Europe, Post 9: Munich and lovely Liechtenstein

After some shopping in Prague on Wednesday morning, we set off for Munich, where we had plans to meet up with... three Aussies!!!

A few days before leaving England, we had found out that Rachael B (working as an au pair in Switzerland; see first blog post from October 2007) and her two younger brothers (over from Australia to visit her) would be travelling through Europe around the same time as us, and our paths were going to overlap in Munich!

En route to Munich, we saw lots more beautiful snow...

We arrived in Munich at about 5pm, which was also when Rach and crew had expected to arrive, but due to the crowds and waiting around they encountered during their visit to Neuschwanstein Castle, they got into Munich on the train around 7pm. After not too much trouble, we found the street corner they were waiting on, got introduced to Matt and Nathan, and then all five of us bundled into our car and set off to find somewhere legal to park.

We didn't have long with them as they were taking an overnight train to Berlin, but we had a very pleasant few hours wandering around the city centre, watching ice skaters, drinking glühwein/punsch to keep warm, and laughing at strange pizzeria ladies who refused to sell two pizzas to five people. Eventually we ended up having tea at Burger King.

Ben said afterwards that it was just so nice to be able to completely relax and talk freely – not having to worry about speaking slowly and clearly, speaking another language, toning down our Strine, etc! :)

That night we stayed at the same youth hostel we had stayed at in June 2006 with Jim, Jenny, Merity, Fraser, Ash and Tish: the Easy Palace City Hostel in Munich. We were in an 8-bed dorm (on opposites sides of the room to each other because that's where the free beds were) - the only night of the trip when we stayed in a dorm that actually had other people in it (twice we had a 4-bed dorm to ourselves)! Apart from some people crashing in at 2am, the person below Ben snoring extremely violently, and some others leaving even earlier than us, it wasn't too bad!

We awoke at 6:30am and quietly got ready to leave. The reason we were up and going so early was because we had plans to drive to Liechtenstein and go snowboarding that day!

We had breakfast at Maccas somewhere in Germany because I wanted pancakes, but they didn't even sell them! Thankfully this marked the end of our brief foray into eating at American-style fast food joints in Europe (three times in less than 24 hours – there was another Maccas moment I didn't mention!).

The scenery as we got closer to Liechtenstein was absolutely stunning. We could see the Alps, blue in the distance, with generous smatterings of snow and fir trees. The strangest feeling on this drive was at times not knowing which country we were in out of three or four possibilities – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, or Liechtenstein!!

As we arrived in Liechtenstein and began winding our way up a steep, narrow road zigzagging up the side of a mountain en route to our guesthouse for that night and then the ski fields, we could not stop raving about the absolutely breath-taking views. It was the most spectacular scenery we saw on the entire trip.

We think that the valley we were looking down into, surrounded by the snow-covered mountain ranges of the Alps, was basically the entire country of Liechtenstein. The charming houses had colourful window shutters and snow on their roofs, a river wound its way through the towns in the bottom of the valley, and the blue and white mountains were all around us! I can't describe it adequately, so here are some photos I took of the views that day and the next...

When the GPS told us we were about 1km from our guesthouse, it became apparent that we could not drive any closer to it. “Rodelbahn”, said the warning sign at the foot of what looked like a narrow road disappearing up the mountain to where our guesthouse presumably was. One quick flip through our aforementioned German dictionary later, we realised that “rodelbahn” meant... TOBOGGAN RUN!!!

Well, it turned out that reaching our guest house involved a 600m trek up the side of the mountain on slippery, icy snow... And leaving it required a winding, 1km downhill run on a small wooden toboggan (rodel)!!! AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

Our initial trudge up the mountain was a bit tiring, for me at least, but my new brown boots did quite a good job of only slipping slightly and occasionally, rather than plummeting me over the edge of the mountain. The gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains and quaint houses scattered across the hills below were also a nice distraction from physical exertion!

Once we reached our beautiful, quaint guesthouse, perched at the top of the toboggan run and looking out over a valley, thick snow all over the ground, we discovered that it also seemed to be location of the local toboggan club! They had a shed full of toboggans, a podium for place-getters in toboggan races, and people coming and going all day on toboggans!

We were curious as to how we would get all our luggage up the mountain, but the lady of the house took Ben down in her car, which had snow chains on, and transported it all up that way. After checking into our room, we discovered that the chair lifts at the ski fields on top of the mountain were closed due to the windy conditions. Unfortunately, this put an end to our much-anticipated day of snowboarding in the Alps.

However, we decided to drive up to the ski resort, Malbun, and have a look around. Obviously this required getting down the mountain via the rodelbahn, which was thoroughly awesome fun and went a little way towards making us feel better about not getting to go boarding! Ben was at the front and did most of the steering and braking, while I was the camerawoman capturing part of the run so that you could all share in the fun. Hope you enjoy it!

When we got to Malbun, we could see there were some T-bars in operation on the beginner slopes, but we decided it was not worth buying half-day passes for that. It was extremely windy at the top of the mountain, almost pushing me over a couple of times, and the big gusts would whip up flecks of snow from the ground that stung the little areas of our faces that were exposed.

Anyway, we had a look through one of the shops at the resort, where I quite enjoyed the antics of a mechanical accordion-playing beaver but did not end up taking him home. I also needed a belt to hold up my ski pants and stop the bottoms of them trailing in the muddy slush, but since the shop didn't have any, I've ended up with a pair of red floral braces instead – quite a unique souvenir!!

Later in the day, we tobogganed down the mountain again from our guesthouse and explored the capital city, Vaduz. We didn't see too much; just ate some chocolate cake and looked through some shops.

Back up the mountain, Ben did an extra solo toboggan run as I could not bear to walk up the hill again – the price you pay for each adrenalin-filled, over-too-quickly descent via rodel!

That evening we had tea in the restaurant at our guesthouse.

In the morning (Friday), we ate breakfast at the guesthouse and I enjoyed making use of an available guitar for awhile. When it was time to leave, we discovered that our luggage would be transported down to our car on a trailer pulled by a snowmobile, which Ben got to ride on with the man of the house! The snowmobile was how, at frequent intervals, all the toboggans found their way from the shed at the bottom of the hill back up to the guesthouse. Anyway, this meant that I got to do a solo toboggan run down to our car. :)

Then, we set off to the Black Forest (Schwartzwald) in Germany...