28/08/2011 Day 19. Fuscha, Hohe Tauten National Park.

Early start again this morning and we set off for Austria. We arrived around 12 so we made good time. We were aiming to get up a mountain and see a glacier, so we headed to a tourist information point to see if there were any buses up there. It was closed but they left the foyer open that had all the maps and leaflets in. We found that it was one road from the campsite up to the top of the mountain so we took the camper for a mad mission of a drive up the side of the biggest mountain in Austria, Grosseblockner (it's spelled something like that). Nick drove us up there and it took about an hour to get to the top. We stopped off a couple of times and threw some snowballs and took some pictures. When we got to the top we could see the glacier, it was brilliant, but we were on a mountain to the side of it. We wanted to get up close and personal to the beast. We saw a trail down to the end where there was a lake and broken bits of ice so we headed on down. It took us 25 minutes to get down to the glacier. It was awesome, loads of signs showed us the level of the glacier from different times, one was 1990 and it was about three times as high as what it is today, crazy. We walked past a sign warnin of caverns underneath the ice we could fall into and very quickly die in, because we're hard and live life on the edge (I didn't even take my inhaler with me!). We went under the lip of the glacier and had a look at te rice running below it, slowly melting the even slower moving ice. The ice all around was bright blue and when close up, it was totally clear. We noticed it was so much colder at the surface of the glacier than at the top of the mountain where we started. It came the time to head back up. I counted that there were 660 wooden steps made to help on the way up, though this is a lot it was only 50% or so of the total amount of steps up rocks and things. It took us 22.5 minutes to reach the top, I was happy, we got up faster than we got down and we just waited for Dave and Nick to arrive about 10 minutes later. We saw a few marmots on the mountainside, they're like hamsters but much bigger and fatter and with fat tails, funny little things just waddling around hoping for us to chuck some food down to them. We got back to the camper about 6pm and headed back down the mountain, I did this drive it wa brilliant. The roads were perfect condiion and it was great to drive down. One problem arose though, because we were going DOWN the mountain, I had to use my brakes quite a lot. Unfortunately when using brakes they start to heat up, when they get too hot they become uneffective. This is what happened to me. The smell of cooking brakes was gorgeous (sarcasm), it was quite scary because if I didn't brake enough for a corner we'd all be flung down a mountain and die about 8 times each. The brakes started to squeal every time I touched them, I started to touch cloth. But as you can tell, from reading the blog I must have survived to have even written it. We got back to the campsite and got out, the heat coming off the wheels was immense, those poor brakes must be absolutely humped now. We're goin Switzerland tomorrow, which means more mountain driving, I hope we don't die again. We finished the night off playing chase the ace. Me and Sam accompanied this game with what he called a Polish coffee. Black coffee with vodka in it that we bought from Poland. It was quite nice actually! So yeah, 11pm has arrived and I might be the only one awake tapping like a madman on my phone so bed time for me. Peace out :)