The hills are aliiiiiivvvvee, with the Sound of Music!!!

Ah Salzburg.  I think this had to be the stop I was most excited to see on this cruise of ours down the Danube.

But wait, you say, I happen to have a map here, and it doesn’t look like Salzburg is close to the Danube.  You are correct, perceptive reader, Salzburg is not on the Danube, but it is an easy day trip from Linz, and Linz is where we docked the evening we left Passau.  Linz is also where we were treated to a delightful Sound of Music sing-along the night before we set off to see the sites.  (I’m sure it is great and easy money, but those poor actors, I can’t help wondering how many times they have to sing “So Long, Fairwell’ to tipsy tourists…I dearly love Sound of Music, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sing-along, but I might go crazy if I had to do it twice a week all summer long).

Viking does offer included walking tours at every port, but they do understand that not everyone is always on the same page about activities.  If you happen to move a little more slowly, they offer a ‘slow group’ on all of the regularly scheduled city tours (you can opt in to this at the concierge desk on the ship), and in some ports they also offer alternative tours.  In Linz, for example, they offered a shorter walk around that city for those who didn’t want to take the drive to Salzburg.

Some of Linz’s famous residents have been Johannes Kepler (astronomer who came up with the law of planetary motion), composer and organist Anton Bruckner, and Adolf Hitler…Hitler lived in Linz for 9 years as a child and always considered it his home town.  He would eventually aspire to make it the main cultural center of the Third Reich. Linz has worked hard to come to terms with its Nazi past taking many measures, the least of which has been to rename 41 streets to honor the victims of National Socialism.  In 2009 Linz was chosen as the European Capitol of Culture and it is a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.  It is also the home of the Linzer torte- not my favorite torte, as we’ll discuss when we get to Vienna, but still, not a bad claim to fame!

But that’s the tour we didn’t take.  Come on!  Who wouldn’t want to go to Salzburg?!  And on the way, visit the most beautiful rest stop in the world?!

Mondsee (Moon Lake) is a lake and a town on the way from Linz to Salzburg.  The town is home to the church where they filmed Maria and the Captain’s wedding in The Sound of Music.  We didn’t stop there (though apparently the Sound of Music tourism to that church has saved both it and the town).  We stopped at the rest stop by the lake, which really must be the most beautiful rest stop in the world.  Because of this, I think, it is a hub for all the tour buses wandering up to Salzburg, and thus the restaurant, shop and lookouts were all completely packed and I was terribly grumpy.  But not grumpy enough to not be inspired to spend a day or two in the town of Mondsee when I eventually make my way back to Salzburg to explore a little more.

Our time in Salzburg was also crowded and very quick- quick for the distance from the ship and crowded as we happened to be there at the same time as the annual Salzburg festival (yes, the same festival in which the Von Trapp Family Singers actually performed in 1936!) But that didn’t make it any less lovely.  We started in the Mirabell Gardens (the Mirabell palace was built by and for another one of those prince-bishops…) where Do-Re-Mi was filmed!  The gardens we saw in Austria from this point were absolutely spectacular.  I dearly love a good garden, but I’m afraid I have the blackest of thumbs myself.  I’ll just have to hire a gardener one day I suppose.  On the edge of the gardens on our way towards the river and the old town on the other side, I saw my first posters for a Sound of Music tour…and a Sound of Music puppet show!!!  I will go back to Salzburg just to participate in both of those activities because I am such a nerd 🙂

After our guided tour we were given an hour or so to lunch and explore the old town on our own. There was simply too much to see to fit it all in, though we did try to at least walk past most of the highlights.  We saw the very yellow house where Mozart was born on January 27th, 1756, and walked through a really heavenly market in the cathedral square.  The pretzels were bountiful and all at least as large as my head, I’m still not entirely sure why I didn’t get one… probably because we’d been so well fed on board the ship.  We did have a really lovely lunch on a patio right beside the cathedral, and had a moment or two to explore some of the shops before venturing back to explore the monasteries.

There are two monasteries and one nunnery still functioning in Salzburg today, and they are all squished right in the old town together, differentiated by their architecture.  Stift Nonnberg is the oldest nunnery north of the Alps, founded around 715, and is where Maria is a novice in the movie.  Nonnberg is the sister nunnery to the St. Peter monastery in Salzburg, whose restaurant claims to be the oldest in the world (Charlemagne was a diner here), and whose cemetery served as the inspiration for the one where the Von Trapps hid at the end of the Sound of Music.  The cemetery is still in use today, still accepting burials in their charming gardens and the gated vaults you see in the film, though you can’t actually get behind the tombs in those vaults…ah well, it does make for a good scene anyway!

Another very interesting point about the movie is that it has only been in very very recent years (I want to say the last 10) that people in Austria have actually begun to express an interest in The Sound of Music.  When they were filming the later scenes after the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by the Nazis March 1938), the director asked Salzburg’s mayor for permission to hang the Nazi flags around the town.  The Mayor responded that since they had all lived through it once, he supposed they could do it again, but the citizens apparently felt that the memory of the occupation was too recent and too painful for them to take any interest in reliving it on film, even with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and all those charming children.

And that is about as much as I had time to glean before we were hurried back to the bus to get back to the ship to sail off to our next port of call.  Apparently ships have to make reservations in the locks one year in advance, so there’s no being late!  Salzburg did make a good impression on me though, and it is definitely on my list for a future trip.

For the moment however, we must set sail again.  The next stop turned out to be my absolute favorite of the voyage.  But more on that next week!