Articles > High Tyrol in Technicolor

For lunch, we ate 17 different kinds of sausage. Blonde waitresses in tight lederhosen came round with plates of sauerkraut and enormous dumplings. Outside, the snow fell thickly, but inside the ancient wood-panelled Hospitz, diners wore thick woollen jumpers and ate steadily, oblivious of the log fires and the cholesterol overload.

Pudding was even worse: thick strips of pancake mixed with candied peel, fried in butter, flamed in brandy and served with vast spoonfuls of whipped cream, the kind of diet that might make sense after a hard day spent pulling St Bernards out of snowdrifts or even an energetic morning on the piste, but I had no excuse. I was supposed to be writing about the skiing championships, a subject I knew nothing whatever about. But the race had mercifully been cancelled - the wrong type of snow, or something - and my relief at not having to file any copy was probably a cause of my subsequent overindulgence.

After lunch, the owner took me down to admire his cellar while he talked about the ancient guild he belonged to and its obligations of hospitality. For 700 years, the Hospitz had been the last refuge on the road to Switzerland. From there, travellers were guided over the high passes in winter and search parties sent out to find those that were missing. The Von Trapp family came this way from Salzburg to escape the Nazis, 60 miles in a single night if the film is to be believed.

I wondered if there is correlation between the way societies traditionally treated travellers and the way their modern tourist industries have evolved. Those that regarded strangers as fair game for robbery and murder have adapted well to the demands of package tourism but, in the high Tyrol, hospitality is still something they take very, very seriously, a duty rather than a pleasure.

I might have paid more attention to what he was saying if I hadn’t been so astounded by the cellar’s contents, something so unexpected as to defy logic. Here in one small restaurant on a remote mountain pass was, with the sole exception of the great white burgundies, everything you could ever wish to drink in a lifetime, and more than enough quantity to last several lifetimes. And it was all in jeroboams and methuselahs. Who could afford to drink bottles like this at restaurant prices? It must have cost millions, a lifetime’s magnificent obsession, as bizarre and impractical as the Schlumf Brothers’ collection of Bugattis.

Unfortunately, his obligation of hospitality did not extend so far as to bring a corkscrew. “If I was to open this,” he said, fondling an enormous bottle of 1950 Petrus, “you and I would not be able to drink one tenth of it,” to which the only possible reply was: “Don’t bet on it mate!”

I had arrived in the town at 10 o’clock that morning to find everyone drunk, even the police falling over and laughing. The scene was reminiscent of those medieval villages where the wheat had been contaminated with ergot and the entire population was hallucinating all winter. It would have been good to have seen the mountains, but they were lost somewhere in the blizzard. The town was certainly very pretty - narrow lanes and odd houses with their roofs on the wrong way round, their interiors in rich plum red and intense moss green like bad early Technicolor. And lots of ornately carved wood, relics from the days before skiing when the Tyroleans spent their winters whittling at pieces of wood and plotting world domination.

By the end of lunch, it was already growing dark and to kill time I walked down to the finishing post, leant against a bar made of solid ice and watched the enormous snowflakes falling, picked out in the floodlights. (Open your mouth and try to predict which of the flakes is going to land in it - this is much harder than it sounds.)

And then suddenly it was time to walk up the hill to the museum where we were due to have dinner. Half way up, we were accosted by a party of nuns, drunk and heavily pregnant. They were probably men in drag, although I couldn’t be sure, and I walked on with hardly a second glance. A far stranger band was waiting at the top of the hill.

They wore masks made of porcelain, their eyes like black holes in the snow. One had a large green handlebar moustache and marched up and down like a caricature soldier. Another with an aquiline nose was dressed in feathers and rabbit fur. He made rather convincing cooing noises like a wood pigeon. A third was dressed head to toe in strips of bamboo; his dance started with a shiver and ended in a clatter like a South American rainmaker. They captured passers by with wicker hoops, turned them round, patted them ritually on the back and offered them swigs from flasks of schnapps. Standing knee deep in the snow, it seemed a long way from the rest of Europe.

The museum contained lots of impressive woodcarving, a vast green-tiled oil stove and an extensive and probably fascinating collection of old skis. The picture gallery displayed skiing photographs. Inspired by the film Der Weisse Rausch “by cinematographer Richard Angst” said the label. Elsewhere, there were references to “the great film by producer Arnold Fanck” and its “co-star Hannes Schneider”. There was no mention of the director and lead actor, airbrushed out of the picture.

For dinner, we ate duck in cherry sauce, and if I hadn’t eaten for a week I might have enjoyed it more. The Austrian red wine went down surprisingly well, although not as well as the Petrus would have done.

The after-dinner cabaret was provided by a father-and-daughter duo. He wore a traditional green-felt Tyrolean suit, his hair was thicker and yellower than any man of his age had any right to have and he played a piano-accordion (who was it who said that the definition of a gentleman was someone who knew how to play a piano-accordion, but didn’t?). His daughter looked ominously like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music: she had bobbed blonde hair, wore a dirndl and strummed an acoustic guitar with gusto. They sang a number of jolly yodelling songs - probably very good as jolly yodelling songs go - followed by a medley of international favourites that you sincerely wished you would never hear again. Their party piece was to ask members of the audience where they came from and sing a song appropriate to the country. On learning I was English, they sang Que Sera, Sera followed by a few rousing choruses of the Hokey Cokey.

It was a bizarre end to an odd day, but worse was to follow.

The following morning in Innsbruck, I was due on a tour round the town, followed by lunch and a 6pm flight, but I was woken early by the hotel reception telling me that my taxi was waiting to take me to the airport. I said my flight wasn’t for another eight hours, but they insisted that there had been a change of plans: the roads were bad due to the snow. As I checked out, I asked the manager where the Canadian journalist I had been travelling with was. He looked me straight in the eye with a condescending smile and said, “We know nothing about any Canadian journalist.” It was like a scene from an old film.

The roads were, of course, in perfect condition, and I kicked my heels at the airport for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until I got home that I learnt that in the night a member of the British team had been kicked to death just round the corner from the hotel.

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