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Thursday, July 01, 2004
Horse and carriage ride
By Belinda Rodriguez
One of the delights of traveling by land in Europe is that you get to see and experience life in the countryside. The beauty of the Austrian countryside is postcard-perfect; what you see in their postcards is what you get, especially in the breathtaking Lake District on whose shimmering waters are refl ected the serene grandeur of the magnifi cent villas built along its banks.
From Vienna, where we started, to Innsbruck, we passed by the city of Salzburg, whose terrain is dotted with small hills that one could literally jump off and run from, one to the other, just like what Maria and the von Trapp children did in the movie The Sound of Music, fi lmed on location here.
Innsbruck is four hours away from Vienna by motorcoach.
Often a site of the Winter Olympics, it is a city ringed with mountains, the Tyrolean Alps. A well-preserved medieval city, one of its famous attractions is the “Golden Roof”, built by a recluse king whom his subjects thought had gone bankrupt. To disprove this belief, the king erected an ornate balcony in his palace and covered the roof with gold coins.
But what delighted me most during this two-day visit was the horse and carriage drive we took through the forests of Innsbruck late in the afternoon. Our carriage driver was costumed as “William Tell”, complete with knee-breeches, a short leather jacket, a red shirt laced with strings and a feathered hat.
Now, doesn’t he remind you as well of that legendary archer?
It was summertime but the temperature had gone down to 10OC and the Alps, by then, was completely covered with snow.
Compounded with late afternoon showers, the cold sent chills all over me in spite of the protective woolen blankets provided for us in the carriage. So, I forced myself instead to dwell on the beauty and magic of the forest. Maybe, this was where Goldilocks met the three bears, or Hansel and Gretel, the witch! This was the kind of setting used by the Grimm brothers in their many fairy tales since Austria and Germany (where the Grimms come from) have the same landscape features, the former having been a part of the German empire before her independence. A farmer’s house, standing alone at the edge of the forest reminded me, too, of the cottage where the seven dwarfs hid Snow White from her cruel stepmother, or the home of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother before the hungry wolf devoured her.
It was such an isolated and lonely house that the only sign of life there were the wisps of smoke coming out of its chimney. Thus, I was constantly on the edge, expecting any minute to see a dwarf, a witch, or maybe, an enchanted princess! One’s imagination really soars in this woodland of enchantment that evokes in us images of the distant past and the long ago of fairy tales.
Coming out of the forest, we passed by picturepretty villages and typical Tyrolean houses with balconies filled with lots of colorful summer blooms.
To add a touch of local color, children in their native Tyrolean attires waved at us from their homes, equally delighted to see us, as we were, of them.
After the one-hour drive, we stopped by an inviting country inn for a drink of hot chocolate (others opted for wine) to warm ourselves and to continue story-telling about (what else?) fairy tales.
We then went back to our rustic chalet hotel which provided our aching muscles with a welcome respite, and as a visual bonus, a magnificent view of the towering, snow-capped Alps. A perfect ending for a two-day stay in the magical city of Innsbruck.
(July 1, 2004 issue)
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