Love in Switzerland... Ohhhh...

Sharon.... Will you marry me?...

The hand weaved ring (Andy made this himself)

The happy couple

Porst (or Cheers in English)!!

The backdrop...

The signs were all there!

And so were the bells...

Our little red train

This is a Marmot.... kinda cute!

So here it is for all you who have been waiting eagerly for the story…

Once upon a time there was a girl called Sharon and a guy called Andrew they fell in love, went over seas together and found themselves in Switzerland which is where this story takes place… more specifically in the little township of Lauterbrunnen.

The day began with a sleep in for Sharon (which I should have been a bit suspicious about as sleep-in’s are not high on Andrews agenda and so I am usually rudely harassed into waking up) very nice, and a busy time for Andrew in preparation for the big event Sharon was blissfully unaware of. Andrew sneaked to the shop and packed a very heavy bag filled with goodies and then finally awoke the sleeping beauty, who woke very happy… always a good start to the day! We headed off after breakfast into a beautiful sun-shining, not a cloud in the sky day and headed for one of the surrounding mountain ranges. This time Andrew invested some money into a gondola ride that took us up 500meters (as opposed to walking). At the top we were greeted by a cute little red train (I, Sharon felt like Heidi) that took us further along and up the mountain with amazing views the whole way to a quaint village called Murren. In Murren we looked around a little and found a nice walking track that would take us a bit further up and around the mountain. We walked for awhile and I (Sharon) got hungry and angry (hangry) so we stopped for a quick bite to eat to appease the monster that I become when hangry and headed on further up the mountain trail. The path snaked its way past the cute chalets of Murren, past flowers only seen in the Alps, past bushes full of fresh mountain blueberries (I had stained fingers by the end of the trip) and up to a bubbling mountain stream with butterflies fluttering by and the sound of cow bells ringing further up the mountain (no exaggeration, it was an amazing day)! There Andy found a nice spot in the shade of a rock and we had a wee picnic to finish our lunch with a few surprise goodies from Andys morning escapades, including Swiss chocolate… yummy… he sure knows how to please a girl ha!
After lunch and a few casual ramblings and the sighting of a furry animal called a Marmot Andy stood up and blindfolded me with his jersey claiming to have a surprise for me…. After about 10minutes sitting lonely in the shade he came back and stood me up, he then proceeded to lead me blindfolded out of a dry riverbed across unstable ground and up a bank… by this stage I had finally worked out that something was going on as I could feel the poor boys hands shaking (mum says he has to be a brave man to ask me… not sure that was much of a compliment to me, thanks Mum)! Once we had navigated our way for a minute or so Andrew tells me that I can now take off my blind fold. I do, and there he is kneeling on the ground looking very cute wearing a crinkled shirt, vest and tie on the top half and shorts on the bottom (true Andy style). After speaking some profound words, and with a backdrop of the beautiful Swiss Alps and tears in his eyes (he claims only due to the fact that I was crying) he asked to marry me…. Through further tears I managed to agree, yay and he handed me a hand woven ring, that he had even made himself (the day before)!! As a further surprise he brought out a bottle of bubbly and we shared the bottle on-top of a large rock in the sun to celebrate :) The rest of the day was spent continuing on our hike, past farmers making hay in traditional ways and gazing at all the wonderful views. Very tired we headed down the mountain on another Gondola, this one going over a huge cliff that made you feel like you where on a theme park ride, fun for us but not for the older lady beside me! We then caught a bus back to the campground and had a little snooze.

When we awoke Andrew extended the celebration to dinner, where he took me out to the local restaurant and we shared a very Swiss, cheese fondue…very yummy and very filling!

And so there you have it, the love story between an Andrew Woodward and Sharon Snell…. To live happily ever after…

Esslingen and Lake Constance

Pretty girl in the flowers

Esslingen old town

Public profanity!!!

Christian the fireman.. and Andrew

Lake of Constance

Andy, Sharon, Christian, Nicole and Robert enjoying a wine or two

Local Rose

Sunset and wine.... only the best!!

