The Dolomiti

It’s hard to imagine two places so close, so distinct, and so different from each other as Venice and the Dolomites. In the course of ~2 hours you’re transported to a totally different world.

Details….

We needed a rental car in Venice, as we were going to drive to the Dolomiti. This was Dan’s one assignment for the Euro trip. April pretty much planned and reserved the whole trip, I painted the big picture then did a lot of second guessing (often times after something was booked), Jayne thought about food, cheese, gelato and bathrooms. And Dan was supposed to get the rental car. So Dan and Jane head off to NY to start their journey and realize they have no idea about anything they’re supposed to be doing, their dates, their reservations, their confirmations, nothing. And Dan has the car rental thing hanging over his head. He remembered reserving something but hadn’t forward the info to April. So he had no confirmation number or anything. And as they look thru their Rick Steve’s Italy book on their flight to NY, Dan reads he’ll need an International Driver’s License. So their whole trip started with a good bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Nice way to start your Euro vacation.

But as luck would have it, of course they had his reservation. And this being Italy they didn’t need no stinkin International drivers license. Heck they didn’t even ask for any driver’s license. The Italians don’t seem that focused on efficiency or details. Venice has a huge number of people pouring in via the train station, and there’s one window to buy tickets. Life’s good, why worry.

Dan got his nice little smart BMW, all our gear fit, Dan was the Pilot/driver, I was the Navigator. Away we go, we find our way out of Venice get on the Toll highway and head towards the mountains. We hit the toll booth, it’s not manned, there were some signs about TelePasses, the car in front of us seemed to drive right thru the toll gate, so Dan decides it must be fine for him to drive right through also. Who knows, perhaps he thought he had that EZ Pass that worked in NH, so maybe that should have him covered here? Maybe he thought the BMW had some hidden transceiver that would automatically get billed? Maybe he thought, this in Italy, they don’t care about tolls? Now the rest of us all yelled, “hey there’s the ticket in the machine - take it!” The Pilot slowed slightly about 20 feet past the toll gate, but Pilots need to have confidence, be cocky; backing up on the highway back to the toll gate didn’t seem to be in character with the Pilot and his snazzy little BMW, so after the slightest hesitation, away we sped. Ticketless.

Of course we all had a good laugh, then settled down to worry about our impending fate 100 KM distant. Actually Dan worried; the rest of us continued to have a good laugh.

The plains gave way to hills and then very quickly huge mountains. A really quick transition.

And then we come to the toll booth. What’s it going to be? A German/Austrian shakedown, or the Italian “Ciao”, why worry?

As we were still in the Italian part of Italy, of course we got the Italian response. Dan meekly tried to describe in his butchered 4-language technique (german, Italian, French, English) that he came from Venice but didn’t have a pass; the Italian didn’t even blink, took his money, gave him the change, gave him a Ciao and away we go. Who really cares about the rules?

Well it turns out, in about 30 more minutes every cares about the rules, as the Dolomites are more like Germany and Austria rather than Italy.

The Dolomiti (Italian spelling) are sort of a slightly separate mtn range from the rest of the Alps. There’s more sun and better weather. And they’re made up of a unique sedimentary rock called Dolomite (hence the name), Dolomite is similar to Limestone, but it has a reddish color in there, and they are shaped and weather slightly differently than the traditional Alps. Hence the wonderful glow in the morning/evening, and the amazing shapes. Whatever, the scenery is freaking crazy. Really fantastic. Amazing spires and towers everywhere you look.

And as for history, the area is way more German/Austrian than Italian. German seems to be the first language. The region was in the Hapsburg Austrian Empire for ~300 years, but in WW1, the Austrians lost the area to the Italians. Mussolini tried to culturally convert the locals, but they all wanted to stay German. In 1939 the locals were given a choice, they had a 6 month window where they could move north into Germany or they could stay Italian in the Dolomiti in Italy. 85% (212,000 people) made the decision to move! But WWII broke out and only 75000 had made the move and the rest were stuck in Italy. After the war the Allies kept the prewar land ownership so the area stayed Italian.

That being said, you think you’re in Austria/Switzerland. Beautiful alpine meadows, the same mtn huts, the same alpine house architecture, flower boxes on all the houses, food is wurst, sauerkraut, dumplings, speck, lot of meat dishes, strudel, beer. People hiking in leather hiking shorts and jaunty hats with a feather poking out. Pure Austrian.

