SKIING IN AUSTRIA

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 142, 17 June 1936, Page 23

SKIING IN AUSTRIA

WELLINGTON GIRL'S TOUR ENJOYABLE TIME RECORDED

A Wellington girl has just lately been having a delightful time in Austria. She writes saying that she does not wonder that people become "Austromaniacs," for it is a disease that is most easy to catch. They had brilliant sunshine as well as snow storms (thes? mostly at night), and the 25 people who formed the party were all good travellers and easy to get on with. The journey from DotUr, the train trip, etc., was not too good, and the writer says that the Continental thirdclass wooden seats are not at all pleasant to experience. However, she took to the luggage-rack, and found that it was quite all right—away from the turmoil below, out of the way of. ticket collectors, passport authorities, and various sellers of goods. She had a ski suit and rucksack at her head

and slept most comfortably. "Then," she continues, "we decanted our 25 selves and five guides who met us at Buchs on the frontier, bought boots and other necessaries for climbing, and embarked on a four-hour climb, first through fir-clad hills, and then up a sheer mountain face balustraded with sloping roofs and snow-shoots at intervals, with ice-tunnels here and there. Looking through the latter was wonderful with the snow view and deep blue sky. Skating had kept me in pretty good form, but I was badly puffed, finding later that I had followed a broad, tweed-covered back up a shortcut some hundreds of feet in height, this belonging to one of the best rockclimbers and mountaineers in England. However, we puffed along like small, but determined steam engines, and arrived somehow. Then we crossed a snow saddle, dropped down into Zurs, and wound round a long valley into Lech. Then came the last lap of 1000 feet to Oberlech, where food was the immediate necessity with innumerable cups of tea."

The next ten days passed in a flash— breakfast early, overhauling of gear, and then out in groups for the climbs which were always new, and with a delightful return home on skis. Dinner finished at nine in the evening, and then came music, dancing, and community sinigng. For the first four nights the Wellingtonian went to bed after dinner, but after that "found her feet" and was able to stay up and enjoy herself. She would not mind tackling any country after her experiences in the Austrian Alps, and is prepared to enjoy climbing and skiing when she returns to New Zealand.

"VIENNA WAS GREAT." Thinking that she might not return to Austria again, she decided to extend her tour to see Vienna, and was so glad afterwards that she had done so. "Vienna was great," she writes. "Friedl has us in charge and delivered twelve of. us (the rest had returned to England) at West Bahenhof in Wien in the morning (another night on the luggage rack), and when we arrived we simply romped around Vienna." They saw marvellous palaces, some good museums (for ballast), went round the cafes, visited the Spanish Riding School, shopped with the few remaining coins, and then went to the opera, where they saw "Rosencavalier," a typical Viennese work by Richard Strauss. They invaded tea-shops and cathedrals, were completely overwhelmed by the age and dignity of the University, gambolled on the Prata (a super-amusement part on the banks of the Danube), and spent an afternoon in the Viennese woods surrounding the city, one of the most beautiful scenes in a beautiful country.. Then they had a swim in Dianabad, the best swimming bath in the city. They went to a marvellous place under the Rathaus (City Hall), the whole of the end of a room being the carved end of a gigantic cask. There was a wonderful band there, which played "English tunes" for them, including "Tipperary," "Lily of Laguna," and "the Merry Widow." "We nearly wept to leave Vienna." s?ys the writer. "Had it not been that we were down to our last farthing we might still have been there. Coming through Austria, though, was the gem of all, Oberlech included. After our helter-skelter through Vienna we were sufficiently tired to sit and let the landscape flow by. In Lower Austria and round Vienna the vineyards land fruit trees were in blossom, and if you could have seen the lilacs in Vienna—in all the gardens and in the Ringstrasse (a broad belt of trees and gardens that runs round the centre of the city, on the site of the old city wall) —they were glorious! Upper Austria, beside the Danube with turreted castles overlooking it. to the Salzberg Province where the country begins to rise i you can see the snow-clad mountains of Styria and Carinthia right away to the south—it was all marvellous."

THROUGH SWITZERLAND IN DARKNESS. "We went through Switzerland in darkness running alongside Lake Zurich, with twinkling lights all along the further side, for all the world like Wellington harbour by night. We changed to the Paris express at Bale for Ostend and curled up on our luggage quite dead to the world till the morning. It was lucky we had a big breakfast on the train, for we crossed the Channel tooting our way along through fog, and did not get in till two hours late. Coming back is not so dreadful after all, for we missed a ! shocking Easter, and now spring is deI finitely on its way and there promises to be a good summer, so they say, much better than the last. It's peculiar how, when you get back to England, one immediately begins to talk about the weather. In Austria we simply took it for granted, the snow glistened, and j.we had to wear sun goggles and all got sunburned—but here the weather forms such an integral part of things that it just has to be discussed." The spring in England, it was felt, was going to make up for any shortcomings on the part of weather, with the lovely flowers and trees coming into glorious leafage.

DOMESTIC DISCOVERIES An English correspondent, writing of the Ideal Home Exhibition held recently in London, points out that in a year or two housekeeping will have become merely a morning's work, and the word "housewife" will fast be fading out of our vocabulary- Women must be prepared to find interests outside their homes—intellectual interests, business or recreational ones. If housewives don't foresee the change now it will come to them as a jolt in the future, when they see other wives giving most of their lime over to lighthearted companionship with their husbands and children, while they themselves cling to the cutworn conventions. As fast as the scientists turn out their domestic discoveries, we women must be busy widening our interests so as to ensure that when we all have ideal homes they will be run universally by ideal housewives.

Steamy windows, which you often get in the kitchen after cooking, can be prevented by this simple treatment (states an exchange). Rub a little hard toilet soap on each pane. Then polish with a clean rag until all traces of the soap have disappeared.