“Waka, waka, waka” - Pacman

 

Our joker card played, we loaded the horses up into Zolan’s four-horse trailer early in the morning on the first of July. Any lingering doubts about whether it was a good idea to drive-through instead of ride through Bratislava and Vienna dissipated immediately: we left the village and found ourselves on a long, flat, agricultural plain, and then in two cities. The horses had a breezy four-hour drive, and then we all unloaded at the foot of the Austrian Alps.

​

Tears welled up in my eyes when I pointed out the mountains to Chai, “Here are your new mountains - your new home is on the other side.” I have been getting a lot of side eye from him about this sentence though; the Alps are very long, and ‘the other side,’ is still very far away. Changing mountains meant a lot of changes: first we changed shoes, and we also changed our traveling strategy.

​

The rural tissue of Austria is strong; here there are no ghost villages, and every space has been corralled or built up in some way. We’d been told we could take 4x4 tracks most of the way, and that the country has the most extensive network of 4x4 tracks in Europe. Only half of this is true. There are many 4x4 tracks, but they mostly just go up and down, for forest management. Rarely do they connect, which means that we’d need to take bike trails along the valley floors a lot of the time. Sometimes though even these let us down, like when we must cross the river Steyer on horseback — the bridge is full of heavy trucks.​

​

It all feels very much like living in a round of Pacman - we’re running away from the trucks, the tractors, the motorcycles that might chow down on us and the horses.

​

 

Allez Scooter!

​

Our next challenge was to accept that there would be next to zero wild camping here. All the land is used in some way, and so each night we’d have to ask farmers for a bit of grass. “Allez Scooter!” they all say to us as we leave the next morning - which we later learn is “Alles Gute!” - good luck in German.

 

But here’s where we find the light in the urbanized Austrian Alps: with the local farmers. Each night the first-person Ashley asks in her poor German immediately accepts to host us. Always they have a spare field already fenced in, or put one up, for the horses. And for us, often we’re gifted a covered terrace or the inside of a hay barn.

 

Horse travel here is a bygone art. But some people still remember the old traditions: horses and mules used to transport salt from the Alps to the sea and come back with wine. Now these passes are covered in asphalt and have becoming popular motorcycle routes. Finally, we find one alpine pass that looks crossable by horse - nearly to the top it’s a 4x4 road, and shortly after the pass too.

​

Once we reach the alpine pasture, we realize that like the rest of the country, even the alpine pastures are private. Here the farmer clearly makes hay and has fenced off a lot of the pastures. But happily, they’ve got a pasture for the horses, and we spend the night with the family before heading off to the pass.

​

And so begins the gates, the wires and the fence posts. For hikers, the way is clear, most farmers have a left a small passage. We spend the morning opening and closing the gates that limit different pastures. The pass reserves a final boss though: no gate, no moveable fence post. Just barbed wire tied up in a very complicated and pokey way to the fence. It takes a few minutes, but we pass the horses through without letting the crowd of loose horses on one side of the fence through to the other. Our reward is a long, soft descent to the village of Malta, where the brother of our host the night before is waiting to welcome us at his chicken farm.

​