An Alpine Adventure — Villach 🇦🇹 (Part 1/3)
With our first long weekend since moving to Sweden approaching, my wife and I knew we had to take some days off and make the best of it. A few conversations with John (our friend from India who works in Villach, Austria) and a few days later, our Easter vacation trip was set — A week-long road trip through The Alps covering a bunch of Italian towns and cities. And what a wonderful trip it turned out to be!
We flew from Stockholm Arlanda airport to Ljubljana’s Jože Pučnik Airport on 30th April. We picked this airport in Slovenia as it was somewhat easily accessible from John’s place. The plan was to take a whole day to explore Villach itself and its surroundings, before setting out on our alpine road trip on 1st April. This post captures our experiences in Villach, with more write-ups in the near future to describe the rest of our trip.
Villach is a quaint Austrian town with about 60,000 residents nestled in a valley between mountain ranges of The Alps. It’s quite close to Austria’s border with Slovenia and Italy, and is a notably important railway hub in the Austrian rail network. As we walked through the town starting at the beautiful church of Sankt Nikolai and heading westwards towards the city centre, we could see snow-topped mountain ranges in the backdrop no matter which way we looked. The city centre predominantly had buildings that look like they might be well over a hundred years old. The outer parts of the city though were home to modern office buildings, expansive supermarkets and furniture showrooms.
To kick-start our tour of the surrounding lakes, we drove to Faaker See, where we had our first glimpse of the pristine clear waters in Austria. It was raining lightly, but it wasn’t enough to stop the ducks from swimming around and it wasn’t enough to stop us for stepping out of the car and clicking some pictures. I’m sure there are more articulate ways to express how beautiful the lake was, but “The blue was very… blue!”
Next, we headed north to Ossiacher See (Lake Ossiach), which is a mere 20km away from Faaker See and yet had entirely different weather conditions— Quite sunny and no rain! It was interesting to observe how local weather could vary so much so quickly, and I presume it has to do with the mountains around the area which make the weather patterns not very obvious. I would never expect such drastic variations over short distances in places around Stockholm. We took a break to step out and soak in the sun and enjoy the picturesque scenery.
Next we headed to one last lake — Afritzer See. It was noticeably colder here, probably due to this lake being at an elevation of about 700m (which is 200m more than Ossiacher See). In fact, parts of the lake’s surface were still frozen from winter. The sight I found most fascinating here was of houses tucked deep within the forests on the mountain range towering over the lake. It was interesting to see glimpses of houses engulfed by the thick clouds and imagine the view of the lake that one would have from up there!
Fast forward by 5 days — and we’re back to Villach after having completed our road trip through the Alps (more about the trip in upcoming posts!) and 1 day away from our flight back to Stockholm. Tired? Yes we were, but there was still one more place to visit — the Dobratsch Mountain Range. The weather was perfect with clear skies and mild temperatures, so we set off with the GoPro mounted on the car’s dashboard and a visibly pumped-up John (who is more passionate about driving than one might imagine) to drive up to the highest point on the range that was reachable by car. The drive uphill lasted for about 20 minutes, and the winding roads paved the way for a fun ride. As the drive progressed, we noticed the temperature outside drop steadily from 17deg where we started to about 5deg at the top where we finally got off the car. Here’s a neat time-lapse video (in 4K!) of the ride uphill.
I am glad we decided to drive up instead of ‘just chilling’ at home and relaxing. We would have missed many breathtaking views that we enjoyed right from the moment we got off the car at the end of our ascent.
We took back with us a lot of fond memories from this trip, along with an enhanced German and Italian vocabulary — and this wouldn’t have been possible without John’s efforts to plan the road trip and figure out the best routes to take.
Until the next post, Auf Wiedersehen!
