Snowlines: More laughs than lonely goatherds

By COLIN MOORE

The Kitzsteinhorn Glacier, high above the Austrian alpine village of Kaprun, is being assailed by blistering sunshine and 30C heat that leaves the snow with the glutinous consistency of a bad spring day on Mt Ruapehu.

It is mid-June and the European Alps are closed after an indifferent season, not least because travel-wary American skiers motored to Canada instead of flying to Europe.

But at 3000m above sea level the Kitzsteinhorn is covered in snow year-round and the chairlifts are still running, as they will all summer.

That, in part, is why we are here. This is Austria's "Europa Sport Region", a Wanaka-like outdoor playground around Kaprun, the postcard-pretty lake of Zell am See, and a town of the same name that is a larger and infinitely more cuckoo-clock version of Queenstown.

Every four years Austrian tourism mounts the World Tourism Games, a clever gambit to showcase the sporty nature of a country where tourism is the backbone of the economy. There have been summer games and winter games and this year, at Zell am See, a bit of both.

So there are 438 of us, from 33 nations, a mix of journalists and travel industry people, here to ski and snowboard, run, cycle, play golf, tennis and beach volleyball, race on in-line skates and compete in archery - and then write about it or sell tourist packages afterwards.

The New Zealand contingent consists of John McCaulay, of the New Zealand Herald and my partner in a family holiday home in Turangi, Julie Coulston, owner of the ski travel company Ski Alive International and who a couple of years ago opened my eyes to the skiing prospects of Mt Hotham in Australia, and myself.

We choose the skiing option and leave our 10 Australians in the Down Under team to contest the summer sports.

For us, it is the chance for our first snow rush of the (New Zealand) season, even if it does take "Mac" and me 19 hours longer to get to Salzburg than it does to get to our place in Turangi to ski Mt Ruapehu.

Our Austrian hosts perhaps have other motives. Salzburg has put in a bid to host the 2010 Winter Olympics - along with Vancouver and some daydreamers in Wanaka, New Zealand.

Salzburg, the Sound of Music city, offers Kitzbuhel, perhaps the most famous ski-racing slopes in the world, and promises to suspend a huge temporary stadium across the Salzach River in the heart of the baroque old town, a designated World Heritage area.

The snow slopes in the Europa Sport Region are not proposed Olympic venues but they do lie in the middle of a triangle of those that are. As well, winter sports at Zell am See and Kaprun, and particularly on the Kitzsteinhorn, have had some bad press.

In November, 2000, 155 people died in a fire in the tunnel of the funicular railway to the Kitzsteinhorn slopes. In a Salzburg court last month 16 people faced charges of negligence over the blaze.

At the base station there is no plaque or monument to mark the tragedy but the portal of the tunnel that fed the flames like a giant chimney remains a stark reminder. We ride over the top of it on a new gondola.

The lower slopes are free of snow. A few long-tailed sheep and cows graze the alpine meadows so those lower down can be cut for hay.

The slopes are also furiously busy with machinery because a high-speed gondola is being installed to take people to the glacier. We ride a chairlift and then T-bars to the summer snow.

This is a semi-fun affair but it is all run according to Hoyle. The opposition includes some serious Swiss who chant that they are "red and white, Swiss dynamite", and clean up just about every race. It is not surprising given that one of their team is sporting a Swiss national ski team uniform.

Our division includes 80-year-old Ted Heck, an American ski writer who from the sound of it has been skiing in Austria since the armistice. He still skis well, too.

The Kiwis finish out of the medals but fortunately for Down Under pride the Anzac team includes Richard Hegarty, the young editor of Australian Snowboarder magazine, who slides away with a gold medal.

On foreign soil we are more than happy to be Anzacs, particularly as down on the lake shore our team-mates are picking up medals in tennis, running and golf. On the last day McCaulay makes up an Anzac quartet that wins a silver medal at golf while I take off to the hills that are alive to the music of haymaking.

Every last morsel is being cut, by hand mower if a tractor cannot reach, and collected, some of it with a hand rake, for winter feed. The hiking trail I choose goes through hay fields and past barns and homes fragrant with window boxes full of flowers. In the winter most farmhouses double as pensions, providing skiers with relatively cheap accommodation.

A haymaking farmer tells me he has 15 cows and 15 "kinder" - which underlines an OECD report on farm subsidies. Still, if more than 50 per cent of his farm income didn't come by way of subsidies, what would these meadows look like?

Would I and other tourists hanker to come to overgrown fields and rundown houses? Perhaps we should consider the subsidies as compensation for taking care of the tourist environment.

There are a few other things you consider, too, when you can follow a well-used public path around the lake shore, rather than have the shoreline blocked by private housing as it would surely be in New Zealand.

In the winter Zell am See-based skiers and boarders have access to 56 cable cars and lifts and 130km of piste, all with a single ski pass. And the Europa Sport Region is but a tiny winter-sport area in the province of Salzburg. Just looking at the map of opportunity is enough to make a snow-starved Kiwi wince.

In the summer, the alpine areas offer a lifetime of trekking. A hiking brochure for Salzburg runs to 50 pages of different trails, including the Arno Trail, a walking tour of the province that takes six weeks to complete.

It is something to dream about, I guess.

* Something else to dream about. The Salzburg super ski card allows you to ski in all of the dozens of ski regions in the Province of Salzburg. In the season just gone it would have cost $560 and was valid from early November to May 1.

* The Euro makes money changing and shopping a breeze.

* Arrival procedures in Austria did not include any immigration or customs form filling, just a cursory look at our passports. And there was no customs inspection of declaration required.

* Air Lauda flies to Vienna from Sydney, via a brief refuelling stop in Kuala Lumpur.

* Austrian National Tourist Office, phone 00 61 2 9299 3621, fax 00 61 2 9299 3808.

Austria Tourism

Europa Sport Region

* colinmoore@xtra.co.nz