Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, June 2020.

Not long after I reach the desert I realise it is trying to kill me. The land has been baked hard by an unrelenting sun. The wind whips the alkaline dust into angry dervishes. The playa seems to stretch out to infinity. It is too hot and too dry here for life to ever feel welcome. This is Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, 1,000 square miles of absolutely nothing. It is so flat and so empty that you might come here if you were trying to set a land speed record, or launch a rocket into space. What kind of maniacs would look at this alien void and decide to throw a party?

We arrive in convoy. It is the last week of August and hundreds of buses and RVs and U-Haul trucks and cars are crawling along Highway 34 away from the last glimpse of civilisation, a tiny no-horse town called Gerlach. Turning on to the final desert dirt track our vehicles slow to 10mph. At the gate, greeters encourage us to climb down and roll in the dust. They are wearing bondage gear or nothing at all, and they want to give us a hug. “Welcome home,” they say, but what they mean is welcome to Burning Man.

Founded in 1986 by artists Larry Harvey and Jerry James, Burning Man is a hard thing to define. At times it might feel like a giant rave, or an open-air art exhibition, or a particularly hardcore strain of survivalist camping. Once the preserve of freedom-loving hippies with a head full of acid, you’re now just as likely to run into Silicon Valley tech billionaires – also with a head full of acid. It all plays out in Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis arranged like a giant horseshoe with a towering wooden statue of a man standing proud at the centre.

The greeters point us in the direction of our camp, which is at 7:45 and E. The roads radiating out from the centre are numbered like a clock face, from 2 to 10. The perpendicular roads which join them are lettered, starting with the Esplanade at the centre of the horseshoe and then A, B, C so on all the way out to L. This simple system means that it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to get lost, a feat I will manage repeatedly over the coming week.

Soon after we find our camp we start building. My friends and I run a British pub-turned-flamboyant drag club known as the Queen Dick, a pun on Eastenders boozer the Queen Vic that’s made all the better by the fact that approximately nobody at Burning Man will make that link. We erect a bar, a pink stage with an illuminated wooden heart suspended above it and, improbably, an upright piano. We also have eighteen kegs of beer and cider and hundreds of bottles of spirits, all of which we plan to give away. No money changes hands at Burning Man. One of the most common misconceptions is that it runs on a bartering economy. In fact, everything is given away. ‘Gifting’ is one of the core tenets of Burning Man’s philosophy, along with ‘Radical Inclusion’, ‘Radical Self Reliance’ and ‘Radical Participation’. That means there are no bystanders and no observers. Everyone comes here to play their part, and each camp, each outfit and each party seems more outlandish than the last. Burning Man is what happens when 70,000 people ask: ‘Is this too much?’ and nobody ever tells them: ‘Yes, that’s too much.’

On the first night after the pub is built I take my bike and cycle out into the deep playa. I watch as the sun sets over the city, purple hues filling the sky over a distant mountain range, the bleached light of day fading into the black of night. The horizon glows with countless neon lights, but these are unreliable landmarks. As well as the camps there are hundreds of slow-moving vehicles, known as art cars, and they move across the playa with no obvious logic. Pyramids and towering sheep, fire-breathing dragons and even a scale replica of the Golden Gate bridge are never to be found where you left them. Each of them throbs to the beat of their own soundsystem, and some of Burning Man’s most infamous nightspots – with names like Mayan Warrior and Robot Heart – are mobile. At one point, feeling disorientated, I hitch my bike to the side of a ship gliding past and climb up on deck. I grip the rigging and gaze out awestruck. Sometimes in life you need something to hold on to, even if that’s a giant neon pirate ship in the desert. Now the real game begins. Where on Earth did I leave the pub?

As I try to cycle back in the vague direction of 7:45 and E I pass revelers wearing outfits just as elaborate and creative as the art cars. There are BDSM punks and stilt-walkers in ballgowns, Mad Max warriors and models in bikinis. One night I see a couple dressed in khakis and fleece jumpers with cameras slung around their necks. I spend the rest of the week debating whether this strange vision was simply people wearing their ordinary clothes or arch conceptualists who’ve managed to put together the one costume that’s truly transgressive.

