Malerweg Day 5 - Altendorf to Neumann Mühle

Thursday morning, June 5, I headed out of Altendorf...

Just outside town, a person walking a dog headed toward me. He looked me and my backpack and asked if I was hiking the Malerweg, because if I was, well, everyone likes all the stairs on the steep trails, but they can be slippery, and the route over there gets you to the same place down below and is much prettier and doesn't have stairs and is only a little longer. 

I pulled out a map and saw how the other trail intersected down the hill with the Malerweg. "I walk here every day," he continued, "and the upper route really is much nicer. I'm not telling you what to do, but you should really take the upper route." 

In general when locals stop me to say "don't go this way, go that way," I figure they're either serial killers who want to lure me to isolated places OR they know the local terrain better than Komoot does; so I took another detour off the Malerweg and went that way.

It didn't take long to catch up to the Malerweg down below in the Kirnitzschtal*. From there, the trail led up to the Schrammsteine massif, a long plateau with several exciting rock formations and peaks.

Looking across the Elbe to Zirkelstein and Kaiserkrone

This hiker preferred to go barefoot:

Bark beetles are a scourge, but they chow down in interesting patterns:

About halfway into my hike, I passed the Kleines Prebischtor ("Little Pravčická Gate"). The name is in contrast to the non-adjectival Prebischtor further east in the Czech Republic--the largest natural sandstone rock bridge in Europe.

Kleine Prebischtor

Note the Barefoot Hiker under the arch for scale:

Further along the Schrammsteine, the Kreutzturm is a popular spot for climbers.

Can you spot the climber?

The Malerweg then descended again into the Kirnitzschtal and passed through Lichtenhain. The teeny tiny town was bustling with tourists, a surprise given its small size, but this is in part thanks to the Lichtenhain Waterfall, a tourist attraction since the 1830s and the terminus for the Kirnitzschtalbahn tourist tram that runs through the valley all the way from Bad Schandau.

Waterfall is to the right of the hobbit smial

Tourists clearly need an automat to provide DDR-style soft serve 24/7:

Lichtenhain is a starting point--and probably has been since the 1830s--for several popular hikes...

...including the route up to the Kuhstall, the second largest natural sandstone bridge in the Elbsandsteingebirge after the Prebischtor.

https://www.saechsische-schweiz.de/malerweg/en/interesting/art-along-the-malerweg/johann-carl-august-richter

To the left in the images above is a gap in the rocks through which you can access the outside of the arch; and from the outside, there's a stairway built into a gap in the arch called the Himmelsleiter ("heaven's ladder"). The stairs are quite narrow--the better to allow foot-sized gaps to fall into to the right and left. This here acrophobe declined to ascend, and thus missed the apparently spectacular views of the Schrammsteine from the top of the arch. A series of staircases allows hikers to descend from the other side, keeping the traffic one-way.

Not for me.

From the Kuhstall, the Malerweg descended...

...back into the Kirnitzschtal, and eventually to the Neumann Mühle hut, where I had a mattress waiting for me in a room of 28 mattresses.

Late lunch: Kartoffelpuffer. I've had Puffer in Bavaria before--basically potato pancakes--but the ones at the hut were like sweet, onion-less latkes, served with whipped cream, applesauce, and powdered sugar. Lecker.

Additional things I learned about at the hut:

Hey kids, you might be able to speak Hochdeutsch, but can you speak Saeggs'sch? It's always good to know a few words in the local dialect! Now build a conversation using the Saxon words listed below.

Ta da! 12 of the day's 17 miles

The hut's restaurant was closing early, so I had an early dinner, then set off for a backpack-less hike in search of mobile data, so I could check in with S.

Poor piggy! African swine pest info in six languages

Ta da! Another 5 miles.

BTW, I hiked the entire Malerweg in sneakers. They were thoroughly up to the job and more comfortable than hiking boots, although going back and forth to Dresden gave me ample opportunities to grab my hiking boots had I decided I needed them.

*I'm fascinated by the name Kirnitzsch. Is that a vestigial -z- between the -t- and the -sch? I asked S how to pronounce it, and he blandly said "KEER-nitch." But what about the -z-? "What about it? KEER-nitch." Why's the -z- in there? I decided to ask Google to pronounce it. Among the multiple only-incorrect answers it offered, this was the best of the worst:

 

Wien, continued

One of my favorite scenes from the Belvedere in Vienna. How times have changed...

Day 3, July 11: The Belvedere grounds and upper palace, the Justiz Palast, the Kunsthistoriches Museum, and the Wiener Staatsoper.

We walked from our Pension through the not-quite-yet open Naschmarkt...

...past the Karlskirche again...

...past the 1945 Soviet war memorial...

...with graffiti memorializing Alexei Navalny...

...to the not-quite-yet open lower Belvedere palace, with artwork in front by Urbana IL native Dan Graham.

Round and Around, 2019

We had breakfast across the street while we waited for the museums to open.