Leaving Salzburg we bussed to Munich and spent our first night couch surfing! We had been accepted by a Hungarian computer programmer who worked for Google and was new to Munich so his social life consisted of random foreigners he let sleep on his couch. Staying with him at the time was an Italian girl who cooked us an authentic Italian gnocchi dish for dinner. The meal was stodgy homemade gnocchi in a blue cheese and almond sauce… mmm! Well it would have been had I liked blue cheese and almonds, but not wanting to offend I forced it down feeling quite ill by the end of the meal, I think Sharon liked it.
We talked late into the night and got up early to catch our bus to Stuttgart, there we were staying with a friend Nadine who lived in a pretty little village called Esslingen. We arrived at lunch time and met Nadine at the café where she worked and were treated to a massive lunch free of charge, it was great and for the first time we felt like rich tourists eating out. As we were really tired from a few days of being on the move with early starts and late nights our days in Esslingen consisted of sleeping in and wandering around the village chatting to the locals.
Nadine and her fiancé Dominik decided to drive us to our next destination the Lake of Constance and tie it in with a weekend away camping. This meant free travel for us in an 2008 3.2 L Audi A6 that Dominik borrowed from work. It was a very nice ride and we really got to experience the ‘autobahn’ with a top speed of 230km/h, sweet!!!
At the Lake of Constance we were staying with another friend Christian who worked at home for a few months. Christian and his family were really generous and treated us like royalty!. His father gave us an annotated map of Switzerland showing us where to go (which we forgot to take with us) and his grandmother gave Sharon two pairs of knitted socks and promised to make me some my size and post them home for me and also gave us a 750ml bottle of 42% pear and apple schnapps that her late husband home brewed, a little heavy but a very generous gift that we will try to save for home to share with all. 
And Christian treated us to a ferry trip and a Bavarian breakfast of Weisswurst (White sausage eaten a very specific way, you have to peel the sausage out of the skin and not eat the skin), pretzel and beer if we wanted.
The Lake of Constance is the biggest lake in Europe and is shared by Germany, Austria and Switzerland. From our house in the German town of Wasserburg we looked across the lake to the Alps, the view was nice but the weather not so with the temperature 18 degrees less than that of a few days previous. But the weather cleared for us to enjoy a bottle of red at a local wine festival sitting on the shore of the lake watching the sun go down.
To continue with the theme of generous Germans and free travel Christian drove us 2 ½ hours to our next destination near Zurich Switzerland to stay with my friend Dama from YWAM.

Austria - Vienna and Salzburg

Town Hall Vienna

Film Festival Vienna

Sharon relishing some cool mist

Feeding time in the park

St Peters Church Vienna

Roman ruins beneath the pavement Vienna

Mozart???? (artists impression) Salzburg

Salzburg

Monk monastery carved into the cliff Salzburg

Salzburg

Ice Cave (photo stolen off the net) Salzburg

View out of Ice Cave

Austrian Alps

Mountain climb to Ice Cave

Ice Cave Entrance 1700m above sea level 1200m above valley floor

Our host in Vienna was a girl I took caving in February, probably our most random of contacts. But we were welcomed into her apartment and made to feel at home, she even fed us! We were really thankful that we had a few nights here to recover and have some good old quality R & R in a nice place  We spent our time relaxing and mooching around the city, seeing the sights, walking in parks, having picnic’s, walking around the Vienna hills and around amazing Castle gardens. We also went out one night and watched the Berlin Philharmonics on a big screen outside the town hall which was a part of Vienna’s open air music festival month. On the last night we had a nice quiet dinner out at the local Italian restaurant which was just lovely. Not too much to report on this city but it was such a good break from the crazy travel schedule we usually follow!