Just as I’m starting to become exhausted from cycling over the uneven playa I spot a rest stop. A little warren of sofas in the middle of the desert. It’s as if Burning Man has anticipated my exact desire, which of course it has. Throughout the week this happens time and again. Feeling hungry? Here’s a camp passing out quesadillas. Growing weary? This place will give you a coffee, although they may insist on spanking you to earn it. Struggling in the heat of the day? There’s a lounge full of people misting you with cool water. In need of a strong cocktail? Well, take your pick. This phenomenon comes with its own maxim: ‘The playa provides.’ Slowly, moment by moment and place by place, the desert is starting to feel a little less inhospitable.

Eventually I stagger back into the welcoming bosom of the Queen Dick. My friends are dancing on the bar and pouring shots into the mouths of a crowd of people I’ve never seen before. It feels good to be home. Night becomes day and day becomes night. Each morning in the pub I swap breathless tales about the things I’ve seen and found and am rewarded with stories of things I hadn’t even imagined. Everyone comes to Burning Man for different reasons. Everyone’s Burning Man is different.

There is only one universal communal experience, and the clue’s in the name. On the penultimate night we leave our bikes behind and walk to the man. All 70,000 of us gather together, at the centre of our new community, to watch him burn. We sit in a vast ring, whooping and cheering when he goes up in flames and then lingering a while as the heat prickles our faces. The next day we begin to dismantle the pub. When we’re finished we sweep the ground meticulously, making sure not even a scrap of plastic is left behind. Litter is taken very seriously at Burning Man. It’s known as MOOP (‘Matter Out Of Place’) and creating it is an unforgivable faux pas. By the time we all leave, the desert will look as blank and foreboding as it did when we first arrived.

Belatedly, I am coming to understand the significance of the desert. It is easy to become distracted by Burning Man’s dizzying lights and sounds, the chaos and the hedonism, but beneath it all is this grand blank slate. Every dancefloor, every piece of art, everything you see and touch has been built by someone expressly for you to enjoy. Everything has a purpose. On this sprawling canvas we come together to build whatever we like, wear whatever we like, be whoever we like. For this brief and wondrous grain of time, it’s home.

Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, January 2020.

I regret to inform you that we have all been wildly misinformed about pineapple. I’d been going through life fishing rings of the stuff out of tin cans onto gammon and indulging my controversial affection for it on pizza, so I cavalierly assumed I had a pretty good idea of what it tastes like. I was wrong. I realise my mistake the moment I casually bite into a slice of freshly-picked pineapple and it explodes in my mouth: sweet and rich. It’s like hearing Beethoven’s Fifth when you’d been expecting a drunk banging on a bin. It’s as if happiness itself had a taste.

At the moment of my epiphany I’m standing in the kitchen of Sala Lacabuka’s home, in the tiny village of Vacalea. With a population somewhere around 80, it sits on a hilltop towards the eastern end of Kadavu, Fiji’s fourth largest island. The house was built by hand by her husband Seimisi and is painted a slightly deeper shade of blue than the vast sky above. When Sala started preparing dinner – tuna, spinach, eggplant and the tropical root vegetable, taro – Seimisi picked a baby pineapple from one of the plants outside and sliced it up to serve as a snack. We eat greedily, while above our heads shiny DVDs hang from the ceiling, catching the fading light. Sala’s incongruous choice of decoration is a complete box set of Scrubs.

Outside the window every child in the village – from toddler to teenager – is engaged in an energetic game of pani, a local game roughly equivalent to dodgeball. Behind them the sunset is beginning to turn the horizon candy-floss pink. Earlier, approaching the village by boat, thick green vegetation had made the whole place appear uninhabited, and there are no cars or roads on this side of the island. At 411km², Kadavu is just slightly bigger than the Isle of Wight – but home to an awful lot more palm trees swaying over white sandy beaches. The sea is turquoise and clear. Pineapples grow freely. If you were ever shipwrecked on Kadavu, you probably wouldn’t be in any particular hurry to be rescued. For their part, the islanders don’t seem to be in any particular hurry about anything. Sala’s catchphrase is: ‘Take your time, no rush.’

