IF we had known that a seven course gala dinner encompassing most foods known to man was in store that evening at the Bergresort Hotel in Seefeld, Tirol, we might have passed on easyJet’s toasties.
At 7.30 pm prompt, the mostly Austrian and German guests trooped into the dining room where course after course appeared with military precision served by an astonishingly small staff. Welcome to Austria, where almost everything runs like clockwork and when it comes to meals, four courses is the absolute minimum.
It was just as well that there was plenty of hiking in store for us over the next three days on this trip to sample the Thompson Holidays Lakes & Mountains package.
The hotel, a traditional chalet-style affair just outside the main part of Seefeld, could be almost anywhere in Tirol, much of which looks so disarmingly like Middle Earth that you begin to believe you are Bilbo Baggins.
Best known for cross-country skiing Seefeld has just won the Nordic World Championships for 2019, seeing off rivals from several other countries without having had to resort to any form of bribery whatsoever.
Now the Nordic World Championships may not be an event comparable to the Winter Olympics but it’s been the talk of the town for months and is very big news. Up to now the main attraction Seefeld has had to offer has been the September festival where the cows are brought down from the mountains for the winter.
It is also the birthplace of the man who invented the parallel turn.
Outside of the ski season, the infrastructure of lifts and cable cars is perfect for getting walkers up into the higher mountains which offer 360 kms of hiking trails through the dramatic scenery. It’s easy to see where the word ‘breath-taking’ came from once you start the ascents for some of the trails are almost vertical. Walking sticks are advisable, stout boots essential, selfies could lead to death if you step back in the wrong place.
After a light four course lunch we headed for the Wildmoos Golf Club where James Murray, an jocular Scot who turned a blind eye to our totally unsuitable clothing, summed up the game as ’14 clubs, one swing, a piece of cake” and gave us a short lesson from how to hit the damn thing to how to put it in a small hole, its home, which proved no easier.
In Austria you have to pass a golf test, a bit like a driving test, before you may join a club so that you don’t hold people up on the course. James’s best yarn was about a Russian who wore such tight tops and shorts that “she would have been better wearing nothing” who could not be brought to understand that she could not buy the certificate.
That evening, after just five courses in an Italian restaurant which specialised it seemed in ringing the changes on aubergine, we were invited to another lesson at the local casino. It’s probably marginally harder to learn how to place your money on a winning number at the roulette table than to hit a golf ball 2 metres into the hole, but that is exactly what we managed to do. In less than an hour we had raked in euros 400 and we left rapidly after that. Seefeld Casino is a throwback venue, with masses of black velvet curtains, swirly carpets and ranks fossilized gaming addicts glued to their favourite slot machine. It’s one of the very few places left in Austria, and probably Europe, where you can smoke indoors and so in every way does its best to counteract the extreme healthiness of everything around it.
The Tirol is impeccably, almost impossibly clean. In three days of walking and hiking, I saw one discarded plastic bottle on the River Isar in the Karwendel nature park, a 727 sq km pristine wilderness whose one village, Hinterriss, has 47 inhabitants.
A paradise for birds such as endangered sandpipers, woodpeckers, it has 20 species of wild orchid and has an ever changing carpet of wild flowers; dazzling blue gentians, tiny nodding campanula, sweet scented lilies, therapeutic arnica.
Noon brings another chance to wolf portions of salad, cheese, sausage, eggs and pancake in preparation for another very short hike back to the taxi.
