Sun, 28 Sep 2003

author Tim	location the 10:34 Innsbruck to München Inter-City train
posted 11:44 CEST 30/09/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Osterreich/Osterreich 2 ( all photos )

Into Innsbruck ( No photos )
(Continued from Italia)
At the border station Brenaro/Brenner, the train stopped for quite some time, with plenty of armed Austrian police wandering up and down the train. It turns out this was just routine, and also that the driver seems to get out and is replaced by an Austrian one. We had thought that maybe we would need to change trains, but this was not the case.
We travelled the remaining distance to Innsbruck in no time at all, arriving at the presently being upgraded Hauptbahnhof. Being a little more organised than usual, we had rung ahead from Italia to see if there were rooms available at one of the hostels on the other side of town (but still the closest in), Jugendherberge St Nikolaus.
Walking there, it became readily apparent that we were in another country - no vespas, taxis were Mercedes instead of FIATs, we crossed roads without fear of death, and everything was calm and serene. We were going to like Innsbruck, we could tell already.
We crossed the river Inn (since bridge in Deutsch is brücke, Innsbruck is named after the main bridge) at a small footbridge Inn Steg, finding our hostel/pub/restaurant combination just on the other side. It was a pleasant, lively place, filled to the brim with Aussies. Almost everyone was either going to or coming from Oktoberfest, thinking the same as us that this was quite a pleasant convenient place to stop over.
We were once again in separate dorms, which we don't really mind but all our stuff is packed into the one pack, which makes showering and finding clothes a little difficult. My dorm was the strangest yet I have seen. Picture a bunk bed, one up down. Got that? Now picture a double bunk bed, so that there is a double-sized bed on both the top and the bottom. Still with me? Well, this room was completely filled with a quintuple bunk bed - five up, five down. I was more than a little concered about finding myself sleeping next to a large blubbering drunk Aussie, but I needn't have worried. They cleverly fill up the positions with spaces in between, only filling the other ones when they are really full.

author Tim	location the 10:34 Innsbruck to München Inter-City train
posted 11:13 CEST 30/09/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Italia ( all photos )

Verona ( 16 photos )
We awoke to a darkness that foretold bad things to come. The power was out. Getting organised for the breakfast, we noted the reception was lit by a candle. After being totally impressed by the way that the kitchen was run with no power as if it made no difference, we chatted to the receptionist about the power outage. She said that she had been talking to someone about 300km away and they had no power either! Oh dear, not good for the electric rail system we had planned to travel on.
There were only three buses running into town that morning being a Sunday (at least they weren't electric too like some of the others around), and we got on one of these, rode for a while and alighted at our stop by the markets once again. Arriving at the train station, we observed that things weren't going well at all.
Trains were over three hours late, but we picked one supposedly going to Verona and went to sit on what we thought was the right platform. However, the station signs told otherwise. It turns out that the platform numbers go 1-8, but then there is a separate set of platforms numbered 1-3. Pointing and extremely basic Italian found the right platform eventually, and we wandered across the tracks (when in Rome... all the locals were doing this despite signs advising to the contrary) to the other set of platforms.
The train was there, but it took a walk to the front to speak with the driver to find out if it was the correct one. I asked when it was leaving, and he replied in broken English "One hour. Maybe?" This train by now was about four hours late, but it was the only one going our way, so we just sat there for a while. Eventually without warning it just started moving away from the platform, heading off north to Verona.
The journey was another pleasant one, as all in Italia have been - the seats are comfortable and it is a good way to travel for not much money at all.

Pulling into Verona, we checked our big pack into left luggage for a few hours, intending to have a brief look around the city and then get a train to Innsbruck in the evening.
The extremely helpful information office gave us a great map with a walk around the town, and we limped the twenty minutes or so into the centre.
It lived up to its billing as one of Italy's most beautiful towns, with ornate marble pavements everywhere, great cafés and a medium-sized Roman Arena smack-bang in the middle. We had quite a good walk around the town which was overall quite pleasant, but with no amazing highlights.
Following our budget theme, we didn't go into any sights, just looked, sat, walked and walked, past the many 1st century BC and AD bridges, theatres and probably the most famous place here, "Juliet's House". Yes, the city is famous for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and we looked in the place where the heroine supposedly "lived", now with lover's graffiti over the walls under the famous balcony. All a bit blown out of proportion for a work of fiction really.
We'd had our fill, and decided to try and make it back for the 3pm train to Innsbruck. We made it with quite a bit of time to spare, but we needn't have bothered. Once again, the trains were in chaos, as we sat on platform six where it was supposed to leave from. Plenty of other trains came and went, but the Munich (or Monaco as the Italians inexplicably call it, much to our confusion) via Innsbruck train was not to be seen.
I limped yet again down to the station information office, waited in the queue and spoke to a guy who didn't speak English. I resported to my paintented One-Word-and-Hope technique, saying "Munich?" This did the trick, as he pointed to a piece of paper saying nothing but "17:00". This was the time of the next train we had first been going to catch - I gathered the 15:00 one was cancelled.
The joys of travelling! Luckily, the Italians seem to be prepared for the total lack of efficiency and organisation inherent in their systems, providing an excellent waiting room where we sat for an our or so, and could have even watched a movie in a small cinema there had we understood Italian.
Up to platform 7, our train finally arrived. We were powered across the landscape, further and further north as the darkness surrounded us. The train crossed into Österreich at the Brenner Pass, where it occurred to us that we had left Rosie and a sizeable proportion of our belongings in another country.

(customised)