Scaling the Alps in less than 15mins…
Thursday, August 11, 2005
After a decent breakfast (included in the room charge) we headed off down the road with the intention of going to the supermarket to buy a picnic to have at the top of Mt Baldo. After that lovely 2k walk we discovered that the town of Malcesine had a little more to offer than just great views of the lake and a cable car – it also had the coolest castle we have seen so far on our trip! After umm-ing for a minute about whether to pay another 4 Euro each for another castle, we decided just to go with it. I’m so glad we did! The 1500 year old castle is really well maintained, with gorgeous gardens and lots of seats. It also had stunning views of the lake from every level of the castle. (Photos below…) We could even climb up all the tiny (and we do mean tiny) staircases to get right up to the top. OSH eat your heart out – there’s no way you could do that in New Zealand, they would have mesh over all the open windows, and you’d have to take an elevator… although on second thoughts that may not be so bad!! Anyway, we got to the top and were looking around us at the view when suddenly we heard a ‘dong’ from right behind us… the tower bell was striking 12pm in a very loud kind of way! There were actually some little kids who had been looking up inside the bell when it first rang and they got such a fright! Quite funny really… Anyway, after looking around for an hour or so we decided we had more than got our money’s worth and went off to find some lunch. We headed to the supermarket but it was another of those Italian ones that you can’t move in and sells nothing worth buying, so for the same price we went down to the pub and got toasties and coke, followed by another gelato… they’re so good! (We’re not rolling around on the ground from being too fat yet, but it’s probably a good thing we’re leaving Italy soon!).
We then headed to the Cable Car. We deliberated for a couple of minutes about the 15 Euro each cost, but decided that you have to do these things when you’re in places you’ll probably never be again, so we handed over our money willingly.
Wow. I tried to tell Maarty that it looked like it was about the same height as the Christchurch Gondola – he didn’t agree but anyway. We went up up the first part, then had to get off and change gondola… this is when I realised that Maarty was right and we were going to go a lot higher up than the Christchurch Gondola (although if someone can tell me how high this goes I’d be quite interested). We started to go up… and then kept going and going and going, with our estimate being that our speed was about 30kms an hour.. it was FAST. We got to the top and were just in AWE of what we were doing. We were 1720metre up in the Italian Alps, looking down on Lake Grada, the biggest lake in Italy. We put on our jackets (because we are clever kiwis, and knowing that we were going up a mountain we brought them, unlike most people who were in shorts and T-shirt style clothes) and went for a wander. We headed out to a rocky ridge and just sat, having a drink. We then walked up further and went over the crest of the mountain and found another place to just ‘sit’ enjoying the view of the other side of the mountain. It was just lovely. We spent well over an hour at the top, enjoying just being out of town for a change, doing something different from most travellers.
After heading back down, we walked the 2km back to the hotel and had a rest, reading books, catching up on the diary etc. We had dinner in at the hotel again, and then a lovely early night. Ahhh!
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 pm,
