[The Natural Arts Diary 1997 - Click for information]

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NEWS

DIRECTOR'S IMPRESSION OF EUROPEAN

CULTURE

Unlike South Africa, Britain and the USA, the Germans have no speed limit on the open roads and most people in built-up areas drive in much the same spirit. A startling example of this occurred on our last night in Hamburg when my son-in-law Anton Denk drove us around the grandest suburbs of the city at about 20h00. There is a lot of old money in the city of Buddenbrooks, much of it sunk in domestic architecture.

It remains light until after 21h00 in August and he was motoring slowly - for Hamburg! - to point out the most admired houses (in Germany one drives on the right with the fast lane on the left). Suddenly a figure crossed from the slow lane across the white line in front of the car - on a pair of roller blades. Anton wasn't doing more than 60 kph so he was able to brake just in time. But the blade-roller, a man in his early 20s couldn't understand Anton's sense of outrage. Anton, who grew up in South Africa, says he still does not understand the German temperament. I reminded him of Galland, Richthoffen, Immelmann and Schumacher!

Next day at 08h53 we again boarded the ICE express train with its top speed of 277 kph bound for Munich, arriving there with just seven minutes to spare to caught our connecting train.

HANDSOME

A tall dark handsome youth soon got talking to us. My granddaughter, just turning 14 is about 5'6", looks and acts much older and he was quite taken with her. His name he told me was Michael Feldman - "Michael Fieldman to you". I asked him rather obtusely if he were German and he said `no', he was Bavarian. This was something I encoun-tered several times. There is a regiona-lism around in Germany these days. We arrived in Salzburg to be greeted by a relatives and in-laws living in Salzburg.

Mozart, who was not being commemo-rated very positively at the time, is not one of my favourites, preferring as I do Beethoven and the great romantics. We were shown the archbishops's palace, where, reportedly, Mozart was thrown down the steps when he had the temerity to ask the prelate for a professional fee long owing. The story goes that the fall down the steps did further damage to Mozart's weak kidneys, probably has-tening his catastrophically early death.

MONASTERY

Not far from Salzburg we visited a huge monastery which began working about 900AD under the great Bavarian Empe-rors and is still functioning. One section is given over to a vast display of incre-dibly old and valuable artifacts and religious relics going back to the early middle ages.

Our main landfall was Moondsee, with a colony of well-built comfortable chalets at a spot well back from Moondsee Lake, looking out across the mountains, snow-capped even at that time of the year. The splendid scene struck me as familiar which seemed ridiculous until one of our party pointed out that the scene before me was printed on the cover of the historic recording of the

Sound of Music. Some of the film was shot in the area making it a popular tourist attraction.

A highlight of the Moodsee excursion was a visit to the Eishohle (ice holes) at Dachsteinberg (literally Roof Stone Mountain), which one relative, a magistrate and amateur geologist wanted us to see. This meant motoring at least an hour to the foot of Dachsteinberg where we boarded a cable car which took us half way up. Then we had to climb under the hot sun by a zigzag concrete pathway for a good 400 yards to a huge hole at the top of the mountain.

It was very steep and by the time we got to the top we were sopping wet. At this point we should have sat down, rested and dried out. Instead the spartan orga-nisers warned us to wrap up with anoraks and other cold resistant gar-ments as we were going to walk 1.4 kms through frozen caves, where the tempera-ture sometimes dropped as low as minus

14 degrees centigrade. The route is a metre-wide wooden duckboard over the ice and slush and the lights switch on and off as the tour party passes through. The scenic effects are absolutely specta-cular. Thousands of years ago water from on top of Dachsteinberg seeped through cracks into the caves and formed not only stalactites and stalagmites but huge obelisks and towers of ice in different pinks, blues and greys which was breathtaking. But I did notice the uneven drops in temperature as the duckboard track rose and declined underfoot, though there were rails at the sides to steady you.

Twice along the 1.4 km hike I had my first suggestion ever of a heart attack. The third time I offered a prayer to be spared the embarrassment of an attack down that icy hole. Then a terrible thought crossed my mind, would we have to walk all the way back again? Just as I made up my mind that this was not on, the guide said, "Around that outcrop of ice you will find the outer entrance". We stepped out into the hot Austrian sunlight and the walk down the zigzag path was almost a pleasure.

My wife celebrated her birthday in the Inn that serves the chalet village and it turned into sing-song with my son, for years a contract singer with PACT, doing his bass-baritone helped by his father, singer's nodes and all.

The young ladies sang as an ensemble, the youngish innkeeper brought out a whole book of Austrian folk songs which she, her husband and children sang to us for the best part of an hour - songs I am sure I will never hear again.

DIGGINGS

Next day the amateur geologist took us down to the Halstatt Diggings. Even I had heard of Halstatt which is close to the Halstatt Lake and is one of the earliest flowerings of European civi-lisation, before 1200BC.

Its origin was a tremendous deposit of salt, a much coveted necessity more than 3 000 years ago. The research professor in charge, with the humility of so many top German-speaking scholars, produced scores of bronze- aged artifacts and art works in bronze and copper. Some of the goblets, armlets, rings and other items would not disgrace a modern craftsman. He had also unearthed early steel cutting blades for carving bronze, since you cannot carve bronze with bronze.

The same levels at which all these bronze-age artifacts were unearthed revealed stone-age implements