Travel An Austro-Hungarian Holiday ACTUALLY from London it is nearer
to Vienna than to Rome. But since Austria as traditionally the Gateway of the East sounds further, it is likely that you may get more sense of distance and travel by going there. So, for instance, the route taken by the Arlberg-Orient express is for the best part of three hours up the valley of the Inn, and all the way there will be Churches with those queer bulbous-shaped spires that somehow look oriental. That Gateway of the East feeling starts practically as soon as you get into the country.
There are the three main express routes to the capital, and you can leave London at 2 p.m. and be in Vienna by seven the next evening. It is not such a very long journey after all, and on certain days of the week there are through carriages direct from Calais, from Boulogne and from Ostend. Or, of course, the traveller who likes to break his journey has plenty of scope. One route is by Stras- bourg and Munich, another by Ostend, Brussels, Cologne and Frankfort, while the third runs by Switzerland, the Arlberg Tunnel, Innsbruck and Salzburg. There is a choice then of cities old or new, of gaiety or grandeur, of churches or mountains or scenery or sport.
Then for those who like it a kind of combination route can be planned either through Nuremberg to Passau or by one of several routes to Linz, and then from either of those two places by Danube steamer down to Vienna. They are steamers with comfortable cabins and excellent res- taurants, and it is roughly a two-day journey and passes very wonderful scenery, the most spectacular reaches lying up-stream between Passau and Linz. But the famous Melk Monastery lies lower down. In its Church every inch of space seems deliberately designed for the maximum effect of ornamentation or blaze of colour. But if anyone has the time to spare, then Melk and that river-trip are even finer when taken up-stream. The ship takes longer against the strong Danube currents and so is less crowded.
The Englishman is distinctly persona grata in modern Austria and the country is almost pathetically glad to see him. Its touring trade is not doing too well and so prices today are extra cheap. It is the one country that I know whose tourist leaflets show the usual lovely lady passenger as stepping out of a second-class international carriage, and the trifle struck me as having its significance. If you have any money at all, then Austria will be very glad to see you, and furthermore, she will make all sorts of reductions and special-rate fares for the foreigner spending so many days within her frontiers. She will go even further ; her railway agents will actually map you out a trip on the road-coaches if only you will visit their country at all. " Society Coach " is the Austrian name for the thing, and everybody on it will do their best to be friendly to the English visitor.
Austria is a friendly country, and while it speaks German it uses a good deal a German word in a sense entirely its own. Gemutlidtkeil is the word, and it stands for a sort of friendly tolerance and not worrying too much about any rigid super-efficiencies. Put politics apart and call Austria the traditional Ireland of the German-speaking world, and you have something like the general idea.
Then leave Vienna and her palaces or the churches or the mountains, or wherever you have been, and go a little further and it will all be different again. It is a six-hour train ride from Vienna to Budapest, or if you like, there is the river boat ; and when you get there it is Hungary. Solvent or not, it is an aristocrat of a city, and there is a chain of hotels along the Danube Bank that must be unrivalled in any capital in the world. And then for the foreigner they are not nowadays too expensive for even moderate means. The Hungarian Railways will fix the traveller up with coupon-terms for different lengths of stay and classes of accommodation. Or they will take him to Lake Balaton, a sort of Geneva of Eastern Europe and probably the largest inland sea likely to be reached by the ordinary English tourist. Or he can pass right through the whole of Hungary to its Eastern- most frontier of Mohacs and still sleep soft and travel with case. For the summer tourist season, those Royal Hungarian river boats have bathrooms and private cabins and menus printed in French.
They are big boats and they ply on a great river. Their notices run in six languages, and so there is German and Magyar, and Russian and Bulgarian and Yugoslav, and then something that looks like Italian and that turns out to be Roumanian. And except for the merest scrap of German I know none of those languages, and when I went on one of the boats, deck passage and with no French menus and no polite stewards, I was rather wondering about it all. But of course the simplest way is to speak English and to throw the responsibility of doing something about it upon the Hungarians or whoever it happens to be. And I went Through Hungary with perfect ease. It is the river frontier of Hungary and Yugoslavia that you will come to at last ; the place is called Mohacs, and it comes in a national song. It was at Mohacs that the Turks first burst through into Western Europe, and it was there again after another battle a century or so later in history that they were finally turned out of Hungary. There are steamers that go on and on right down to the Black Sea, but the bathrooms and the private cabins come to an end at Mohacs ; and when the ordinary English traveller has got there he has really reached the extreme end of the Europe that he belongs to.
It is not nearly so expensive as it all sounds. From London to Vienna ordinary return fares run from roughly £25 first and £17 10s. second ; but with all sorts of reductions for foreigners buying their tickets abroad and with all sorts of period-bookings and inclusive terms. And then, of course, the living is what you choose to make it. There are great hotels in Vienna and in Budapest, and then there are other quite big hotels which will be very much cheaper than they look. And as for the provinces, Austria at least is an extraordinarily cheap country ; and if Hungary does work out a little -more, it is not very much more, and anyway it is a country worth almost anything to sec.
And they are both really so extraordinarily easy fur
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