I’d come to Fiji to find out why people here are so happy. A 2017 Gallup poll found that 92% of people who live in Fiji describe themselves as ‘happy’ or ‘very happy’, the highest proportion anywhere in the world. This statistic comes as no surprise to Seimisi, who as well as growing most of the food we’ll eat tonight also farms kava, the root crop used to make a mildly sedating drink which is Fiji’s main form of social lubrication. As we sit down to dinner, joined by their children Lusiana and Samuela, Seimisi points to the bountiful natural harvest spread out on the table in front of us as one of the reasons why Fijians are so content.

‘No money, no worries,’ he says. ‘In your country, you need to have money. Here you can pull up cassava and taro from the ground and get fish from the sea. In the evening you can drink kava. You may have no money, but you have no worries either.’

Be hospitable

The plentiful food also helps to facilitate Fiji’s culture of generosity and hospitality. Sala, who works as a manager at the nearby Matava Resort, invites guests to come and stay in her village. She’s just as welcoming to her own neighbours. ‘We keep our door open,’ she says, and she means this literally. The front door has been propped open all day. ‘We’re eating now, and whoever walks past we’ll say: ‘Come, have dinner!’ Anyone can just walk in if they feel like coming in. If they’re starving they’ll just come straight away and we’ll serve them food. Families don’t cook just the right portion. We cook extra so that we can invite anyone to come and have a meal with us.’

This sense of tight-knit community is strengthened by the islanders’ rich folklore and collective mythology. Over the dinner table Lusiana cuts off her parents to eagerly regale us with the story of Dakuwaqa, the fearsome Fijian shark god who was only defeated in battle by an octopus who lived in the shallow waters around Kadavu. ‘When they fought, the octopus wrapped his arms around the shark and used two of them to block the shark’s nostrils,’ explains Lusiana. ‘The shark surrendered and promised he would never bite or eat any Kadavu people.’ Local fishermen claim Dakuwaqa has protected them from shark attacks ever since.

After dinner I settle down for bed on a foam mattress in Sala’s living room and am quickly lulled to sleep by the quiet of the village. A chorus of cockerels breaks the silence a little before 6am, but another couple of hours pass before Sala appears in the kitchen to start shaping dough to bake into fresh buns. ‘In island life this is how we do breakfast,’ she says with a shrug. ‘There’s no rush.’

Most of the men who live in Vacalea are farmers, like Seimisi. For those women who don’t work in tourism like Sala there are more traditional forms of employment, such as weaving grass mats from pandanus leaves. A couple of doors down from Sala’s house I meet Kelera Raivasi, who learned to weave this way when she was just six years old. ‘All through Fijian history people have been weaving like this,’ she says. ‘The skill is passed from grandmother to mother to daughter.’

She sits on the mat as she works, happy to chat away as the weaving has long since become second nature. Her eyes light up when she hears that I plan to visit Bouma National Park on Taveuni, another island 200 miles to the north-east. Slightly larger than Kadavu, it is known as Fiji’s ‘Garden Isle’ because of the incredible diversity of its flora and fauna. By chance Kelera’s in-laws live there, and she’s spotted an opportunity to display that characteristic Fijian generosity. ‘The head man of that village is called Iosefo, he’s my husband’s father,’ she explains as she fetches two sulus, the Fijian sarong. ‘Can I give you these to take to him and his wife? He looks after the waterfalls. They’re beautiful.’

Cherish nature

Bouma National Park lives up to Kelera’s billing. A three-hour hike through the teeming rainforest reveals three waterfalls, each forming its own perfect pool. After the long climb I can’t resist the chance to dive in, washing the sweat from by body in the cool, fresh water. From vantage points near the top of the trail the island appears entirely untamed, a sea of green from which coconut palm trees grow like church spires. As I walk downhill, hibiscus, gardenia and heliconia flowers provide bright splashes of colour while frogs and purple shore crabs cross my path. In a small village near the entrance to the park I meet Chief Iosefo Raupuga, who welcomes me to his simple home and happily accepts Kelera’s sulus. As we talk, he points out that this pristine natural environment can’t be taken for granted. His community had to fight for it.

