I have to admit I have been a bit lapse the past few days with the blog - technically I am now in Slovalkia rather than Salzburg.  However, remembering back (each day is so crammed full of stuff that they have a tendency to mash together), we started D-Day plus 12 in Berchtesgaden.  As had been the case at pretty much every stage of our ill-fated Alpine trip, it was raining, so we headed to the train station to leave that accursed neck of the woods and head for the rolling hills of Salzburg.  For those of you are interested in the technicalities of our trip, our interrail pass entitles us to 10 days of travel.  Our plan includes 13 days of travel however, so we have had to pay for three of the journeys.  Berchtesgaden to Salzburg was one of these journeys and with bus tickets a third of the price of train tickets, we went by road.

Luckily I had had the foresight to book a relatively comfortable room in Salzburg, in the knowledge that we would have just been camping.  As a result, the three guys used the en-suite shower as quickly as possible, before heading out into town.  I have found when writing this blog that I have more time to analyse a city when we don’t do as much there - and Salzburg was one of these cities.  Having arrived on a Sunday afternoon, I have to say that there seemed to be very little going on.  As has been the case in most places, we invented our own tour based on visiting as many of the highlighted sites on the free hostel map as possible.  These included some gardens, some palaces and the castle.  However, in a way that is similar to Amsterdam, I think that it is the general ambiance of the town that makes it a tourist sites - all of the buildings are immaculate and ornate and the skyline (viewed from the castle) is spectacular - the city is small enough for the countryside to be clearly visible.  After a few hours sampling the sites, we headed out for dinner.  Having been relatively cultured and basing our evening meals around the local cuisine, we decided to have a Vietnamese meal this evening.  This was worth it, just to hear a Vietnamese man speaking German - a real fusion of cultures.  We were tired after the ordeal of Berchtesgaten, so spent the evening washing our clothes.  This was more stressful that necessary due to a combination of our incompetence at washing stuff and the insistence of the Americans in the hostel to jump the washing machine queue in front of us.  Anyway, after what was actually a fairly uneventful day, in a city that at the time seemed very quiet and laid back, we got an early night ready for heading off to Vienna and meeting with the next members of the Overlord team.