After our relaxing time in Vienna we where ready once again for onward travel and some joy filled singing of ‘the hills are alive’ in the village of Salzburg where coincidently the sound of music was filmed.
We arrived mid day and after a blisteringly hot and sweaty walk across town with our packs and some dripping meat we had brought with us frozen from Vienna we found our hostel. From the outside and looking in the foyer it appeared to be quite plush…. However it was not all as it seemed. It was nice downstairs and the rooms were not too bad, but there was no kitchen or fridge or anywhere to store food, so the dripping meat which had made a mess had to be discarded. This left us with a dilemma as to what to do about dinner, we didn’t really have enough money to eat out every night and we didn’t feel like bread and tomato for lunch and dinner everyday! We decided after having a wee nap to head out to find a supermarket for some inspiration, of course they were way across the other side of town again and with no directions we gradually circled in on them, three big ones with in 200m of each other! Why don’t they spread them out a bit!?!
Anyway we had found some inspiration and bought a single use disposable coal bbq, some vegetables and sausages and some couscous…. Perfect! A bbq every night and some red wine drunk from the bottle… Classy! We divided the coal into 3rds and I (Andy) cooked on a surface of 10cm by 10cm the meat and the vegetables while Sharon fluttering her eyelashes procured some hot water in our little Tupperware container (thanks Roxy! Has been really handy) from the barman to cook the couscous. We enjoyed these bbq’s for 3 nights and rewarded ourselves on the 4th with some pizza!!

Salzburg is a small town but the second most visited place in Austria so very busy, the main sightseeing areas around town had throngs of people. The town holds very closely to the fact that Mozart was born there so everything is about him, where he was born where he lived, breathed, and sat and so on, they don’t mention however that Mozart disliked Salzburg and thought the people there were ignorant twats (not his actual words but to the same effect)! We explored a neat monastery that was carved out of the cliff right in town and looked in some more stunning churches.

On our last day we did an excursion out of town to the largest ice cave in the world called Eisriesenwelt. This was a limestone cave 1600 metres up a mountain 42km long that is so cold inside that when all the water seeping through the rock enters the cave it turns into ice formations that look similar to stalactites and mites. There was a gondola that carried you up the entrance from a parking lot halfway up the mountain, but as we are el-cheapos we decided to hike it! The day was beautiful, not a cloud in sight and barely a breath of wind, the effect of this making it ridiculously hot!!! The walk climbed over 600m and was a very steep gradient the whole way across loose scree slopes and rocky cliffs with a great view from your feet straight to the valley floor! (Andy- cool! Sharon- eeek!) Once we reached the cave we joined a group of maybe 70 people to be guided on a 1 hour round trip 1km into the cave. Because we were the only people who spoke English as a first language we were put up the front which gave us the best views. The cave is below freezing and the whole time you are walking on stairs constructed above the ice, it is really steep (up to a 70° incline and climbing 700 stairs we reached the highest point of 1800m, the guide carried with him a coil of magnesium which he burned to light the cave, the effect was amazing! The cave was stunning and well worth the expense of getting there and the hike in blistering heat to reach it, we returned to Salzburg late, starving and exhausted, definitely the night to reward ourselves with pizza and beer!

Prague, oh Prague...

Hostel Royale!!!

Old Town Square

Old Town, these neat buildings are everywhere

Eccentric canadian guide

Interesting sculpture... one for the ladies.

The Gothic chapel in Prague Castle

Prague Castle

Prague is one of those places that everyone seems to just love and so with great expectations we left little Dresden and headed on to see the wonders of the oldest still standing city in Europe…