He explains that in the 1980s, a Korean logging company did a deal with the most powerful chief on the island to turn Taveuni’s trees into timber. They even went so far as to construct a sawmill. However, the chief still needed to get the assent of the various village chiefs, which at that time included Iosefo’s father. They all refused, the deal fell through and the barely-used sawmill fell into disrepair. In a poetic twist, the mill itself is now part of the forest, overgrown and tied up with vines. A tall, unfelled palm towers over the forgotten doorway.

‘They turned down a lot of money,’ says Iosefo. ‘They decided the island was more important. They were thinking of future generations, and I think they made a wise choice. Now we’re reaping the benefits of it. Money comes into the village from the tourists who visit the waterfalls every day.’

Like everyone I meet, Iosefo quickly agrees with the portrayal of Fijians as happy people. ‘We’re happy because we live as a community,’ he says. ‘We live as neighbours among these beautiful surroundings and we can always go and talk to the other villagers, our brothers and sisters.’

Live and let live

This sense of togetherness is another clue towards understanding Fijian happiness. Importantly, it even extends across what other countries would called ‘religious and cultural divides’. While around 64% of the population identifies – like Sala and Seimisi – as Christian, the sizable Indo-Fijian population helps explain why 28% of the population are Hindu.

Many of those Indo-Fijians live on nearby Vanua Levu, which at 12 times the size of Taveuni is significantly larger than the two previous islands I’ve visited and has much to explore. On the south coast near Savusavu I stroll along a white sandy beach and swim surrounded by tiny but curious fish. The island’s biggest town, Labasa, is home to almost 30,000 people – a heaving metropolis by Fijian standards built around one main street, with a bustling market and a busy bus station. Just outside of town is one of Fiji’s most significant Hindu religious sites: Naag Mandir, literally ‘Snake Temple’. The red and yellow building contrasts sharply against the rolling hills and is built around a three metre tall rock which resembles, from certain angles, a cobra. Some Hindus believe that this island is the place referred to in their scriptures as Ramanaka Dweep, where Lord Krishna sent a snake god.

When I visit, the rock is garlanded in red, yellow and white flowers. Although the priest’s chanting echoes around the room, there is a sense of stillness. Families from as far afield as Australia and New Zealand kneel, pray and give offerings of apples, bananas, coconuts and milk. The air is thick with the smell of burning camphor.

After the families leave the priest introduces himself as Anil Maharaj, and explains why people travel such distances to pray here. ‘They come to have their desires fulfilled,’ he explains. ‘Their problems are solved and their sicknesses are healed.’ He adds that religious tensions in Fiji are non-existent. ‘There are never any problems here,’ he says. ‘It’s a beautiful country. People are very happy.’

In Fiji that happiness springs from many wells. It’s easiest to see in the natural beauty of those untouched beaches and waterfalls, but it rises too from the strength of the communities that protect them. It’s there in the spirit of hospitality, the giving of gifts for no reason, and sometimes it’s in places you might not expect it – like that first bite of really fresh pineapple.

Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, January 2020.

When the sun is shining in Vienna, there are few better places to be than the gardens of the Prater. Home to a sprawling amusement park – notable for the Ferris wheel where Orson Welles delivered his nihilistic monologue in The Third Man – it also contains one of the city’s most famous beer gardens. The Schweizerhaus has existed in this location in one form or another since 1766, and its reputation rests on doing two simple things very well: perfectly-soft, meaty pork knuckles the size of rugby balls, and glass tankards filled with beer so frothy that it’s impossible to drink them without getting bubbles on your nose.

