Among the many places I have visited with my son Gianluca for our “special adventures“, few can surpass in beauty the western Austrian Alps in the summer.
We stayed in an apartment a few levels up on top of a Turkish kebab place, in a town close to the Austrian border with Liechtenstein, called Feldkirch, at the westernmost tip of Austria. The Turkish kebab proved to be quite convenient for Gianluca, by the way, but that’s rather beside the point here. My plan for the trip included looking up on Google “the ten most beautiful places in Austria” and visiting those that are closest to Feldkirch. We were not disappointed!
Lunersee
We went up by cable car to get to this lake, arriving next to a hydroelectric dam that was built in 1957, helping to raise the water level by 72 metres. That’s equivalent to a 24 storey building of increase in depth. Thanks to the dam, the lake provides water to four local hydroelectric power plants.
There’s a 6 km walking trail surrounding the lake, so of course we immediately set off on a circumnavigation.
The tiny dark spots on the shoreline give an idea of scale. This was looking back on the first part of our loop.
Looking ahead, more dark spots were exploring the water’s edge. I was fascinated by the tourquoise colour of the water. And, of course, the backdrop of mountains all around us.
We were approaching the highest point of the trail.
It was simply magnificent.
Formarinsee
To get to this lake, we came up against a road barrier that blocks all car traffic and only allows in authorised vehicles and buses. So we had to drive back to a town called Lech and walk around some pretty surroundings until the next bus would be leaving for Formarinsee, some one and a half hours later.
It wasn’t bad here either.
This wasn’t a loop around the lake, rather than a long trail that happened to have a lake within it. Having climbed up a good deal, we left the lake behind us and were practically on a mountain trail. Gianluca had already worked out how pressing on along the whole loop would take us back to the bus stop where we had arrived, and where we needed to take a bus trip back to our car in Lech.
We had lost a lot of time until we arrived, due to having to drive back to Lech and wait for the next bus to get to Formarinsee. We absolutely couldn’t afford to miss the last bus by proceeding along an unknown mountain trail in late afternoon, so I had to insist on going back. I know I took the right decision, but Gianluca complains about it to this day, close to four years later.
The water’s edge at the lake, on our way back, wasn’t so ugly after all.
Korbersee
Here, we arrived in good time for a looping trail, starting next to a small lake, reaching Korbersee itself after about 40 minutes, and then continuing along alpine trails surrounded by mountains. Beautiful.
I’ll end this post with an anecdote on the same theme of the sheer beauty of the Austrian alps. Driving south through Germany into Austria, a couple of years later, my wife and I entered a rather long tunnel that would cross the border, while listening to a great song by John Miles, Music. At one point the song burst into full blown grandiose symphonic, in exactly the same instant that we exited the tunnel and entered Austria, surrounded by scenery similar to the pictures above. We couldn’t help laughing at the soundtrack that seemed so fitting for the moment.
Welcome to Austria, it was saying.
Leave a Reply