Sunday, August 28
We arrived in Mörbisch, found Landhaus Luka and moved into our large “apartment”. (The A/C is an extra 8 euros per day, and using the kitchen in the apartment is extra as well.). We walked a couple blocks to the nearest restaurant, a factory outlet restaurant for one of the wineries in town. We had a sampling of four of their wines, one of which was pretty nice. The soup with julienned veal heart was the best.
Monday, August 29
Burgenland is not a place to improvise travel. Neusiedler See looks so inviting on the map, a long, thin, lake surrounded by towns buried under the icons for wineries and hotels and restaurants. But in fact, you can’t get to the lake. The whole thing is a walled off reserve. The only place you can actually touch the lake, from my experience, is at the docks for some small ferries that cross in the middle. The correct thing to do is: plan ahead for a tour, with a ranger who knows where the remaining birds hide out, and most importantly, rent a bicycle. The bike trails are so ubiquitous and wide that Google Maps sent us driving on several of them, and it takes a long time to determine that in fact you are on a bike trail, especially since some of them actually do accommodate cars, if the car or tractor belongs to someone who lives on that trail.
We did not plan ahead. Nor did it rain.
Eastern Austria is secretly Nevada. The ecosystem of the Seewinkel is that of every salt puddle in every valley you cross on the way from Fallon to Ely. The rains fill the lakes in winter and spring, and they dry out in summer, and the birds leave to find another lake from whose mud to suck the highly adapted creatures who live there.
A ranger sent us to one of the last remaining late summer ponds with water. We went there and watched a lot of geese. Also lapwings. A little less common were the black-winged stilts, who allow you to approach fairly close, and feed elegantly, balanced on their long thin pink legs, insubstantial as the stem of a wine glass.
The winery situation is also restricted. The wine bars are almost all of them tied to a particular winery. They feature the wines of those businesses. To experience the offerings of more than one vintner, you are reduced to tasting wine in the style of a pub crawl. Some of the tied houses are as much as twenty meters distant from their neighbors. Bring bearers and a palanquin if this is a problem.
The thing which really stood out about the area, and for which the guidebooks do not prepare you, is The King And I. Some time earlier this summer, a local troupe put on a production of that Rodgers and Hammerstein standard, and they papered the whole lakeside with posters and more elaborate displays — in the town of Rust, a whole sequence of placards gave the history of mid-19th century Siam, and of Anna Leonowens, and how she came to write her story, and how it came to be produced, and how Yul Brynner came to play the part and on and on and on.
In our hotel, on the floor with the rooms on it stood a full-sized mannequin, dressed in Siamese Hollywood costume, advertising the show. Was there one of these in every hotel? Mannequins are expensive!
The show had closed some time ago. I looked up Yul Brynner in Wikipedia. He grew up as a refugee in Harbin, China, just like Boris’s grandparents, and Boris verifies that his grandfather knew Yul Brynner in school there.
The important search string for learning about Yul Brynner includes “George Platt Lynes”. Lucky Boris’s grandfather.
Tuesday, August 30
We drove to the airport on a somewhat Googly route including yet another town whose downtown was torn up and they didn’t tell Google, turned in the car, took a train to Vienna Hbf, and then got on the train to Venice. We had lots of time to spare. You never know if there will be a thunderstorm washing out the bike route you’ve been advised to take. The train was super-comfortable: we had a table between us, there was Wi-Fi on the train, and there were power outlets to keep the laptops running. I was able to get some work done on the train.