‘Every year I always go to the Schweizerhaus with my friends,’ says Johann Diglas, whose family have run coffeehouses in Vienna since 1875. ‘We have a few beers and then summer has officially begun.’ We are sat in the hedge-lined garden of Café Diglas in Schottenstift, where Johann is sipping a white wine spritzer. ‘It’s half wine and half soda water. It’s very traditional for Austria,’ he says. Locals will tell you that the drink was invented in the country as an easy way to create bubbly wine. I discover, too, that drinking outdoors is intimately intertwined with Viennese culture. ‘Since the 1800s, people in Austria have felt that the coffeehouse is like their living room. Gardens like this one are the living rooms of summer.’

That concept, with all its welcoming ambience, is played out all over the city. At Heuer Am Karlsplatz, which shares a building with the Kunsthalle Wien art gallery, I have beer and burrata on a smart outdoor patio which has proven so popular they’ve had to set up wooden picnic tables and chairs in the adjoining park to cope with the overflow. At Glacis Beisl, a restaurant specialising in Wiener schnitzel, they serve their craft lagers in wine glasses – a world away from the foaming beers at the Schweizerhaus – but it’s their spacious courtyard that’s the real draw. I also spend an evening among the hundreds of Viennese who visit the Ottakringer brewery’s outdoor events during the summer, listening to Austrian cover bands play classic rock while drinking beers under the very silos they’re made in.

Looking for a view over the city, I head to the Dachboden bar on the roof of the 25Hours Hotel. It’s a fashionable hangout, with a disassembled drum-kit suspended over the bar, an extensive cocktail list and great views over the baroque MuseumsQuartier. However, for me, the best views in town are to be had from the bar on the roof of the Hotel Lamée. Here I sip a spritzer of my own while looking across at the majesty of St Peter’s Church – just 400 metres away – the most striking landmark on a skyline dotted with spires.

A short walk brings me to the Donaukanal, which borders Vienna’s city centre and was once an arm of the Danube before being converted into a regulated canal. The last 15 years have seen a rejuvenation of the area, particularly since the opening of Strandbar Herrmann in June 2005 demonstrated the appeal of water-side drinking.

Hermann remains one of the best, with deckchairs set up on a patch of sand and a young, hip crowd whiling away their day drinking bottles of beer and nodding their heads to reggae. Wandering further down the canal, I find Blumenwiese, which serves frozen daiquiris and puts an altogether more upmarket spin on the beach bar idea. By this point I’m ready to cool off with a swim, but the canal water doesn’t look too inviting. This is where Badeschiff Wien comes in: two barges that are permanently moored in the canal and house both a bar and a shimmering blue swimming pool.

Refreshed after my dip, I hop on a D Tram and head 20 minutes out of the city centre to my last stop, Heuriger Schübel-Auer. Will it, I wonder, be worth the journey? A ‘Heuriger’ is a type of traditional wine tavern located close to a vineyard; Schübel-Auer’s is just two blocks away. Before the city expanded, it was surrounded by fields, and stepping into the courtyard, I feel transported back in time to a rural idyll. It’s no surprise when you consider that the place has been owned and run by the same family since 1711, and that the table I sit down at is shaded by the branches of a 150-year-old chestnut tree. Wrought-iron lamp posts complete the atmosphere, although their powers aren’t needed in the dappled sunlight. The signature drink here is a DIY version of a white wine spritzer: one of their own bottles of wine served with an accompanying soda siphon. I mix my drink and put my feet up. As living rooms go, this will take some beating.

For Lonely Planet Traveller.

It’s only an hour until stage time in Salzburg but right now the star of the show is wedged sideways between the green folds of the scenery, looking a little lifeless. Tonight’s performance is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, performed here in the same city where the musical is set, and where the real Von Trapp family singers once lived. Maria, the singing nun-turned-fairy stepmother made famous by Julie Andrews, is sandwiched between the scenery because, when the time comes, the meadows will spring into motion at exactly the same moment she does. Here at the Marionette Theater, the hills really are alive.

