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In Munich, capital of the Free State of Bavaria and Germany's third-largest city, you face a dilemma: to stay in town or surrender to the beckoning lure of the southern alps and some of Germany's most dramatic and unforgettable landscapes. Surprisingly perhaps, it can be a difficult call. Not for nothing do they call Munich the most northerly Italian town, all brio, baroque and bragadoccio. With its oom-pah-pah brass-band beer halls and cellars (all lederhosen and dirndl), its splendid churches, its palaces and castles, its gardens and parks, galleries and museums, Munich is understandably Germany's favourite city - as much amongst Germans as visitors.

For those already familiar with the city and in need of a change, or for those unlikely few inured to the city's many delights, the favoured direction from Munich is always south, away from the northern flatlands and into the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Here is a rich and undulating farmland puddled with silvery lakes, woods and forests laced with hiking trails, fanciful baroque churches topped with traditional onion domes, and tourist-poster alpine villages with steeply-pitched roofs, ornately-carved wood balconies and exuberantly frescoed walls. Here too are any number of rejuvenating spa towns where salt, iodine or mineral-rich mud are used to great effect, as well as fairy-tale castles like Ludwig II's Linderhof, the sumptuous island fastness of Schloss Herrenchiemsee and the more familiar Neuschwanstein, which the Walt Disney Corporation used as a blueprint for their Disneyland castle in Sleeping Beauty.

As Germany's premier holiday destination, Oberbayern, or Upper Bavaria, is busy throughout the year, as popular in summer as it is in winter, and subsequently well-served with a wide range of accommodation. In luxurious retreats, like Murnau's Alpenhof and Aschau's Residenz Heinz Winkler, or more modest inns and gasthauser the traditional Bavarian welcome will be warm and genuine and the beer on tap will be local.

In the flower-decked village of Aying, only 20 miles south east of Munich, the beer is as local as you can get it. Villagers have been brewing their own brand here for the last five hundred years and the references are hard to miss. Instead of "sweet dream" chocolates, the Inselkammer family who run Aying's Brauereigasthof Hotel prefer to leave a bottle of beer on your pillow - in case you hadn't sampled enough of their Ayinger brew in the hotel's bar or beer garden.

Swaddled in a thick overcoat of vine and creeper, this ancient brewery-turned-hotel has long been a favourite retreat for city dwellers, close enough to Munich for easy access, yet far enough away to feel satisfyingly rural. Like most hotels in the Oberbayern, Aying's Brauereigasthof is traditionally styled. There are frescoed walls and ceilings, weighty beams inscribed with German proverbs, and a preponderance of carved and knotted pine. Its 27 bedrooms are spacious, airy and attractively furnished, with hand-painted canopied or four-poster beds buried under billowing duvets as thick as snow drifts.

Further afield, a few kilometres east of the A95 which connects Munich to the ski resort of Garmisch Partenkirchen, lies the spa town of Bad Tolz. Neatly bisected by the River Isar, Bad Tolz is effectively two towns in one. On one side of the river is the town's spa facility where iodine-rich springs known as jodquellen have been used in a number of revitalizing treatments since the mid-nineteenth century, and on the other bank is the old town with its celebrated weekly market. Set on the very edge of the Isar, only a short distance downstream from the old town and all but concealed by woodland, stands a converted ferry house called, appropriately, Altes Fahrhaus.

More a restaurant with bedrooms than an hotel with both, the Altes Fahrhaus is marvellously positioned, its secluded sunny terrace and five balconied bedrooms overlooking the tree-lined river. With a choice of two dining rooms, supervised by chef-owner Elly Reisser and renowned for local specialities like perch and wild boar, and with well-appointed and comfortably furnished bedrooms, the Altes Fahrhaus is as small and intimate as it is sought-after.

From Bad Tolz it is an easy and exhilarating drive between the twin lakes of Walchensee and Kochelsee to the picture-postcard Ettal Valley. Midway between Garmisch and the wood-carvers' village of Oberammergau, whose long-running, once-a-decade passion play was first performed in 1634, the Ettal Valley is one of Bavaria's most beguiling landscapes. The valley's mint-green alpine meadows and fir-covered hillsides burrow into the heart of the Ammergau Alps, with the isolated village of Ettal from which it takes its name tucked away in a secluded fold of hills.

A mile or so from this village, on the edge of a sloping alpine meadow, stands the chalet-style Der Benediktenhof, its window-boxes a mass of blooms each summer, its steeply-pitched roof a mantle of snow come winter. Owned since 1959 by Baron Ernst and Baroness Eva von Reitzenstein, Der Benediktenhof is about as Bavarian Baroque as you can get - its exterior walls flamboyantly frescoed and its warm, welcoming interiors traditionally decorated with hunting trophies, beamed ceilings and hand-painted furnishings all stylishly supplemented with fine family antiques.

As its name suggests, Der Benediktenhof has something of a religious background - albeit as the site of a sixteenth-century factory which supplied the bricks for the nearby Benedictine Abbey of Ettal. The present building, however, dates from the eighteenth century, when it served first as a hospital and then as a farmstead, opening as an hotel in the 1930s. Despite its size, Der Benediktenhof has only sixteen bedrooms, all individually decorated in Baroque or rustic style and most with fine views of the surrounding countryside. Such generous use of space ensures that Der Benediktenhof's guests enjoy an unexpected intimacy and cosiness at odds with the hotel's size. It also means, like many of the smaller establishments in the ever-popular Oberbayern, that advance booking is a wise precaution.

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