| Salzburg 1998
Pope day. At least it would have been if we had hung around Vienna, instead we hopped on the train from Westbahnhof for a day trip to Saltzburg three hours back down the track towards the Alps. The city is famous as the birthplace of Wolfgang Armadeus Mozart and as the gateway to the Austrian Alps. We were headed there however for one reason and that was related to nothing more than trite sixties popular culture. In Saltzburg the hills are still alive with the sound of music from the famous film blasting from the speakers of tour busses.
Our tour guide was an Aussie hailing from northern NSW. In pure strine he pointed out the Saltzburg locations featured in pivotal scenes from The Sound of Music. Having only seen the film once and that being sometime in the mid seventies my recollections of these places was hazy. However the tour spots were picturesque and occasionally I could imagine a troupe of smart arse boys and jailbait girls in white dresses skipping along with Julie Andrews if I remembered hard.
 After a couple of hours of seemingly endless sing-a-longs to the looped soundtrack tape It was just as well that I had not purchased one of the daggers from the market stall the previous day. Fortunately I managed to buy a beer the tour guide mysteriously found for me at the bottom of the little esky, he had hidden away up the front of the bus. We enjoyed a drink while the rest of the tour party was off taking photos of some place where Maria apparently sang, danced or took a piss in the film.
Once the bus left the town and entered the mountains it became essentially an alpine tour. We snaked through the foothills with a stop at a giant metal toboggan slide that required a short chair lift ride to ascend to the top for a slide descent that promised much but under whelmed in the delivery. Given the gradient and switch back track that seemed to leech any speed from the toboggan, we might as well have been in a school playground. The view was nice from the top though, and it helped purge the soul of the rounds of “Sixteen going on Seventeen” that had captivated our group. Trapped with the Von Traps we pushed further into the mountains.
The final scene in The Sound of Music is the wedding scene and the chapel where Maria finally marries the master of the household, presumably after surgically removing the pole he had jammed up his arse for most of the flick, is in a picturesque village of Mondsee on the bank of Lake Mondsee. It is called the Stiftskirche Mondsee and this was the final stop on the tour before we headed back to Saltzburg and our return train to Vienna complete with our show bag full of chockies and Eidelweiss seeds. Somehow I almost preferred the return of the icy silence between us on the train, to the saccharine wholesomeness of the Maria obsessed grandmothers on the tour.
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