As we walked into town after breakfast we crossed a bridge with rushing glacier water and realised it was coming from a hydroelectricity plant.
We called in and spent quite a while looking at the information displays. Verbund is the company you can choose to buy your power from in Austria and they are very proud of the clean, green process they use to produce it.
They explained how wind and solar power can be used to lift water up to a dam when supply exceeds demand so that the hydro can provide the supplement when demand exceeds supply. They call this the "green battery" and it has been used in Australia for years. Don't listen to people (especially politicians) who say renewables cannot provide 24 hour power. We asked whether we could travel to the nearby dam they used and they said a bus goes there, so we now have the bus timetable and plan to go on Friday. We also booked a bus tour to a waterfall for tomorrow. Guess what! Tomorrow is an Austrian Bank Holiday! We have had three bank holidays in a month.
The carved woodwork is a major feature of the houses here and this statue would have been made of metal or stone in most other places.
These little bags caught my eye in a shop window. Easy to confuse Australia and Austria, and easy to be misled when a price ticket covers up a word.
This is the message intended.
In the afternoon we boarded a Bergbahn (gondola) to go up a mountain.
This little capsule is registered for 160 people! I took us from 630 meters to 1900 meters in 7 minutes. That is 3 metres per second, which was probably a record for my altitude watch, not counting aeroplanes. We quickly got an aerial view of Mayrhofen
and as we docked at the top some fresh snow was melting next to us.
and as we docked at the top some fresh snow was melting next to us.
We walked around for more than two hours and the views were incredible; 360 degrees of glaciers.
We eventually stopped at a little house that sold drinks so we bought sparkling apple juice and redcurrant juice made in the valley.
They had an interesting water feature which may have been to provide a permanent supply for the goats they kept.
A log cabin nearby was 200 years old and seemed to be used to store feed for the animals.
This trip was described as an unforgettable experience and for us it was. There were many pretty flowers growing amid the snow. We loved the bluebells.
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