We arrived and boldly headed off in what we believed to be the correct direction to our prior booked hostel, directions I might add that we had acquired from the above mentioned hostels website… So we found a large bus station and I sat down to guard our packs whilst Andrew walked around the station about 5 times looking in vein for bus number 115 or 26. Finally he ended up finding an information centre and luckily the lady spoke English (we have found this not to be the case in some other bus/ train station info centres) and informed Andrew kindly that these two busses did not actually go from this station. So Andrew headed back to me after about half an hour and we tried to find a map of the local bus system to work out where to go, these maps we were soon to discover were all gone… lucky us!! Did I add that it was a really hot day?! So once again Andrew headed off, talked to some people, searched around some more, ran around 3 blocks to find an ATM machine as we only had Euros and needed Czech money to pay for the public transport we at some point would travel on, and then went back to the information centre which proved a good move as the lady helped Andrew find us another route, this time one that actually existed!! So after a substantial time had passed we finally had a way of getting to the hostel…. What a relief…. But wait there were more surprises in store for us yet!!! We took around three different trams (yes we needed to go on TRAMS not BUSES!) and headed further and further away from the main city and civilisation to end up being dropped off outside a graveyard in an industrial work area. A kind man pointed us in the direction of our hostel and our hearts dropped seeing a run down old warehouse with signs like ‘cash and carry’ painted on the flaky yellow walls of what was to be our hostel! We hoped that the inside would be better then the out but this too proved to be false hope. Inside was a dirty hallway with a crudely written sign informing us that to the left was the hostels reception. Further down the hall were a couple of curious Czech men smoking and running around was a child dressed only in her underwear. We were soon to discover that this hostel mainly contained poor Czech and Slovakian families who lived there on a permanent basis… nice!!! After waiting for awhile the lady who owned the hostel arrived and in broken English informed us that the 3 bed room we had booked was actually not available (we could now see why the directions weren’t so helpful) but that she had a five bed room with two spare beds we could stay in. We agreed to this thinking that it wouldn’t matter too much as it was a cheaper room and our last hostel had 10 beds so would be better then that, you may ask yourself how by now could we still believe that it was going to be ok, but by then we just wanted to put our packs down and rest so would have almost agreed to anything… We had to wait another length of time while the owner sorted out our room (she seemed to have no order to anything) and Andrew had a look around. He came back to inform me that there was no communal area and the kitchen had nothing to cook with, or eat out of, or drink from as everyone had their own stuff because they lived there… wonderful! Finally we were led upstairs to our room to find that it was already occupied by 3 Czech girls who, you won’t guess, yes lived there! They were not too pleased to have ‘their’ room invaded by two other people and so were not too happy with us at first… At this point I cried (yes feel sorry for me) and then fell asleep. Did I also mention that by this time it was late evening and we had only eaten breakfast?!
So when I awoke Andrew and I decided we needed something good to feel a bit better so went for a walk to find a place to eat out. This in itself was an experience as we were to find that we actually were located in the ghetto with our closest neighbors some Czech people who actually live in little tin shacks beside some old abandoned train tracks… We walked for a while to find a nicer neighborhood, had a GREAT meal and a drink at a pub and headed back to our room to be lulled to sleep from the smell of cigarette smoke, oh yes the girls smoked in our room…

Luckily for us the next day we found a better way into town that only took us around 15mins. So for the rest of the time at our hostel we headed into town early and came back late, only to sleep… or more like try to sleep…

Apart from sub standard sleeping conditions Prague actually did turn out to be a lovely city to visit and wander around. We enjoyed a half a day free walking tour with a really eccentric Canadian. The history was amazing and the guide did really well at engaging us for a whole 3 hours. The way it works is that you go on this tour with no obligation to pay anything but at the end you can give them a tip if you think the tour was worthwhile.
A funny story he shared was when the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia to bring their in communist reign. Czech radios went off at midnight so the Soviets thought that they would sneak in after 12 and take the whole country by the next morning with out the Czech even realising. However they forgot that Czechoslovakia had daylight savings and so they crossed the border at 11pm… oops! So it was broadcast all over the radio that they were being invaded, the prime minister at the time informed everyone not to resist as there was nothing they could do, and it would only cause a blood bath. So the Czech being very innovative people took down all the road signs except the ones pointing back to Moscow, and not only this they renamed all the towns and cities under the name of the Prime minister. This caused a lot of confused Soviets and it took them a week to get to Prague and arrest the prime minister!

This tour as well as giving us a good historical overview orientated us for walking around ourselves and so we went back and had a look at the sites that really interested us. One being a church that has a real mummified arm hanging above the door when you come in, its called the ‘church of the shriveled arm’. It turned out to be the most beautiful church we have seen thus far with ornate marble and big artworks everywhere, hard to describe and no photos either, but it was amazing! Go there!

The rest of our stay consisted of us wandering around looking at all the old buildings as every second building in Prague is a work of art!

Dresden

Crazy old bridge at Kurot-Rathen

Ferry across the Elbe - it is anchored by the cable upstream and just uses the rudder against the current to go from bank to bank.

The National Park

Steep rocky gorge less trodden but amazing

The steep stairs turned into steep rocky incline - a great wander.

Third and final gate into the castle

Castle walls rising up from the already high cliff

They had a war museum at the top with this sucker a 1.3 tonne bomb!

Palace gardens in Dresden

All Baroque style

Ohhhh...

