Well, we’re back into the blog posts now….there’s one coming on some bridges in the South of France, and it’s probable that there will be another one soon about our week or so in three parts of what used to be Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Slovenia) because we enjoyed every minute of our time there (except for the one time – at 3.15am – when the torrential rain in Dubrovnik collapsed our awning, thus damaging it to the point where it will not work again without some fairly major repairs!). However, before all that, we want to tell you about a couple of mountains in Europe that are now special chapters in our book of travels.

By the way, this doesn’t include any peaks in Switzerland, because we could be forgiven for believing that there aren’t really any at all! Apart from the first afternoon there, as we travelled from a second visit to Vaduz in Liechtenstein to our campsite located halfway between Zürich and Luzern, when we were driving along a valley flanked by quite high ranges, the rest of our time in Switzerland was spent in low fog and mist behind which there may have been mountains…..who would know?

A few blog posts ago, we told you about our big effort in climbing Mount Kofel (1342m) above the village of Oberammergau in Germany. In the last two weeks, in our travels with Katrina and Bernard, we now have two more peaks to add to the list – Montecassino in Italy, and Kehlstein in Germany. Very different in height, very different in use, and each having occupants over the years who couldn’t be further apart in character if they tried, but both great places to visit.

We visited Cassino to firstly see the War Cemetery there, at the foot of the mountain and quite near the town. Andrew had been there in 1980 and remembered it as being a very peaceful place, where the memory of the several thousand Allied soldiers, including 400 or so Kiwis, is still held very dear by the eternally grateful local Italians. Well, in the ensuing 30+ years, the town and its industry have grown around the cemetery so the surrounding area is a lot busier now, but the graves themselves still sit peacefully under the trees and remain an oasis of memories. After a good visit there, we headed into town where a policeman with just “a leetle bit of Inglese!” assured us that it was no problem to take the camping car up the winding road to the Abbey at the top of the hill, but that we would not be allowed to camp overnight. That was OK with us we only intended to make a brief visit, then head on to a camp on the way to our next destination which was the ferry port of Bari.

So off up the hill – a 9.5km drive that probably covers only about 500m as the crow flies, from the town at just 40 metres above sea level, to the Abbey car park at 517m a.s.l., and on a very good road! In Italy, this is quite surprising because most highways and byways, apart from the toll roads, range from poor at best to absolutely dreadful. And when we got to the top, another surprise was in store….the old guy who took our €8 for parking informed us, quite unprompted, that we were most welcome to stay the night in the car park so we decided to accept this offer. First of all though we visited the Abbey itself – a pretty incredible building which has been there in one form or another since St Benedict founded it in the 5th Century AD and which has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times. Most recently it was reduced to rubble in the Battle of Monte Cassino in the first few months of 1944 – this battle of course being the reason for the cemetery down below – but then it was fully rebuilt within a few years after WW2 ended. It’s still a fully functional Benedictine monastery and in fact we were in the church itself when evening prayers were being sung which was a pleasant surprise. And then, next morning after a very peaceful night’s sleep under the walls of the Abbey, we were all still sound asleep when morning prayers began. And how do they wake the monks? (and also the heathens in the car park?)….by ringing the incredibly deep toned and resonant Abbey bells for a full 10 minutes starting at 5am….and again at 5.30am, and then again, just in case any young novice has pulled the blankets even tighter around his ears, at 6am! Despite what you may think though, it was actually a really good experience – not many people like us would have stayed the night “up the hill” anyway, let alone had the experience of lying there, listening to the bells toll out across the surrounding countryside. Unique…and memorable. The other thing that made the stay even more memorable, was to look out the windows to find ourselves well above a thick and all-enveloping layer of cloud which obscured absolutely everything bar the Abbey itself and maybe the top 50m of the Monte. We certainly felt like there was no-one in the world bar just us four, a handful of monks, and maybe God himself, on top of a pretty special peak.

Then, to see another famous peak but one at the far distant end of the spiritual scale, a couple of weeks later we camped in the town of Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps. It is a typical German Alpine town, where all the houses have shuttered windows with flower boxes full of geraniums, and all the occupants (well, many of them anyway) wear dirndls or lederhosen. But unlike most German Alpine towns, this one has a very close link to the Führer himself, as Berchtesgaden sits underneath a peak named the Höher Goll, which has Kehlstein as a sub-peak – this is where the infamous Kehlsteinhaus or Eagle’s Nest as we know it in English can be found. The town is at around 700m a.s.l., and after a short drive to a car park beyond which no private vehicles have been allowed since 1952, we boarded a bus which then became part of a convoy of 4 or 5 others which travelled 6.5km up another very good road at surprising speed as we climbed to almost 1700m a.s.l. The buses are on a very strict timetable because the road is one way for its entire length all but a passing bay at the halfway point where the downhill buses wait for the uphill convoy. Once we reached the top bus park, we achieved the next 124 metres of vertical climb in a very highly polished brass lift which takes you from a tunnel bored into the mountain, and up into the Eagle’s Nest building itself. And we were told that whilst we have to walk the length of the tunnel these days, Hitler used to be driven to the lift door….nice for some!

The Eagle’s Nest itself now houses a bar and a restaurant and to be honest is a somewhat unremarkable building in design terms – if it had been built on a normal building platform. However, given that it, and the road leading to it, were completed in just 13 months as a 50th birthday gift for Adolf in 1938, and that of course the site is nearly 6000ft up in the mountains, the unremarkable becomes worth noting! What is truly worth the climb though, and we were lucky with a clear sunny and mild autumn day, is the view down over Berchtesgaden and Konigsee, and across the valley into Austria where Salzburg was clearly visible. You can see a very long way from the Eagle’s Nest, and the view is magnificent. Check it out, along with a few other photos, in the attached album here.

Two entirely different peaks, but definitely two highs on our travels to date…..