Wolfgangsee and Maibaum (May Pole)

The weather on Saturday seemed promising, so we set off on our postponed trip to the lake district. We parked our bikes at Mirabellplatz, waited for the bus, and then had a sort of worried conversation with a lovely young woman who turned out to be Australian when the bus was a few minutes late. But it did show up, and we rolled off through the countryside east of Salzburg. Our plan was to get off in St. Gilgen, at the west end of the Wolfgangsee, and do some hiking from there. But due to some blunders by our navigator (me) we failed to get off at any of the St. Gilgen stops. So we stayed on to Strobl, the little town at the other end of the lake. Here I am, posing like I know what's going on.

We got some buns and cheese and such for lunch in Strobl, then strolled off along the north side of the lake (to the right in the photo above) for St. Wolfgang. It's a larger town that sits on the narrowest part of the lake--in the middle, sort of. It was a nice hour's walk along the lake, climbing just a little once where the mountain comes right down to the shore. Here's a view from partway along, looking back at Strobl.

In St. Wolfgang we found ourselves suddenly among lots of people and tourist shops. But there was also ice cream, so we had dessert first, at a bench downtown, looked into the church, then walked a little more and ate the rest of lunch in a park on the edge of town, with tulips and the lake and the mountains on the other side. You can take boats on the lake, but we decided to keep walking (for reasons not entirely clear to me).

It's about a 3-hour walk from St. Wolfgang to St. Gilgen. The first hour or so was smooth and easy--then the path started going up, and kept going up for a long while. We huffed and puffed on our way to some beautiful overlooks ("blicks," they're called in German), and then down the other side--which was quite steep on the way down as well. There's a pilgrim way with several little shrines and an old church built into the mountainside, but it was closed for some reason.

We sauntered on into St. Gilgen, which is small and scenic as well. We were tired but wanted to be sure not to miss the bus, so we found our way to the main bus station, and found out that the next one left in a few minutes--and the one after wasn't for two hours. So we jumped on and went back to Salzburg, where we found a nice little sidewalk cafe and had grilled turkey, potatoes, and vegetables--yes, vegetables! in Austria!--then biked back down the Salzach to home.

Sunday we made our way up to the Aigen church (just a few minutes by bike) for the Maypole celebration. It turned out to be quite a community gathering. We got there just in time to get good seats at a table in a shady spot near the brass band, which was very good, and seemed to remain together no matter how many steins of beer the serving girls delivered to them. There were hundreds of people there by the middle of the afternoon, sitting at the tables or on the grass or wandering around. They were selling all kinds of food and drink, including excellent desserts prepared by the local women.

A fair number of the men and even boys had on lederhosen and/or traditional jackets, and a good number of the women and girls wore dirndl dresses, though others were dressed in various "normal" attire (so we didn't feel too out of it). There were even young girls wandering around giggling and offering glasses of schnapps, though as far as we could tell they weren't drinking it themselves.

The central activity, though most people didn't seem to pay it a lot of attention, was the gradual raising of a very large Maypole (see photos). This involved a large number of men with smaller poles linked at the top by chains, which they used to inch up the big pole a little at a time. The process included a lot of shouting, rearranging of poles, and pausing to build the suspense, shoot off a cannon periodically, and (I think) drink beer as well. We were there for three hours or so, and the pole was almost vertical by the time we finally decided we'd had enough sun.

For those of you with Bluffton connections, I have to say that I think our May Day committee could learn a few things from the Austrian version of such festivities. I would recommend a research expedition be undertaken, and now that I have some experience, I would be glad to lead it.