Niederelbe Hütte

Austria walking July 2024 Day 6 Ischgl to Niederelbe Hütte

It was way different waking up without  the prospect of having to negotiate some rickety step ladder in order to get out of bed. And way better! The agreed meeting time for breakfast was 8 and this seemed a long way off after the neighbour’s dog woke me at 6.

The array for breakfast was pretty similar to that in a Hütte but a bit less of a scrum and also a chance to toast the bread and have scrambled egg on it.

The task today was to get back on the trail and get to the Hütte that we would have reached if we had stayed at Damsteater Hütte last night. This would involve some public transport ( the cost of which was remarkably included within our hotel cost).

It was a short walk to the bus stop and a short bus ride to Kappl (who neds vowls nyway) where the cable car was waiting to whisk us up the mountain side. Everything here is so efficient and seamless in its operation. You just know that if this was the UK something would be broken or late or subject to ‘the cable car isn’t running at the moment due to the wrong kind of sun reflecting off the operator’s window.

There were a few tourists enjoying the mountain air and summer sun but not nearly as many as there would have been in winter time as this was clearly set up as a massive, and very impressive, ski resort.

We could have taken another lift further uphill but didn’t. We needed some sort of walking challenge today to have a little credibility when we met up once more with our Hütte hopping group at the next stop.

The climb up the valley was reasonably hard but the sight of the Hütte at the end drew us on and by lunchtime we had arrived in time for Gulaschsuppe mit brot and beer for lunch.

At first we thought that our allocated room was a good one with just one bunk bed in it and bed frames that did not seem too creaky.

After lunch and in a way to keep up with ze Germans, we climbed the nearby peak for an impressive view down the valley that we had ascended that morning. When we met Thomas and Felix (who had, of course, made it to the Damsteater Hütte last night without any difficulty) there though they described it as a small hillock and we were a little deflated.

Weiner Schnitzel and boiled potatoes for dinner again, great but the absence of any substantial vegetable, let alone fruit, is beginning to wear heavily on my stomach. How these guys are not all suffering from scurvy is a mystery.

I turned in early whilst John stayed in the dining hall to play games with Thomas and Felix. It was now that I realised that the room, or perhaps the building it was within, was really not so great at all. The creaking from the dorm room upstairs combined in unison with the pounding of feet down the corridor en route to the toilet. The tiny cot of a bed was so narrow that I could not even bend my legs into a fetal position and the bar that sort of prevented me from toppling over the edge and crashing into the floor made such a noise by even laying a finger on it that I dared not go near it for fear of disturbing John through the night. Ironically, the one time that I was in a deep sleep at around 1am, John woke me by getting up for a pee.

I am sooo looking forward to getting back home to my own bed.

John plotting the route to the last Hütte