3rd day is the charm! Woke up, looked out from the balcony, and there, directly in front, was the entire Alpspitze, and to the right, the Zugspitze; sunshine over all! Off to breakfast, quickly, and then off to the nearest Zugspitzbahn (Zugspitze railway) station. This was one of the "stop on demand" stations, meaning if you stood on the platform, the train would stop. Tickets were purchased from a machine (not cheap, Euro 49.50 per person, round trip) and were validated by getting them stamped with date and time at a machine on the train itself, a very common system on German public transit, which works largely on an honour system with the occasional inspector checking tickets who can levy quite large fines, payable instantly, much like the Austrian toll system (yes I am still bitter)!!! In the event, there was a wrinkle in the system, which we didn't know about, but "which everyone knows" - details later.
The train arrived not too much later. These are very modern electrical carriages (they have been electrical from the beginning, in the early 1930s, when the first railways up the Zugspitze began to operate). Now, the very modern cars feature flat-screen TV displays, announcing the next station, as well as showing informational videos. If you are on the train and wish to get off at a "stop on demand" station, there are buttons to push, and almost immediately the screens show the asked for stop.
The entire track from the main station in Garmisch to the end station at the Zugspitzplatt is about 19 km. The altitude at the Garmisch station is 705 m, at Grainau it is about 750 m. At Grainau, 7.5 km from Garmisch, the propulsion mode changes from adhesion (steel wheels on steel rails) to rack and pinion (toothed cogs on the cars engaging a matching rack at the centre of the rails). The next 2.5 km to the Eibsee station climb about 250 m to just over 1000 m altitude. The next 3.5 km or so climb another roughly 630 m, at which point the track enters a tunnel cut through the mountain to the terminal station. The tunnel is about 5 km in length, with a climb of almost 1000 m. Apparently the maximum gradient for the rack and pinion system is 250% (250 m climb in 100 m horizontal travel!); the maximum for the adhesion system is 35%. Many of these facts are from the narrative videos shown while the cars are in the tunnel, others are available on the website of the Bayrische Zugspitzbahn.
The terminal station is on the Zugspitzplatt, a plateau on the south side of the mountain, at almost 2600 m (roughly 1900 m above Garmisch), about 400 m below the summit. The facility has both indoor and outdoor restaurants, as well as the cable car station for the remaining 400 m to the summit. The outdoor eating area has spectacular mountain views in all directions.
The cable car to the summit is the size of a small bus, and depending on traffic, can operate in each direction about every 15 minutes. On the summit there are a few restaurants, Europe’s highest beer garden (not operating yet when we were there), a mountaineers’ hut with rough accommodation and a restaurant serving hearty fare, and an open platform from which, on a clear day you can see into Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France. The platform is bi-national; in a few places there is effectively a line, one side of which is Austria, the other Germany. From here one can see a remnant of pre-Schengen agreement Europe, a customs hut on the ridge which forms the Austrian-German border, where skiers and mountain climbers were expected to check in if they crossed from one side to the other.
Off the platform is a locked gate and a small catwalk to the mountain itself. If one is properly equipped, and a holder of the appropriate skill-level mountain climber ID card, one can go out and climb the remaining few meters to the actual Zugspitze summit. As that is a slim spire, with sheer drops as much as 1000 m on all sides, no thank you..
The restaurants at the summit were all full, so we returned to the plateau where the capacity is much higher for lunch. But first we explored a bit, walking a few hundred metres up to the highest church in Germany, "Maria Heimsuchung" church (Mary’s Home Seeking – it makes more sense in German; also the "name" of the cathedral in Augsburg). This modest sized (seats perhaps 50)church is a memorial to several dozen guests at a former hotel above the Zugspitzplatt (it is now a research station) who were swept to their deaths from the large veranda of the hotel by an avalanche. Every Sunday a priest comes up on the train from Garmish and celebrates Mass, and while we were there, the bell began to ring, calling visitors, climbers and skiers to worship.
Also all around this area there are ski-lifts of various kinds, and dozens of snow-grooming machines were parked. During the ski season (and we were just beyond it) skiers take the train up (for a skier’s fare, higher than just visitors), and then can take various lifts higher and ski back down, or ski down, and take lifts back up, and then at the end of the day take the train back down, all for one price of admission. We’re not skiers, but just looking at the possibilities, this has to be as near to heaven as skiing gets.
