Author: david

Februrary 27 2006 was Mozart’s 250th birthday so we made the pilgrimage to his birthplace, Salzburg. Salzburg is a beautiful baroque town. In fact the Old Town is designated a World Cultural Heritage Site by UNESCO.

We arrived at our hotel, the Auersperg, late on Sunday night. It was really a very nice hotel with friendly staff and modern decor. The only downsides was that it was not in the Old Town and it only had a bar, not a restaurant.

The next day we discovered how cold Salzburg gets in the winter. Despite the long underwear and scarves we soon started to freeze. However, we found that if you tried to not stay outside for more than a couple of hours it wasn’t too bad. As we walked to the Old Town we passed a group of school kids wrapped up like Michelin men who seemed to be on a school tabogganing excursion. They needed the padding for more than just the cold as they tended to crash repeatedly in a most amusing way.

We visited Mozart’s birthplace, which didn’t have an awful lot to see and Mozart’s residence which had a bit more. We also went to the Residenz which was the Prince-Archbishop’s palace. It was only in 1815 that Salzburg became a part of Austria. Until then the whole province was an independant principality governed by the ecclesiastical ruler. The Residenz is very impressive but it is interesting to think that while Mozart was just a servant then, now it is he who is more famous and revered than the Prince-Archbishops who lived there.

Salzburg is a very small town with a population of about 150,000 but as it was Mozart Week in his 250th year we thought the town would be a little busier than it was. But the streets were quite empty, including the main street, the Getreidegasse.

We had booked tickets to see the VPO with Daniel Barenboim at the Grosses Festspielhaus on Monday night and were interested to see that about two thousand people had come from somewhere to practically fill the huge hall. I suppose they were mostly locals. They were also mostly over sixty.

Unfortunately Daniel Barenboim was ill so he couldn’t do the concert. Instead we had Manfred Honeck and Alexander Lonquich. This was rather disappointing considering the price of the tickets but the concert was still nice. I don’t think the VPO were as good as the LSO but they still made a nice sound. The strings were very good and the horns took every opportunity to remove their plumbing and upend their instruments.

Over the next couple of days we visited the Hohensalzburg Fortress on the peak of Festungsberg above the town, went to the quite interesting Natural History Museum and did some shopping on the Getriedegasse.

If I were to go back I would probably only go for two rather than three days as the town is really quite small. I would also go in warmer weather as although the town is beautiful when covered in snow, it really was frickin’ cold!

We hired a car last weekend and went for a drive. We went to Ightham Mote which is a fascinating 14th-century moated manor house in a hidden valley.

Apparently its seclusion saved it from Cromwell’s soldiers who, intent on looting it, lost their way and ransacked another house instead. It eluded us for a while as well as we made several attempts to leave the M25 but always seemed to end up back on it again. On one particular attempt we found ourselves stuck in a traffic jam we had passed going in the other direction. We eventually found it and it was cool.

Seeing as Andrew decided to join the National Trust at Ightham Mote we thought we would make the most of the membership and so we went to Bodiam Castle in East Sussex. This is a beautifully symmetrical castle with a massive moat filled with even more massive carp. There was also a duck with a solitary little duckling. I imagine the giant carp had eaten the others.

Bodiam was built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge after he made a mint fighting the French. While it may have had some strategic importance in repelling a French invasion, being quite close to the coast, it is thought he built it mostly to show how loaded he was.

After a light lunch of scones and jam and cream and wasps we headed for the coast and eventually ended up at Dover which also has a cool looking castle but we didn’t visit it. We were looking for the White Cliffs. We arrived at Folkestone not having spotted any White Cliffs yet but we were hungry and so we got some fish and chips and ate it by the harbour. We could see some cliffs in the distance but they seemed a bit brown.

As the sun sank lower in the sky and we were meandering in a fairly random way back to the motorway we finally came upon site that gave us a view of the famous cliffs. I think it was called Saint Margarets Leas. There was a tearoom (closed unfortunately) that had been an old coastguard station and a giant obelisk monument to sailors killed in the two World Wars. We were really quite close to France at this point. So close in fact that our mobile phones thought we were in France and switched over to roaming on the French networks.

There are pictures in the gallery