On Monday Sabrina went back to work so it was time for us to move on to a new country; Austria. Unfortunately it was pouring down so we decided to take it slowly, as not to arrive on a damp campsite too early. It was definitely a day for inside activities and the best we could come up with was to pay tribute to Ahnold Schwarzenegger and visit the gym in Bregenz to pump some ihon.

After Bregenz we drove to Ragal, a small town in the Voralberg region in the Alps. We had found a campsite in the ANWB Camping Guide (Dutch variant of AA) which was highly recommended. The young man at the reception instantly addressed me in fluent Dutch, which surprised me. But as we later found out, most campsites in Austria, Switzerland and France are for about 50 to 75% occupied by Dutch campers! After finding a nice spot with mountain and valley views we set up the tent in the rain. We were very pleased by the level of facilities on the campsite, being used to South American campsites. Wifi seems to be the norm, spacious, clean and sanitary toilet facilities, bad weather room, swimming pool etc.

Rain all day, Goretex day

The next day the weather had cleared up a lot so it was time to tie up our hiking boots and hit the Alps. We did a loop that started with quite the uphill and ended with an interpretive walk on the way down to learn the names of the various plants, alas no edelweiss yet! Back at the campsite we had a coffee to replenish energy as next we had a trail run planned. This run was about 7 kms and had all sorts of on the way entertainment from friendly goats to an adventure playground to an old chapel and some brutal up hills. The advantage of all this exercise was that that night we didn’t hear the loud snorers in the tent next to us, we were out!

Hiking trail obstructed by some gentle but large beasts

The trail down to our favourite running trail in the Voralberg region in Austria

One of the many hiking trails in Austria. It is definitely a hikers paradise there!

On this hiking trail it was possible to buy unpasteaurised milk. Very pretty typical Austrian alpine hut also.

The weather was only getting better so we hiked to a mountain lake, such a stunning place to go for a swim. This was followed by the same trail run again as we enjoyed it so much the first time!

Idyllic lake, great for cooling off after a hike on a warm day

Many distractions on this hard trail run

Austria wasn’t initially in the planning to be visited, so unfortunately we could only stay for three days, but it is definitely a country we would like to go back to. We found the people were friendly, the Voralberg region was quiet (compared to Tirol, we were told) and the Alps are just really scenic, just like the towns with their large houses and flowers on all the balconies and windows. We’ll be back!!

As we were close to Liechtenstein and keen to add another country to our tally we decided to spend a day there. Liechtenstein is only about 160 km square large and has about 40.000 inhabitants. It’s very mountainous. We drove to Vaduz and noted how heavy traffic was in this small country. We later read that population has grown a lot and the roads are lacking the capacity to deal with this. So we joined the queue of expensive cars in this rich country and eventually got to Vaduz. There is not much to do in Vaduz, but we decided that the least we could do is visit the National Museum, which was only moderately interesting. We stayed at a nice campsite, but were quite happy to leave the country the next day, which didn’t take much time at all… Moving on to Switzerland!