Today's pictures are here on Flickr.
The next 3 days will be different from what I’ve done so far – they’re in the Austrian countryside, or at least relatively small towns compared to all the big capital cities I’ve been to so far. The Frommer’s guide book recommended a driving tour from Vienna to Salzburg to Innsbruck, and as I was only going as far as Salzburg I used their ideas for a train tour. And since they aren’t big cities, there’s not as much to do, which is kind of the idea. There will be enough to keep me occupied but not busy.
The first stop of the day was Melk, but I had to change trains in St Poelten (the first of three times passing through that station over the next few days). Melk is a town of only a few thousand, but it’s got an impressive 18th century Benedictine Abbey atop the hillside, overlooking town. The Abbey was originally built in the 1200s but burned down in the 1700s, then was rebuilt. Within the last 20 years it was extensively restored, the price of which was paid for by the sale of their Gutenberg Bible to Harvard University. Tourism brings in almost all of their yearly operating budget. When I got into town, I wanted to drop my suitcase off at the TI locker, but when I got there I found that the area had been taken over by some sort of huge block party, so they told me to drop off my suitcase at a nearby coffee shop. I ordered a coffee there as “payment” for them holding it. I found out that Melk (and my later stop in Krems and Mautern) is part of a region called the Wachau, basically the Danube Valley. I also saw that the street party was in fact huge and took up half of the downtown old town/tourist area, with stalls selling toys, meat (cooked and raw), breads, clothes, cheeses, jewelry, shoes, candy, and everything else you’d see at a street fair. I had no idea what the occasion was but it was a nice surprise. At the end of the fair, I saw a sign pointing me to the Abbey, so I started walking. After a while I wondered if I was going the right way, but I kept seeing signs for parking and for the Abbey, and after a 45 minute hike up a gently sloping hill along the roadside, I finally made it up to the Abbey. Then I saw the stairs leading directly down to the town, entering in the middle of the street fair, which I could have walked up in less than 5 minutes (and saved myself 3 km walking!). As it was, the delay got me to the entrance just a few minutes before the English guided tour was leaving, for which I paid an extra €2. The guide took us through all the rooms open to the public (it’s still a working monastery, though there are only about 15 monks there now) and we saw the 14th century Rules of St Benedict book, painted frescoes, a Relic of a bone fragment from St John the Baptist, the medieval library, and their church. While we were outside in the back, overlooking the town, the bells started to chime, and the tour guide told us that the reason for the street fair and the bells was that today was the birthday of the town’s patron saint Coloman of Stockerau, so they were having a big celebration. I got really lucky with the timing of this particular visit to Melk. The tour lasted about an hour and was really interesting. I finished up at 12 and had an hour to kill before the next train, I stopped at a booth and got shawarma/pita sandwich with a Kaiser beer for lunch and a “cremerollen” (cream roll) for dessert from a pastry seller.
Next stop, after another change of trains in St Poelten (#2), was Krems. I wasn’t sure what I was really going to do in Krems but the guide book said it was a good place to stop at. I had made a reservation the night before in Mautern, across the Danube River from Krems, at a B&B owned by a winery. I spent a couple of hours wandering through their old town/pedestrian area and stopped for a Radler beer. The part of Krems that I saw was nothing really special, but it was a nice diversion for a bit before heading to the hotel. The Gasthaus Nikolaihof is owned and run by the same people who make the Nikolaihof wine (the owner of the B&B runs it with her husband and also helps run the winery with her brother, but the two businesses are technically separate). I found the B&B as highly rated on TripAdvisor. After I dropped my stuff off and got situated, I went to the Weinstube Nikolaihof winery a couple blocks away. Most of their wine is pressed off site, but they still have their centuries-old wine press, said to be the largest wooden press in the world. Today they were pressing grapes since it’s harvest season, showing off the press for the tourists and giving out free samples (they predominantly make Rieslings). The B&B owner took me and a few others down to the wine cellar (Weingut) to see the huge casks – the wine ages from 6 months to 2 years, and they have a couple barrels of special wine aged about 15 years. Each barrel holds thousands of liters of wine. The cellar itself actually dates back to Roman times, parts of the cellar walls were originally parts of a Roman fortress wall 2000 years ago. There’s evidence that the Romans made wine in this region too. I decided to have dinner at their restaurant, which was a goat cheese salad and “saumaise” which the menu said was “minced meat tied in pork net” (basically, sausage) with sauerkraut and Waldviertier dumplings. I didn’t realize until I sat down that they didn’t take plastic so I wasn’t able to get any dessert with my cash on hand. Grabbed a beer from the fridge at the B&B (a Neumarkter Lammabrau Weisse) and headed upstairs for the night.
I didn't find out until I was in the lounge area getting the beer that I could (and should) have taken a boat ride down the Danube from Melk to Krems instead of taking the train through St Poelten. It's a 90-minute ride through a UNESCO World Heritage site. I'm not sure if the ferry ticket is discounted with a Eurail pass or not. They had some flyers advertising the boat companies (it takes an extra hour or so to go from Krems to Melk since you'd be going upstream).
Today's pictures are here on Flickr.
(Originally posted 10/20/11 at 2:20am, Munich)
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