. The bus ride was rather
stunning heading out through Switzerland, it is such a colorful country –
mainly green but heading into fall there are some interesting shades of browns
and golds creeping in.
Our first stop today was in a very small country call Liechtenstein,
this is the fourth smallest country in the world, but is understood to be the
wealthiest country per capita – but I suspect this is due to some clever
accounting and relaxed business taxation laws. The country is very small in
size 160km and politically could almost be considered part of Switzerland
(although you probably wouldn't say that to a local or Prince Hans Adam II who
runs the place). Since it was a Sunday most of the shops in Feldkirch were
shut, so we spent our time looking around a couple of tourist shops trying to
use up any spare Swiss Franc’s we had left over. The town itself had a castle
that was quite impressive but from where we were stopped we couldn't take a
very good photo of it. In fact the most impressive photos that you could take
while in Liechtenstein were actually looking back across the border back to
Switzerland – go figure. We were only there for half an hour or so anyway
before we hit the road again this time heading to Austria.
Driving into Austria reminded us a lot of a very green
Canadian Rockies. We were a little too close to the snow for our own comfort,
but the rest of the bus we suitably impressed. The drive its self was
interesting as we went through a considerable amount of tunnels, some of which
were one sided and build for the purpose of protecting the roads from avalanches
and rock falls. We stopped for lunch at a small autobahn stop about 20 minutes
from our final destination and enjoyed a warm bowl of goulash.
Our final stop for the day was in Innsbruck. John had given
as another one of his interesting history overviews, this time relating to
Adolf Hitler, who was in fact Austrian. In fact he made a rather amusing joke
about how the Austrians think they are quite clever as they have lead the world
to believe that Hitler was from Germany and Beethoven was from Austria. We
dropped off our luggage at our hotel and John gave us a quick overview of the
Old town area. This cobble stone area has impressive building and feels a
little like it has been frozen in time, somewhere in the 1500’s, well minus the
horses that were likely predominate in the area at the time. We had a quick
look around and took some photos of the building and the surrounding mountains
before having a look at the crystals at the Swarovski shop – which just happens
to originate from about 10km from here.
Tonight we have dinner at our hotel – which conveniently has
been upgraded to a 4.5 star due to a double booking. We will head back
exploring tonight and have a nice warm glass of mulled wine.
No comments:
Post a Comment