But, it was lunch time, so we went to the ordering station for the outdoor restaurants, placed our order, told the waiter roughly where we would be seated, and waited. The orders are taken at a high-tech bar and serving station, which has a kind of Toronto Skydome retractable roof, and the orders go electronically to the kitchen inside the station building. After not too long, the complete meal arrives via conveyor belt back at the ordering station, and is carried the remaining metres by the server who took the order. Since there are no numbers issued, or any other way of identifying who ordered what and where they are, these waiters obviously have highly trained memories. Our food arrived hot, the beer cold, and given that we were eating at at 2600 m and every molecule we were consuming had been transported up by train (and cooking times at this altitude are very much longer than at sea level) this meal was as good as anything that we had at much lower levels. (But, Germans simply don’t put up with bad food – except, inexplicably, McDonalds and Burger King have taken hold!)
There is something to be said for a delicious outdoor meal in bright sunshine, cool, near-freezing air temperature and yet being too warm in just a shirt, the most spectacular mountain scenery in all directions, all this and your tan is getting darker by the minute.
Back up to the summit station for sight-seeing. The visibility this day was below the maximum (about 250 km), we were at 140 km, so one could barely make out Munich to the north, but a clear view of the Inn valley and Innsbruck to the south. Particularly amusing at 3000 m is a colony of crows who have taken up residence here, and mooch for food from the tourists. They are quite unafraid, and will hover at your elbow, eyeing your plate of food, looking for opportunities. Also remarkable are butterflies which live up here (and I have to assume, this being late May, have overwintered as pupae and just hatched). There are a few mountain flowers beginning to show on the nearby crags, but other than that, I have no idea what the butterflies are doing up here.
Another culinary adventure; afternoon coffee and pastry at 3000 m. There is a very lovely indoor cafe, serving pastry (I think baked in its own bakery) and very good coffee. This early in the tourist season (and late in the skiing season), it is quite uncrowded, so we take our time enjoying the view, and the snack. Also of interest, at various points on the windows (which cover almost 360 degrees all around) are etched vertical lines, with cross-lines labelled with destinations and distances (ie. what is in that direction), a very handy way of identifying directions and what one might see in the distance..
There are two ways back down to Garmisch-Partenkirchen from the Zugspitze summit. One is the cable car back to the Zugspitzplatt station, and the cog railway. The other is a cable car directly from the summit to the Eibsee station, 2000 m below. This was the one we took, and where we discovered the “gotcha” in the ticket system. Had we taken the cog train back down, no problem. But the cable car (and as we discovered the transfer to the cog train at Eibsee) requires a different (magnetically coded) ticket, which “everyone knows" you get by exchanging your ticket at a guest services desk – except we were not everybody. Fortunately, there was a real human at the cable car top station who explained this, and helpfully mentioned that the guest services desk was now closed and that the cable car now departing was the last one so we had better just duck under the gate while he was not looking.
That got us down the mountain in a very spectacular ride – think 2000 m elevator down, with nothing on any side to impede your view. From the bottom of the cable car it is a short walk to the Eibsee cog railway station, where you run into the 2nd part of the ticket “gotcha” – you can’t get onto the platform with your (cog railway) ticket because if you arrived here you should have the cable car ticket that you picked up at the guest services desk up the mountain. There is also no official human around; all looks automated. There is another Canadian couple who are also victims of the ticket system, so we share experiences – theirs are a lot more hilarious, because they speak no German, and thus had stayed on a train that had gone off to the overnight train parking area, etc. Finally, one of us noted that the access to the platform was blocked not just by an automated gate, but this was backed up by a very substantial (and physical) chain and padlock, meaning that a human would have to show up sometime – and indeed did, and after some grumbling punched codes into a terminal, and produced a couple of magnetically coded tickets, which got us onto the train, and back to Grainau.
There we had another lovely supper on a totally empty outdoor patio at a restaurant (with the distinct impression that we were holding up the staff from going home – we were between high seasons, and there wasn’t a lot of action in a town which lives off tourists) and then back to our hotel, to pack up, ready to depart for our next, and final, destination in the morning.
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