In today’s post, I’m going to talk about family holidays in Tirol, since both my parents were somewhat mournful last week that “we were supposed to go to Austria today”. Yeah, I’m supposed to have gone to Iceland twice this year. Life hasn’t gone as planned this year.
But it gave me an idea for today’s blog post. Starting when I was about nine, we used to go to a campsite near Zell am See. Sometimes we’d go to Lake Garda in Italy; sometimes we’d do both. Occasionally we ventured further. Florence, Venice, Barcelona – during our camping years, we did them all. Oh, the fun in the pre-plane days of driving three or four days in blistering heat to a tent.
But then around 2006, it became cheaper to rent an apartment than go to a campsite. Since then, we’ve gone to the same village and since about ten years ago, we’ve gone to the very same apartment. That is, I last went in 2011 because I was working by then and starting to feel like I was using a huge chunk of holiday allowance to do the same thing we do every year. But my parents and sister go back to the same apartment in the same village and spend two weeks doing the same things in a different order.
These are ten favourite things to do in Tirol (and a Google map showing anything I could remember and/or find).
1) Hintertux glacier
Now, Hintertux is great. It’s pretty high and it’s got a glacier on top so you can ski all year round, but more importantly, that glacier is accessed by a gondola that hangs off two cables. This is a novelty and when you’ve repeated the same holiday this many times, you need some novelty. In case you haven’t come across gondolas in this context, it’s not a boat. It’s a small cable car, lots of them strung on a circular cable that just keeps going all day. Whereas a cable car has one cabin at each end and stops to empty and refill, the gondolas trundle round the station and you jump in and out while it’s moving. They’re far more comfortable and efficient than a cable car.
2) Kitzbühel & Hahnenkamm
Kitzbühel is one of these small traditional Tirolean towns where one skis and as a result, it’s kind of glitzy and expensive. We buy bread and ham in the Billa and ridiculous card games in the toy shop by the town gate but it’s where you go for designer things and expensive shoes. It’s the town at the foot of the Hahnenkamm, a mountain you see on Ski Sunday. The starting gate is accessible year round and although we no longer know where most of them are, we had photos taken in that gate every year as teenagers and my family still do it. There’s a nice non-strenuous walking route at the top and my family now invariably do the walk over to the Fleckalmbahn, the out-of-town gondola, and get the bus back to the car. As with most mountains that have an aerial tramway of some kind, there’s a panoramic restaurant at the top serving traditional Alpine food.
3) Hexenwasser & Hohe Salve
If you take the gondola up from Söll, you’ll come to a kind of open air theme park. They’re popular in this region and every gondola has one. They’re not theme parks really, they’re more like a cross between an adventure playground and a play trail. This one is the Water Witches. There are bridges that spray water and pull-along rope rafts and one of those singing bowls and other watery activities, to say nothing of just wandering the mountainside. If you take the gondola up the next stage to the top you’ll come to the Hohe Salve, which has a pilgrimage church, a panoramic restaurant, excellent views and an aeolian harp, which is kind of like an enormous yellow harmonica mounted end-up on a rotating pole. You turn it until the breeze makes it sing – and by sing, I mean that it wheezes and wails like an oversized harmonica being blown by someone not powerful enough to play it properly.
4) Steinplatte
This is a very different mountain to the rounded green ones of the Skiwelt area. This is bare, sheer rock, with evidence of dinosaurs. It has a dinosaur-themed playground but its most important feature is the viewing platform that sticks out over the edge of the cliff, giving you a view of the valley directly below.
5) Seisenbergklamm
I love a klamm. It’s like a cave with no roof, a long canyon with wooden walkways clinging to the sheer sides, while water rushes and swirls violently below. Tirol has plenty of them. I picked this one because I have decent photos but we regularly visit the Kitzlochklamm and the Liechtensteinklamm and probably others. You can go canyoning in this one – I have photos of people in wetsuits & helmets in the water, but we’ll stick to the walk and the wildness.
6) Kitzbüheler Horn
Another mountain in Kitzbühel but on the opposite side of town. Take the gondola up to the middle station and then the cable car up to the main summit. Climb the horn to enjoy the views and then walk down through the Alpine flower garden to the other station at the snowpark which will return you to the middle station. It’s a nice easy, scenic walk, great for beginners. Obviously, when you get to the snowpark station, there’s a restaurant there for your post-walk beer or lunch.
7) Großglocknerhochalpenstraße
The Großglockner is Austria’s highest mountain. It took me some years to realise that your average tourist can’t get anywhere near the summit but what you can do is take the spectacular scenic high Alpine toll road up to the viewpoint, which also overlooks like Pasterze Glacier, which is the longest glacier in Austria. It looks more like a traditional textbook glacier than the Hintertux, which merely looks like a very snowy mountain. You’ll find patches of snow along the edge of the road and it’s always fun to stop in the lay-bys to slide down those patches.
8) Krimml Waterfall
Krimml is supposed to be the highest waterfall in Austria. And maybe it is. It’s certainly an interesting and powerful waterfall, with a long trail up to the top. You may have noticed me wearing a pointy red hat by now. I bought that hat here when I was about nine.
9) Zillertalbahn
We used to do this all the time but then it got expensive and the timings got awkward for wherever we were coming from. It’s a steam train that runs between Jenbach and Mayrhofen. Jenbach is on the main railway line between Innsbruck and Vienna and it’s the changing point for both the southerly Zillertal valley and the northerly Achental valley (leading up the Pertisau or Briesau if you’re a Chalet School fan – Jenbach is Spartz). The train chugs along the valley, stops for an hour or so at Mayrhofen at the far end and then chugs back and it’s a great way to see a scenic valley.
10) Paragliding
Just me? I did my first paraglide from the Choralpe or Talkaser above Westendorf in 2006 and my sister did hers a year or two ago. It’s another unusual way to see the scenery if you’ve got a head for heights. You’ll be with a qualified experienced pilot, sitting in a padded backpack seat thing and you’ll probably get an amazing set of photos presented to you at the end. A warning: paragliding is addictive!