The Maria waiting patiently amid the folded fields is just one of five puppet Marias who play their part in this show, each with a different hand-stitched costume that’s been painstakingly minaturised. Another Maria, wearing a dark blue dress with a white apron, is shyly dancing on her strings towards the edge of the stage where the theatre’s creative director Barbara Heuberger is perched. ‘Oh God!’ gasps Barbara, still moved by the grace of the puppet even after 20 years working here. ‘That smashes me. It’s just a dead piece of wood, but it can express something so powerful.’

The Marionette Theater only started performing The Sound of Music in 2007, at Barbara’s suggestion, but the theatre itself has been here for over a hundred years. It opened on 27 February 1913 with a performance of Mozart’s comic opera Bastien und Bastienne, and has been bewitching children and adults alike ever since. In 1964, while shooting the film version of The Sound of Music, director Robert Wise found himself so enamoured with the puppets that he became determined to include them in his movie. Theatre boss Hermann Aicher declined to get involved because he was about to tour America, but Wise was undeterred and hired his own puppeters to produce the famous ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ sequence. ‘I think that’s the biggest mistake in the history of this theatre,’ says Barbara with a laugh. ‘But we’re the reason why there are puppets in the film.’

For Barbara, it made perfect sense for the theatre to repay the compliment by staging The Sound of Music as their first musical after a century of operas. She understands, too, why 300,000 visitors come to Salzburg every year in search of its magic. ‘It’s got wonderful music, and it’s a story with heart,’ she says. ‘Maria is the great mother, the mother for everyone. She came to the rescue of this poor captain, and even if the real Maria wasn’t actually like that with the children it doesn’t really matter.’

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

The fact that the true story of the Von Trapps did not play out exactly as it does in the musical can come as a surprise to some of those hundreds of thousands of fans who make the pilgrimage here from around the world. The actual home of the Von Trapps, Villa Trapp, is not quite as grand as the version which appeared on screen but is nonetheless a beautiful stately home that dates from 1863. It is now a hotel, with a photograph of the seven singing Von Trapp children lined up above the sweeping central staircase, a beautifully restored parlour full of antique furniture and a breakfast room where guests eat together around a single large dining table, just as the family would have done. It’s run by the husband and wife team of Christopher Unterkofler and Marianne Dorfer, who have dedicated themselves to preserving the real story of the Von Trapp family.

‘It’s true that the captain went into town to ask for a house teacher,’ explains Christopher, an ebullient former journalist who hasn’t lost his knack for telling a good story. We’re stood in the sun on Villa Trapp’s well-kept lawn, part of a 3.5 hectare estate which remains one of the largest in Salzburg. ‘Maria was a teacher at Nonnberg Abbey, not a nun. She intended to become one but the Mother Superior was unhappy with her temper. Maria’s nickname was ‘The General’, so you can imagine what she was like. In reality, the characters were vice-versa. The captain was the charming Julie Andrews-type, and she was more stern, like Christopher Plummer. On the other hand, you have to be fair, she did take on a family with seven kids and she had to rule somehow.’

While Maria’s temperament may have been romanticised, much of the story really did happen as it appears in The Sound of Music. The children did form a successful singing troupe, Captain Von Trapp did use individual whistle calls to summon each of them, and they really did flee from the Nazis because Von Trapp refused to serve in their navy – although in reality they made their escape by train to Italy, rather than hiking over the mountains to Switzerland.

It’s also true that Maria and Captain Von Trapp married in the convent church at Nonnberg Abbey, where she had once dreamed of becoming a nun. Visible from around Salzburg with its distinctive red onion dome, the nunnery is still active to this day. I climb an ancient set of stone stairs to reach the church, which contains beautifully preserved Romanesque wall paintings that date from 1150. The most spectacular view, however, is from outside the priory gates. Looking south, jagged mountain-tops seem to fade gradually into the blue of the sky as if some long forgotten Romantic artist had sat down and painted an exquisite backdrop for the whole city.