Given that the gardeners are now lawn-Roombas, it's no wonder that some of the shrubbery was trimmed...

...and some was not.

From afar, the upper Belvedere appears majestic...

...but close up, we saw the entire front was covered with a printed plastic image of itself for renovations. I was an impressive cover up!

We explored the art museum in the upper palace. Here's a photo of tourists doing what I would have been doing had there not been so many tourists.

Some of the character busts by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt:

Some of the ceilings were art too:

The medieval religious art in the upper Belvedere palace demonstrated that while Verona artists were still dabbling in smiley and frowny faces, the Viennese artists (or at least collectors) were a zillion skill sets ahead. Presumably that's what these folks were reading about on the cell phones: 

The Belvedere grounds are guarded by a dozen sphinxes.

After visiting the Belvedere, we swung by the Justiz Palast to admire the beautiful interior architecture.

They had an exhibit on the administration of justice--and the lack thereof--for war criminals in Austria and Germany following WW2. Some successes, lots of failures. 

Because it was stinky hot outside, we continued to tank up on museums. Given the choice between seeing the ~29,500 year old Venus of Willendorf at the imposing Natural History Museum vs. the Arcimboldo fruit and veggie portraits across the imposing Maria-Theresien-Platz at the equally imposing Kunsthistorisches Museum, we opted for the latter.    

In theory, the Egyptian antiquities in the extensive collection were purchased, not stolen.

Likewise this lion from the Babylonian Gate:

We actually laughed out loud when we turned the corner on the stairs and saw this view. More grandeur than we had already come to expect.

One of the snazziest cafes in Vienna is in the museum. Having already shelled out an astonishing 40E for coffee and cake at famous Cafe Demel the day before, we passed.

Arcimboldos:

One of my favorite curatorial decisions was this trio of adjacently hung Salome-with-John's-head-on-a-platter. Compare and contrast.  

From there, it was back to the Pension to shower and dress for a second night at the opera. 

Our seats weren't quite as good this time, but on the bright side, we sat in the correct seats.

Day 4, July 12: Taking things down a notch in the burbs.

Overwhelmed by the intensity of all-gorgeous-all-the-time, we took a train out to the suburb Ottakring on our final morning there, as friends had recommended visiting the 1907 Kirche am Steinhof, a Jugendstil church designed by Otto Wagner, mainly to be used patients at the adjoining hospital complex. The church was intentionally designed to accommodate the needs of patients with physical and mental disabilities: no sharp protrusions on the pews, a sloping floor so those in the back could see more easily, a holy-water system to reduce the spread of germs (although ultimately rejected by church officials). After the German annexation of Austria, many of the adult patients were sent to concentration camps, and young patients quickly filled their places. During WWII, 739 children were tortured and murdered in the children's ward of the hospital. The hospital grounds now include a memorial, and the hospital is still in operation.

Memorial. The posts represent euthanized children; each has a light on top.

The church:

Afterward, we decided to walk all the way to the main summer residence of the Habsburg rulers, Schloss Schoenbrunn, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. En route, it occurred to us that we might be near the Manner Waffel factory--and indeed we were, but the interwebs said they didn't offer tours.

The face of disappointment

We also passed this building. It was another very hot day, but we didn't stop because a place that can't spell "popsicle" correctly surely isn't a place to eat one.

Here we are, at last, on the grounds of Schoenbrunn, admiring the Palm House...

...and the castle...

...and the Gloriette up on the hill. Of course we had to walk up...

From the Gloriette, looking back down toward Vienna, we observed that the Gloriette and the palace aligned with a long road back toward town, but we couldn't quite make out why the road curved. So of course, we walked down, all the way to the curve in the road, to find out, and learned there wasn't any obvious reason.

Having barely used our mass-transit passes, we hopped on a train back to our Pension and then took another walk to kill time before heading to the train station.

Before heading out, we stopped (for the second time in three days) at the best gelato spot in Vienna, which just happened to be a block from our Pension.

After three sweltering days in Vienna, clouds and cooler air swept in as we waited for our evening train. Thunderstorms followed us to Salzburg and onward to Bayern (cuz typisches Bayrisches Sommerwetter), where storms and accidents elsewhere on the tracks caused delays. Eventually, our train backed up and dumped everyone out in Rosenheim, where assorted other trains were also dumping folks, with no information about whether any trains would be running to Munich that night.

When life gives you late-night lemons, musicians make lemonade:

Eventually a train showed up to take a circuitous route to Munich, and everyone crammed in.

Here's a photo of S ~1:00 a.m. waiting for the S8. "Where'd you get the fan?", someone asked. "Vienna!" he replied (because it was 95oF in the shade every day, and even high-ceilinged thick-walled Pensionen get hot). Not the answer anyone in rainy Bayern expected that night. 

We watched the mice skittering around on the platform while men peed on the tracks (the latter being the consequence of charging Euro-less people a Euro to use the restrooms in the train station) until the S8 arrived to take us back to Steinebach.