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Thursday, January 29, 2004
Postcard-perfect by Postbus
By Evelyn Regner-Seno
(part one)
You can let it stay a dream - an impossibly “lost horizon” of your childhood’s fairy stories, where one expects to meet Snow White and the seven dwarfs at the next turn, or startle Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer out of snow-laden birch forests.
The world as “charged with the grandeur of God”, in the lines of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, would aptly describe the Austrian Alps in all its seasonal myriad faces.
Looking at the Alps in an atlas as one long row of mountains from France through Switzerland and Austria and then down to Yugoslavia, the child in you could wonder whether these remote regions are at all accessible by conventional means of transport. Do you have to struggle down steep mountain paths with your boots half-buried in snow? Do you have to learn how to ski? Does the sun ever shine there? (Do you have to take a canoe or swim to go around the Philippines? This question was posed to me a long time ago by someone who was as sadly ignorant of my country as I was of the Alps.)
The Alps can become very real, though, through well-tailored guided tours on a comfortable tourist bus. The more ambitious could go cross-country skiing or sweat it out on a mountain bike down the well-laid out bicycle highways. You could rent a car or ask that friend to take you there.
But, why bother anyone? With a limited budget, you learn of other ways to get around. In our case, we discovered the mail bus - a regular-sized yellow bus appropriately called “Postbus”. This vehicle has the seating capacity of a regular single-deck tourist bus, and is equipped with reclining seats, air-conditioning, and heating. Though it functions primarily as a mail carrier, it also carries schoolchildren and passengers. Even in the dead of winter, through icy roads, life goes on for the Postbus, as it goes right on schedule to the remotest corner of the Alpine regions.
“I must have done something good!,” I exclaimed to my companions, as an incredibly beautiful scenery unfolded before us. I did not realize that I had quoted the character, Maria, in the Sound of Music, and appropriately so, as the movie was filmed exactly on the spot where we found ourselves.
This was in Mondsee, where the medieval church, dating back to the ninth century, served as the setting of the wedding scene in this movie. A typical Alpine town and lake resort, Mondsee lies in a valley, 481 meters above sea level, surrounded by high mountain ranges, like the Drachenwand (1169 meters high). In such towns, life always centers around the lake, its shores dotted with hotels, summer houses, and cottages, where you can engage in water sports, swimming, and fishing in the summer season. In the cold months of autumn and winter, you can just drive through the misty landscape to satisfy your urge for beauty as the lake turns ethereal with a thick cloud hanging very close to its surface.
The Postbus to the Alpine towns is stationed right across the railroad station of most Austrian major cities. From the beautiful city of Salzburg, the buses travel in two general directions: one to the lake district called Salzkammergut, situated in the province of Upper Austria. The other general direction is towards the Alpine region of Salzburg province as well as to the Bavarian Alps in the German border.
To go in the direction of the lake district of Salzkammergut, you can take the Postbus to Mondsee, which leaves Salzburg every two hours. The trip takes only an hour at the minimal cost of less than US$20.
Along the provincial roads traversed by the bus, you see in spring the meadows changing colors every two weeks or so. This time it is yellow with dandelions, and the next, it has turned blue with forget-me-nots. Entire hillsides can turn white and lilac overnight as cherry, plum, apple, and pear trees bloom in the summer, these same trees are bent with fruit, so abundant that not even the birds could consume it all. In the autumn, the sight of the entire landscape turning red and gold through the mist can leave you breathless and transformed. One day in February, from a Postbus, you are startled as the landscape glitters with “diamonds”, and you want to forget that it is only the sun reflected in the ice which has wrapped up the trees and the tiniest grass. As dark, pine forests swallow the Postbus, you forget about time and space and all the world’s sadness.
(January 29, 2004 issue)
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