The Road to Nowhere

Sitting in a park in Mulhouse, France, waiting for a night train to Perpignan where some lovely festival-goers in a bus will pick me up and take me to Nowhere! Nowhere is the European regional Burning Man. 

Can't wait for the festival fun to begin. And enjoying having this on repeat in my head!

Mountains

Innsbruck absolutely exceeded my expectations. I’m not sure what I was expecting, an attractive small town in which I could drink beer, I suppose, but I’d entirely forgotten the magic of mountains. The way they sit there so vast and craggy and silent, just pulling sound into them, until you’re in this immense silent space of stone and trees and time so endless your whole life is just the merest blink, or nothing.

And the smell! I’d forgotten the smell of mountain forests in the summer, of pine and fir baking in heat, of wild flowers opening and mist from tiny mossy streams, and the smell of sunlight itself. I think my host probably thought there was something wrong with me because I basically spent the first hour telling her how good everything smelled.

Ignoring various bizarre signs along the way...

She lived up on the flanks of the mountains, so as soon as I roused myself in the morning I put some tea in a jar and headed up the roads behind her house to go smell the air some more. The roads quickly petered into trails which I climbed, and after coughing up (disgusting I know) a pint of phlegm and what I swear was another lung full of Moscow air pollution, feeling a bit like a city rat creeping up out of a sewer into the forest, the going was much easier and smoother.  I happily went higher and higher just ecstatic to be in nature. The trail ended at an incomprehensible dam-like structure that didn’t seem to be damming anything. (I found out later that it’s an avalanche guard.) I felt like I was alone at the top of the world, with eagle views of Innsbruck and the Alps and even Italy spread below me, though of course the peaks themselves were still hugely far. Pushing on just a little higher, above the avalanche guard I found, of all things, a veritable mountain-biking highway and a plethora of trails from which to choose. Not so alone after all. I continued on, taking the smaller more empty trails, looking for views and high seats of deep moss on rocky outlooks.

                After a few hours of hiking and getting higher and higher I realized the flaw in my plan: I hadn’t eaten anything and I hadn’t brought any food. (Though of course I’d brought water, I’m not a complete idiot.) But I didn’t want to leave the views and the wildflowers and the air. It was at that point that I noticed the tiny knife and fork symbol next to some of the destination names on the trail signs. Could there really be food there? Taking a gamble I decided to go on instead of back and after a last (to me epic) push, I found an alpine café at the top of the world where I happily collapsed and spend the next two hours eating everything and drinking radler, admiring the mountains and the silence.

                Down at last I showed my host where I went on the map. Her response was very ‘oh yeah, that’s not far, okay…’  But to me, wearing Converse and jean shorts, without sunscreen, sunglasses, food, or any clear or even vague idea of what I was doing or what I would find, (not to mention being terrifically out of shape and in 90 degree weather), it felt like it had been an epic journey into fairyland.

                The next night I stood by one of the little water wells dispensing a constant stream into a wooden trough on the upper roads, cold and delicious, and watched the sky fade to dusk and the orange light leave the mountain tips a misty purple. There were cherry trees overhanging the burbling fountain and a brown cat chased large June bugs and fireflies. Then a full moon rose over the opposite peak, perfectly round and breathtakingly white, and all the world was bathed in silver and connected in moonlight. I would have loved to be on a peak to see that.

                I officially want to go backpacking in the Alps next summer. Not wearing Converse. Who wants to come?

That would be the moon

Journey to Innsbruck

Sitting on a train with genuine Harry Potter style compartments (awesome!) catching up on all the blog ideas. Why Innsbruck? A reasonable question. Well it is supposed to be very beautiful and I found a very cool sounding couchsurfer to stay with, but there is a better reason and the original reason and certainly enough of a reason for me. Here it is:

The idea for the title first cropped up while I was lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971. Not particularly drunk, just the sort of drunk you get when you have a couple of stiff Gossers after not having eaten for two days straight, on account of being a penniless hitchhiker. We are talking of a mild inability to stand up.

I was traveling with a copy of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken Walsh, a very battered copy that I had borrowed from someone. In fact, since this was 1971 and I still have the book, it must count as stolen by now. I didn’t have a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day (as it then was) because I wasn’t in that financial league.

Night was beginning to fall on my field as it spun lazily underneath me. I was wondering where I could go that was cheaper than Innsbruck, revolved less, and didn’t do the sort of things to me that Innsbruck had done to me that afternoon. What had happened was this. I had been walking through the town trying to find a particular address, and being thoroughly lost I stopped to ask for directions from a man in the street. I knew this mightn’t be easy because I don’t speak German, but I was still surprised to discover just how much difficulty I was having communicating with this particular man. Gradually the truth dawned on me as we struggled in vain to understand each other that of all the people in Innsbruck I could have stopped to ask, the one I had picked did not speak English, did not speak French, and was also deaf and dumb. With a series of sincerely apologetic hand movements I disentangled myself, and a few minutes later, on another street, I stopped and asked another man who also turned out to be deaf and dumb, which is when I bought the beers.

I ventured back onto the street. I tried again.

When the third man I spoke to turned out to be deaf and dumb and also blind I began to feel a terrible weight settling on my shoulders; wherever I looked the trees and building took on dark and menacing aspects. I pulled my coat tightly around me and hurried lurching down the street, whipped by a sudden gusting wind. I bumped into someone and stammered an apology, but he was deaf and dumb and unable to understand me. The sky loured. The pavement seemed to tip and spin. If I hadn’t happened then to duck down a side street and pass a hotel where a convention for the deaf was being held there is every chance that my mind would have cracked completely and I would have spent the rest of my life writing the sort of books for which Kafka became famous and dribbling.

As it is I went to lie in a field, along with my Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe, and when the stars came out it occurred to me that if only someone would write a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well, then I for one would be off like a shot... –Douglas Adams

Prague- Beautiful Architecture and Fucking Weird Statues

And too many tourists with selfie-sticks. I have lots of good pictures to add when I can get them uploaded: at the moment my German computer is refusing to accept anything from my Russian phone.