My Favourite Things

Whatever the truth about the mortal Von Trapp family, it’s the timeless pull of Robert Wise’s film that has been drawing people to Salzburg ever since it was released in 1965. Wandering down from the Abbey through the narrow cobbled streets of the city it’s easy to spot familiar sights from the film: the vast Baroque cathedral, and the Rock Riding School hall where the climactic concert takes place. In the fruit and vegetable market in Universitätsplatz I stop to eat a juicy tomato, like the ones Julie Andrews juggles with. Wherever I go there seems to be music echoing from around every corner, whether it’s a choir in the cathedral or an a capella group rehearsing in a beer hall. The sound bounces off the cobbles, mingling with the gentle clip-clop of horses pulling carriages and the splashing of water in the fountains.

A little further out is Schloss Leopoldskron, the grand house whose lakeside location was used for the scene where Julie Andrews and the children fall noisily into the water. Today the park beside the lake is quiet and tranquil, even though it’s a bright and warm Saturday afternoon. A group of men sit around on the bank of the lake with a hookah, their fishing lines dangling in the water, hoping for carp. Swans glide serenely over the placid surface. The house itself looks chocolate-box perfect on the far shore, with Hohensalzburg Fortress hovering over its shoulder. Just as in the film, the castle is a constant landmark, always in view somewhere above and beyond the workaday city.

One of the most famous Salzburg locations in The Sound of Music is the Mirabell Gardens, where Julie Andrews and the children perform their choreographed song-and-dance routine of ‘Do-Re-Mi’. Tour guide and dedicated Sound of Music superfan Trudy Rollo has no qualms about launching into her own rendition as we climb the steps towards the rose hill, and I find myself joining in. It’s as if everyone else in the gardens has been secretly waiting for this moment. Soon others have gathered around us, hesitantly singing and then breaking into applause at this impromptu moment of joyful abandon and reverance for the music that has drawn so many of them here.

Trudy is not surprised that The Sound of Music is still winning new fans half a century after it was released, or that they’re drawn to Salzburg. ‘It’s a good family film,’ she explains. ‘There’s no rampant sex scenes or major violence. Good wins over evil. Every time I watch that opening scene on a big screen, with Julie doing her twirl on up on the mountain, I still think: ‘Wow!’ It’s just so beautiful.’

Climb Ev’ry Mountain

The exact same thought comes into my own head while I look out at the rolling green hills surrounding the Posch’n Hütte, a wooden mountain cabin high up in Salzkammergut, the Austrian lake district. Taking a hike over the nearest ridge I watch as clouds roll into the valley below. Although just a short drive from Salzburg, the cabin feels like it inhabits another time. Even the air tastes sweeter. This is splendid isolation, cut off from the modern world without phone signal or wifi.

In nearby St. Wolfgang there’s a steam-powered cog railway up the Schafberg mountain which had a brief cameo in The Sound of Music, taking Maria and the children to the meadow where she teaches them to sing with ‘Do-Re-Mi’. As the track curves up the hillside at an incredible gradient the little engine chugs along, pushing – not pulling – the carriages through thick forests which eventually break to allow spectacular views over Lake Wolfgang. Within minutes we’re up above the clouds, looking out at grazing cows seemingly unphased by the altitude.

‘It’s wonderful here,’ says Martin Bahr, a train driver on the SchafbergBahn who grew up dreaming of working on these steam engines. ‘We have the lake and the mountains. I can go swimming, I can go out on a boat. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.’

Martin knows about the train’s brief appearance in The Sound of Music, but he’s more concerned with the noise a steam train makes all by itself. ‘For many people,’ he says. ‘It’s music.’

At the summit of Schafberg, a short climb from the train station, is a hotel serving good coffee and apple strudel. Directly behind the building is a terrifyingly sheer drop, a fact mitigated only by its breathtaking views. As I look down at the rough-hewn peaks reflected in shimmering lakes and the church spires jutting up from little towns I can’t help but think of those famous aerial shots which open The Sound of Music. Rather than taking the train back down, it feels better to walk down through the soft green grass of the meadows, listening to the music of the passing trains, the clanking of cow bells and – with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein – to sing:

“Stone-cobbled streets
And trains powered by steam
Nuns in old churches and strudel with cream
Beautiful puppets that dance on their strings
These are a few of my favourite things…”

Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, December 2019.