48hr Austrian Adventure

We arrived at the Austrian border late afternoon to a rather smug looking lady flagging us down at Border Control. After waving us into the search bay she asked where our vignette was. A small sticker costing 8€ that you display in the windscreen to enable you to travel along major routes across Austria. I, feeling very pleased with myself; pointed out the official looking green sticker in the corner of the windscreen thinking maybe she hadn’t seen it. She was quick to inform us that although we had done very well in purchasing and displaying our Austrian vignette we also required one for the half mile stretch of Slovenian road we had travelled along to reach this point. Annoyed and slightly bewildered I reached for my purse willing to hand over another 8€ and pass across the border. Regardless of my good intentions she informed us that it was not possible to buy one from her and as we come this far without displaying the correct vignette we had to pay a fine, of 150€.
I shrieked in utter disbelief whilst Jac had an uncontrollable and slightly embarrassing Tourette’s seizure. The kind lady attempted to comfort us by explaining that the normal fine is 300-500€, however as we were strangers (I think she meant tourists) and we weren’t to know we would receive this special discounted rate of 150€ (In our language, 1 big blow out, 2 weeks fuel or 3 weeks food). Try as we might, there was no getting out of it. We paid our fine and got on our way, hoping to reach our next stop before dark. We drove approximately 500 meters up the road before reaching a standstill and traffic for as far as the eye could see. Obviously something local drivers are used to, everybody switched off their engines and got out of their cars to smoke and catch up with utter strangers from the surrounding cars. After half an hour we started moving and soon realised that the hold-up was due to road maintenance and a closed tunnel that had now reopened.
Feeling that we’d been dealt our fair share of bad luck we continued on our journey. For the next three hours we chugged along through dense dark forest willing the van to make it. A long afternoon, many tantrums and 185 km north east of Lake Bled we reached our next stop, a sleepy town called Murau. With no energy, no electricity and almost no will to live (maybe a very slight exaggeration) we decided to write off the day we had just had and fell into bed.

The following morning we continued our journey another 315 km north to Linz. It rained the entire journey and the drive was uneventful, our highlight being a stop at a hardware store to buy jump leads as today was the third morning in a row we’d woken up to a flat battery (it’s all part of the experience, or so we keep telling ourselves).

We spent the following day at Mauthausen Concentration Camp, one of many set up all over Europe between 1933 and 1945. More than 195,000 people were imprisoned at Mauthausen and around 105,000 died there. It was eye opening to say the least; we spent a good few hours exploring the immaculately preserved camp whilst listening to our audio guides. We entered the camp through the main gate between two watch towers. Just inside the gate was an area referred to as the ‘Wailing Wall’. This was where new prisoners would enter the camp, they would be chained to the wall via iron rings that can still be seen today and stripped of their clothes and possessions. They would be left there for hours if not days and would often experience mistreatment for the first time at the hands of the SS. We continued to the prisoners camp or preventative detention camp where we were able to see inside the accommodation blocks, kitchens, gas chambers and the crematorium, the guards barracks and the Wiener Graben (the quarry where the prisoners were made to work) and its ‘Death Steps’  before visiting the museum.

Later that afternoon we arrived in the centre of Linz, a pleasant city straddling the Danube River and the childhood home of Adolf Hitler, we collected Spike from Linz Airport and headed straight for Munich.  

The British memorial at Mauthausen

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

The perimeter wall carried a 380 volt electrical current

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Wiener Graben & 'Death Steps'