travels, holidays and more…

Take a look at the signpost below:

it was just in front of our holiday village on the Red Sea, when we taveled here a few years back. As you can read, they don’t seem to really care a lot about the tourist health… if you slip on the rocks, drow, scratch your feet on the coral reef, etc, in one word: if you have ANY kind of possible accident there, is your fault!

Clearly I was quite surprised… having such a signpost in the shore just in front of the holiday village isn’t really encouraging! to be honest though, it wasn’t really located in front of my holiday village, but a few meters away on the side, so perhaps that was already “outside the range” of our village…

The first picture below is Hohenschwangau castle, about which I wrote a blog some months ago. I like that image of the yellow/orange castle, semi-covered by the snow that was falling slowly that day… it’s one of the best memories I have of that trip.

Hohenschwangau covered by snow

And I couldn’t leave without taking a look to the 3rd castle nearby, Linderhof. It was covered by snow too, and was closed to the public, however you could still access the outside, which is nice anyway even during winter (even if of course during summer is completely different with all the flowers, etc). It was cool, a strange quiet and at same time majesty was surrounding all the place, almost an intimidating atmosphere.

We explored it for a while, remembering how was different from the summer view, and we had a good time, a feeling of peace, relax.

Linderhof’s park during winter

During the last day of our short winter holiday, we decided to randomly explore Oberammergau surroundings, it’s one of the thing I like more. No predetermined goal, no time, just our instinct: we traveled by foot, following a strange white cross that was on a hill close to the village, and we passed through a wooden bridge…

…and lastly we spotted the cross, and discovered that every year the village people make a “passion play”, a really nice Christian tradition. You can read the whole history in the official site here: www.oberammergau.de

White Cross

Since we had still a few hours left before leaving, we took a short drive and started to walk into a nearby wood (of course was all snow-covered). Once again, there was a really weird atmosphere in it, of peace and mystery together, maybe also because the sun was fading and the darkness was slowly but constantly enveloping the landscape.

We stopped at one point where there was a small river, and we could hear a distant waterfall noise, or something like that. We were too much curious to find out what was hiding behind those woods, but it was really late and almost night, so we thought that was better to get back to the car.

We swore thought to come back there one day, to find out what marvelous nature’s masterpiece was hiding in that “magic wood” of the bavarian region…

a distant waterfall noise… what was hiding in that wood?

As you may have already noticed reading this blog, we like more moutain than seaside. This also because very often the seaside tourist places are completely crowded… indeed the very few times we go to the sea, we pick off-season periods, like when we went on holiday to the “Isola del Giglio“.

Anyway, probably we’re the only italians that had a winter holiday in Oberammergau, and not to ski! yes you read it well, we only had need to relax after the stress of the daily routine, and we found a nice environment-friendly holiday apartment, completely built with wood, warm and cozy. For only 35 eur / day, it was included also a sauna and bike rental (even if being winter we didn’t took advantage of it).

We arrived in the late afternoon, and we did a short walk in the town, since as you may know in winter gets dark early.

In the dusk light a curious figure attracted our attention: the vase-woman ! it was a very bizarre “sculpture” made entirely with vases, just in the middle of the town!

vasewoman, the new super hero!

The next day we decided to ignore the weather challenge (it had snown a lot during the night) to reach the Neuschwanstein’s castle, to see how it was during the winter (we had already the luck to admire it during summer). On the road to reach it, we found a very nice church in the plain before the castle that had a very particular atmosphere, you can see it in the picture below.

a small church in the winter landscape, with menacing cloudy sky behind…

At last we were arrived in front of the huge castle, that was magnificent even with all that snow and the cold (in Bavary can get very cold during winter!). Already from some distance the view was great, but we decided to leave the car and walk even more near.

Neuschwanstein during winter, like in a fairy-tale!

Unfortunately when we reached the Marienbrucke bridge, the perfect spot to take a picture of the castle, the sun was already going down so the light wasn’t really good to take photographs. Add to this that my digital camera isn’t exactly professional, and you can see the bad result in the picture below. I tried to fix it with Photoshop but unluckily that’s the best I could get

Neuschwanstein during winter, seen from the bridge of Marienbrucke