Eisriesenwelt (Ice Caves) then to Munich, Germany

We stored our luggage at the train station before catching a trail to Werfen to check out Eisriesenwelt (ice caves). The storage in the station is pretty cheap, only 3.5 Euros per locker. Strangely enough, we had Burger King for breakfast as it was the fastest thing we could get before boarding the train.

We arrived in Werfen in about 45 minutes and had to walk to take a shuttle bus to the caves on the mountain. The shuttle bus does cost 5.6 Euros per person but it’s better than hiking the mountain yourself! But it doesn’t drop you off at the actual entrance to the caves, you still have to hike from the car park, take a cable car (another 19 Euros for both ways), then hike another 20 minutes! There is a rest stop at each end of the cable car for snacks and drinks. Surprisingly there’s a bathroom right near the entrance to the actual caves. The tour guide told us that they use the melting ice from the caves to flush the toilets!

We had to wait for the guide that spoke English and he let us be in the front so he wouldn’t have to yell as much. We were given kerosene lamps before heading in and boy, it was COLD at the entrance. The ice forms were beautiful and amazing. The caves are 42 km long but the ice is only the first 1 km. We climbed 134 km up the cave and 134 km back down. It’s easy climbing inside the cave because the path is laid down but boy, it was tiring getting to that point and then having to go all the way down.

We stopped by for a bite at the restaurant. Ron had a frankfurter and I had the frankfurter noodle soup. We then took the cable car down the hill and walked to the bus stop. We noticed the clouds starting to roll in and by the time we got to the bottom it was drizzling then downright pouring! We got soaking wet even with an umbrella and we went down the wrong path so ended up having a scale a locked gate to get to the train station. There were no trains in sight either so had to wait for about an hour before our train back to Salzburg. The rain stopped after 15 minutes so we were just waiting there in our wet clothes.

We finally made it back to Salzburg at 6:58pm and saw a train to Munich (Munchen) at 7:03pm so RAN to collect our luggage from the lockers only to find the train delayed until 7:18pm. So we RAN to get a kebab burger and durum (the kebab wrap) before running again for the train since the kebab place took longer than anticipated.

The train was going on smoothly until we were all of a sudden delayed for about 20 minutes. We didn’t understand why because all the announcements were in German. Finally we saw people getting off the train and crossing over to the other side to a much much smaller train. There were people still in the dining car of our original train looking at us wondering what we were doing. We barely got a seat in the smaller train so I have no idea what those other people did.

We arrived in Munich at 9:30pm and caught the U to where our hotel was. We checked in and went to sleep. They left a small bag of gummy bears on our pillows… aww, my fav candy.

If you can’t see the slideshow above, click HERE.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

three + 12 =