Carinthia: Calm as a Picture Postcard. Mostly.

Just back from that trip to Austria I mentioned.   I visited the lakes of Carinthia, the southernmost bit of Austria, on a press trip with Headwater Holidays, who run "soft" activity holidays.  I wanted to go partly because when I was a child we lived in Germany and took our summer holidays either at lakes or somewhere along the Baltic.  Of the latter, say no more (think freezing winds even in midsummer) but the lakes seemed idyllic in memory, and I wondered if my memories had been rose tinted.  Actually it was just like I remembered.  To look at the view above makes me imagine swimming there, as we did, and Mum and Dad sitting just out of shot with icecreams ... sigh..

These lakes are remarkably clear and clean, with water from the mountains, so some of them have that distinctive turquoise tinge found in glacial water.  And there is something calming about swimming in a natural environment, being amongst plants and fish and ducks. Not that I managed any lake swimming on this occasion, (see why not, a bit further on) but it's so much nicer than staring at tiled walls and smelling chlorine in a pool.



Anyway, Headwater has opened up Carinthia as a new destination. I've never understood why English speaking people just don't seem to go to this part of Austria.  True, the flights from the UK aren't that good, but you can easily get a cheapo flight to Munich, Germany, and then take a train - it's a great trip which could form a good start to a holiday.
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Still, the area is not short of visitors. It's particularly popular with Germans and Austrians who want eco friendly family breaks, or like to cycle or walk along the huge network of immaculate trails and small roads on the slopes of the mountains.

It isn't their high season yet, but the weather during our trip was warmer than is usual in June, and there were plenty of people looking as if they were posing for tourist board brochures. In fact, a lot of the scenery looked like a picture postcard.

You will need to take exercise to work off the meals.  The food was all of good quality but although everyone else in our group loved it, it was frankly too stodgy for my taste.  It is like German food used to be but these days in Germany you can get much lighter fare, and less of the fried dumplings and slabs of meat. Take a look at a local speciality - pancake soup!  A delicious bouillon, to be sure, but filling it up with sliced pancakes - ?  This was not for me. I passed it on to one of the other journalists, and he enjoyed it.



I mostly chose salads and fish, though, and the surroundings were usually so lovely that I could forget about the awkwardness of leaving half of the huge portions.

The place above is on the Millstätter Lake and below is the Hotel Schönruh, Faakersee, where we had lunch on the terrace.

 As you see the menu is all in German, although everyone seems to speak English and the waiters are happy to translate. 

We did a sort of condensed version of the company's holidays, so there wasn't as much cycling as there would have been on one of their usual trips,  but we covered forty or fifty kilometres, including some moderate hills.  Here are a couple of members of our group, dawdling around as we considered which route to take.   Several of the houses we passed grew their own fruit and veg and did bio bed-and-breakfast.

The cows apparently hadn't yet gone up into the "Almen" - the high mountain meadows - but seemed happy enough in their spick-and-span barns.

There's more sunshine in Carinthia than other parts of Austria but that didn't spare us from some spectacular mountain weather. One day, we were supposed to be seeing a falconry show in a ruined castle atop a hill. As we climbed, the weather began to look pretty dodgy in the distance, with the lakes going dark green beneath gathering clouds.  But it was still bright and sunny where we were...

And for a while, the show managed to go on - it was all in German and the birds were rather small so I can't really tell you much about it. What you can't see from the picture below is the extremely high wind which had blown up by this time. Or perhaps you can, if you look closely at the bird's slightly ruffled feathers. That shot was pointing in the direction of the relatively "good" weather, by the way, not the dark clouds which were racing towards us from the other direction.

But eventually ......

Great pillars of rain began to fall out of incredibly black clouds. I was hoping to get some of the spectacular forks of lightning which were shooting around, but didn't succeed.  Needless to say, this lot ruined the falconry display when it finally reached us, and its rainy, cold aftermath also stopped me from lake swimming  (see above)- but it was well worth experiencing such dramatic weather. 

I thought Headwater was good, by the way.  They mostly use their own reps (rather than buying them in) and the trip was very well planned, with routes that were interesting and varied, but not too alpine for the  kind of "occasional" cyclists who form most of their customer base.  Our press group ranged from people who had ridden bikes as kids,  to one veteran of the Lands End-John o'Groats run.  We all felt pretty happy with the routes.   And we stayed in pleasing hotels, like this one below, the Familiengut, which as its name suggests, caters mostly for families. But the fact it had an outdoor pool, play area and lots of grass to roar around on didn't stop it from being civilised for adults too. Like many other places we saw, it had well tended gardens full of roses, and varied, civilised outdoor eating for grown ups. A bit like being in someone's particularly nice back garden. 

One of the highlights was traveling out in a motor boat to a pontoon moored outside Kollers Hotel on the Millstätter See.  Guests can book an eight course meal on this glamorous pontoon, with staff zooming out in boats with each course.   Click the link on their website for a better image of the pontoon - I didn't manage to get one but this was the view from it.

We didn't have a meal but they gave us sparkly water and local wine which hit the spot on our first day - which had involved a 3 AM start for me.

The cycle trails were pretty good. They even had toolstations every now and then, with free tools for your bike repair.

Carinthia is not a place to go if you want bright lights or metropolitan buzz in any shape or form, and I doubt you'd meet any incredible challenges on these holidays, unless you feel challenged by heights or the occasional thunderstorms. It seems like a cosy little corner of Austria, although apparently the inhabitants of Vienna are a bit scornful of their Carinthians' countrified ways, I was told.   But when I spoke to a local newspaper reporter, she said she hadn't reported any murders at all during her twenty year stint in the region, and I guess that is worth a few Viennese sneers.  

The area's biggest town, Klagenfurt,was certainly calm and rather beautiful.  Look at this apothecary's window, with shutters hundreds of years old. 

On our last day, we had a guided tour of Klagenfurt, and discovered much harder and darker sides to the area's history, however calm and prosperous it is now - as is usually the case everywhere that has any history (and there is plenty of history here). 

But what I saw seemed to me prenaturally calm, beautiful, easy and well organised. Almost uncannily so, when I compare it with the normal hustle and bustle of my everyday life. So I can only suggest that you do come here if you like some gentle cycling and hiking with Headwater, or come independently for a clean, attractive, well equipped and not too expensive family holiday (in German),  And don't come here if your normal life includes patrolling Detroit in a cop car or hunting down drug gangs, because quite frankly, the shock will be just too much. :)