We get to our first Mtn Hotel. It’s gorgeous, decorated in a mountain fashion (goat heads here, cukoo clock there, some pretty alpine prints and paintings, etc, etc). And the place is stunningly clean. I mean not a speck of dust on anything, and there’s all sorts of knick-knacks everywhere. I didn’t even know how a place could even get so clean. All four of us agree this is the cleanest place we’ve ever seen. I felt I had to take a shower just to get myself up to the standard of the hotel!

So who checks us in? Igor. Yes that’s right Igor. I ask for Wifi and Igor firmly states, “ THERE IS NO INTERNET HERE”. I’m reminded of the Terminator. Since Wifi was advertised on their web site and just for fun I ask on the second day for Internet again, maybe it works in the front café area? Igor gets pissed and says “I told you yesterday, THERE IS NO INTERNET HERE”. When we leave a few days later Dan says to Igor, we’ll be back with our kids, and since I‘m Greek and always like a little argument here and there, I suggest to Igor that he get Internet for the Hotel by the time I return. Dan seems a little embarrassed.

Ok - the hiking. Just amazing. From our hotel, we see this refugio (mountain hut) way up high, sitting impossibly on the edge of this cliff. Who the hell would build something up there? The crazy Germans/Austrians, that’s who. But these huts are great, they’re in the most ridiculous, wonderful, gorgeous places. Fantastic mtn and hiking culture. We hiked up to the refugio for lunch. It turned out to be closing but they still had tea/snacks. Jane felt good as she got her first real hiking of the trip under her belt and saw that all her Mt. Uncanoonic training was paying off. The scenery was mind-blowing. None of us had ever seen such outrageous shapes. Everywhere we looked it seemed like were in the Lord of the Rings staring at Mordor.

The next day we drove down the valley and up another pass to take a tram up to our Refugio Lagazuoi. April closed her eyes the whole ride up. It reminded me of the tram at Big Sky. This was a real mtn hut, great big deck out front for awesome coffee/beer and sitting. We hiked along a large escarpment and cliff edge. This whole area was the scene of lots of fighting between the Austrians and the Italians in WWI. The remnants are insane. Seriously. First of all there are these tunnels and paths going all through and over the mtns. You can go into the tunnels. You need a head lamp and a helmet. The walls, barbed wire, trenches, fortifications, are all over the place. It’s essentially an open-air museum where you can go and do/touch everything. In the States all the access would be scrupulously managed and monitored. Here you can hike thru the tunnels. In this particular mountain top, the Austrians held the peaks and the Italians held the lower portion of the mountain. And the Italians essentially carved out all these tunnels directly up to the Austrian fortifications. Then they took turns firing and throwing bombs at each other. And neither side could oust the other side. Freaking crazy. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. It probably didn’t matter to anyone strategically. It must have been miserable in the winter especially. Just freaking crazy. This was the kind of thing that made you question the human race.

So it must have been hell fighting a war in here, but the hiking is fantastic.

We hike out the next day. To make the day longer, we decide to try a longer route, the 20b, that goes thru a steep looking pass. Not really a pass but somehow a passage thru these spires and cliffs. We couldn’t quite see how the trail was going to succeed but we headed that way anyway. And we made a planning mistake; that is we didn’t have a plan. Remember from the C-C the old adage: “plan the hike, hike the plan.” Well we had no real plan. We head down a valley to the cliffs, staring at the seemingly impossible route. We get to the base of the cliff. The girls are getting nervous. The trail markers fade away, and the trail seems to go both left and right. Dan scouts left, I scout right. My route has a bushwhack up a scree slope or looks like it’s the old trail back to the rifugio. Dan’s is the right trail, he disappears after crossing a steep scree slope. The girls decide they’re too anxious to even cross the steep scree slope. Dan comes back and say it’s steep, slightly tricky but overall looks ok but by that time the girls had psyched themselves out. Wanksters. Then there was the big long discussion of should we split up, how much food did we have, etc, etc. We all decided to stick together and return the easy way and head down. Sigh.

Now if we had created a plan of: ‘just keep hiking until the next 10 steps look impossible, then we all turn back’, then we probably could have done it. The problem was the girls thought it might get too hard even though they never actually saw it get too hard. Whatever.

So we hiked down to our car and headed down to Cortina which was to be our base for the next 3 days. Cortina is where they had the 1956 Olympics. It’s a gorgeous setting. Beautiful alpine meadow, small little village center, some high-end shopping, nice restaurants, beautiful houses/fields/gardens spreading out from the town center. Vast mountain groups everywhere we look. Great place for a few days. And not too many American tourists around. Nice.