This is a tobacco factory built to look like a mosque?!Dresden at night.

So we left the craziness of big city Berlin and headed into rural Germany to stay in a little village called Dresden (they called it little but it had 600,000 people), which just turned out to be the cutest little village ever!! This was also the first time that we had to stay in a hostel after three months of travel! Our first Europe hostel experience turned out to be great except for the first night we had to sleep in different rooms before there was room enough for us in a 10 bed mixed dorm. The hostel had travellers from all over the world and we enjoyed having a drink with friendly Americans and a Kiwi guy from Christchurch.

Dresden is infamous for being firebombed by the Allies at the end of WWII. It was a very controversial attack as they totally bombed out the centre of town and missed all of the military buildings on the outskirts, they dropped 1500 tonnes of bombs and killed close to 30,000 in one night of bombing. All the old buildings you see in the photos are as they were before the bombing but have been re built since, on some of the buildings you can see darker stones and these were original ones but most buildings pretty much were built again from the ground and many are still being fixed.

Being a small town we were able to walk everywhere we wanted to go which was great because although public transport is good over here it is still expensive. We spent the first two days wandering around looking at the architecture which we found out is best viewed at night when it is cooler, there are fewer people and the lighting makes them even more impressive. At night (early night from dusk + a few hours) everyone is out and walking around with ice creams or sitting in a park with a beer relaxing, it’s a nice atmosphere.
We also checked out what was called the Princes Armoury Collection which is a bunch of royal weapons from the last 500 years. They were amazingly ornate intricate works of art, swords, axes, guns and armour for knights and horses studded with precious stones and inlaid with intricate ivory carvings. The amount of wealth that went into them was a little bit disturbing when you know the peasants who paid for it all would have been hungry and poor.

The last day we went 40kms out of town on a train at Julie’s mum’s recommendation to a fortress called Konigstien Castle. We arrived in a sleepy wee village and went to the information centre to find out where the castle was and how to get there, there was no English and no map or anything so we left and decided to walk around the town and see if that gave us any luck. Finally we looked up above the village and saw that the castle was actually towering over us, we didn’t need a map duh, and lucky we didn’t ask anyone where this stupid castle was!!! Konigstien is a huge castle fortress with the high walls built from the sheer cliffs that surround it. We hiked up the steep hill and once up the top discovered we had to pay to get in to see it all. But it was well worth the 6 euros to get in as the panoramic view from the top of the walls was amazing, it was high enough to keep Sharon 1m away from the wall whenever she could.

Leaving the castle we took a ferry across the river Elbe a few kilometres down stream to walk around some amazing cliffs near a wee village called Kurot-Rathen. From the village we walked into the National Park which has amazing rock pillar formations. However we arrived at 4pm and the last ferry was at 6pm and the shortest track to where we wanted to go was 2 ½ hours long. This part of Germany seemed to be reserved for mainly Germans as we could not find a scrap of English anywhere not even at the information centre. So without really knowing where we were going and having not quite enough time I decided to run ahead and scout the best route for us to take, I found some steep stairs that headed straight up the hill and ran up (the very steep stairs) to see where they went, it looked like a good way so I decided to run back to get Sharon who had been walking as fast as she could to semi keep up with me. When I got to the bottom I headed back the way I had come but Sharon was not there, so I had to run back the other way for a good while till I finally found her by which time I was very sweaty and hot. Once finding her I took her back and once again headed up the steep track that went straight to the top.
The track which was not often trodden had ripe blue berries to eat along the way (mmm! Just like your ones in Norway Catherine & Frode) and took us climbing through a very steep rocky and beautiful gorge and put us up the top much faster than any other way would have. At the top we still had no idea where to go to find what we were looking for so headed off down another trail, we finally found a map that helped us little so we carried on an soon after found a Hotel… Yeah turns out we weren’t that far out after all. Anyway near this hotel was a stone arched bridge that was built up high amongst the natural rock pillars, it’s kinda hard to describe but it is old and looks really cool in an impressive area, just look at the photos! :-p

In a nutshell we loved Dresden and its surrounds. It is a really picturesque town/city with friendly people and a really relaxed feel about it and we would have liked a few more days there to check out more of the surrounding area…. Next time!