932 - Take Me To The River

This is the entry for Saturday, May 2. We made a short trip to Salzburg, the fourth-largest city in Austria, with a population of about 150.000, almost half of that of London, Ontario, almost triple that of Lancaster, PA, and about the same as Savannah, GA.

Does Salzburg with that size qualify as urban? You bet!

We didn’t stay in Salzburg though. We only fetched Michael, and with him we made a round trip through the valley of the Lammer, following an alpine panorama road over Postalm, down to Sankt Wolfgang, and then via Mondsee back to Salzburg for dinner.

River Lammer is a small tributary to Salzburg’s main river Salzach. It runs east to west, and not far into the valley, near Oberscheffau, it runs through a narrow gorge called “Lammeröfen”.

When we reached that place, I decided to go in for a few minutes and take some images. At that time it rained, but Michael assisted with an umbrella. We payed 6€ each, which is quite heavy, but what you get is an excellently and unobtrusively built walkway through the most spectacular part, the so-called “Dark Gorge”. After a few minutes the rain stopped and we even got some rays of sunlight.

All in all that reminded me strongly of last year’s SoFoBoMo book “Tscheppaschlucht”. Given enough time, I can always pull off a book in such places. The variety is enormous, and this time I was only in for quarter of an hour with a single lens and a polarizer 🙂

In fact, the temptation was strong to say goodbye to “Urban Dreams”, return on Sunday, me, a bag of lenses and a tripod, pay another 6€, this time for six hours, take a hundred shots and be over and done with it. This way I could finish in two weeks.

But that’s nonsense. SoFoBoMo is no race and repeating last year’s tour de force is no challenge either. Still, this gorge is a nice place and I really want to return for an extended shooting.

We didn’t follow the river to the valley’s main community of Abtenau. Instead we took a small mountain road through an alpine region called Postalm, crossing over to Wolfgangsee, already in Upper Austria, one of the region Salzkammergut’s more beautiful lakes, best known through the operetta “Im Weißen Rößl”.

We took a coffee in Sankt Wolfgang, in its core a really picturesque village, but totally encrusted in its touristic infrastructure. It is far from high season at the moment, but when we arrived, the big parking area nearest the center (yes, there is more than one) was half full with private cars and tourist buses.

Actually the place reminded me strongly of places of pilgrimage like Lourdes with all their accumulation of kitsch and trash.

Anyway. Here’s an image taken with the fish and as usual corrected with Fisheye-Hemi™. This is the restaurant/hotel that claims to be the White Horse Inn of the operetta, and in fact didn’t contribute anything but its name.

The Song of the Day is “Take Me To The River” from the 1978 Talking Heads album “More Songs About Buildings and Food”. See them perform live in a video clip from the movie “Stop Making Sense”. Not only for the title, no, it’s as well for contrast to all the alpine kitsch 🙂