Doreen, her family and I drove three hours in the morning after having a typical German breakfast with lots of breads and meats. We drove to the Zilleltal Staundamm which is a huge glacier in the Austrian alps on the border of Austria and Italy. We woke up early in the morning to spend the whole day there since it was a long trip.
While driving up through the valley to get there I just stared in amazement out of the window. It was a wonderful experience seeing the towering walls of steep rock, the spacious green grass, the assortment of pine trees and the snow up all of the mountains around us then. Then instead of taking the time to drive around all the mountains like we do in Australia, we just drove straight through them in a rock tunnel.
Eventually we arrived and got out of the car. The first thing that struck me was how blue and clean the water looked, it was mesmerising. The water was in a huge lake surrounded by mountains in a small valley with a huge dam wall blocking the water off from tumbling into the valley below. On the dam wall someone had built a rock climbing wall onto it. So as we walked along it you could see people scaling the dam wall.
I found out that just at the lake itself we were already 1800m above sea level and the mountains around us were 2500m - 3500m high, that is roughly 1500m taller than the tallest mountain in Australia!
We walked out along the dam wall until we could go no further and then we started the walk around the lake. It took about __ hours to get there and back. When we finished the walk around the lake we went into a Hütte (a small house/cafe on a mountain) and had lunch. I got a mezzo mix (German drink that is a mix of cola and Fanta) and Wurst (sausage.)
In the morning it had been cloudy over the tops of the mountains but after lunch the clouds had cleared and it was blue skies and sun shine for the rest of the day. Because of this I could now clearly see the peaks of the mountains and how much snow there was. It looked like there was about 2m-3m of snow and winter hasn't even started yet! This is double what we get at peak season!
At the end of the day I was so exhausted but loved every minute of it, can't wait to see more.
Nicola Smith
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