Day 4: Earth pyramids

After updating the blog last night, we went out in Bolzano to try and find something to eat. Bolzano seems to be a place where a lot of restaurants are closed on a Sunday evening, so we weren't wholly successful. Tim and I ended up in McDonalds, which perhaps wasn't the classiest of establishments. But we did get a nice view of the main square in Bolzano by night.

The next day was Dad's 70th birthday, so we had a slow start to the day as we went round to give him his cards and presents. Afterwards we took the cable car up to Soprabolzano, from where we then caught a little train to the little village of Klobenstein.

Last time Tim and I were here was winter 2019 when everywhere was covered with snow. Today was so different - brilliant sunshine.

Back in 2019 it was so cold that this pond was completely frozen over.

Today, not only was it not frozen but we had a fantastic view of all the fish swimming around inside it.

We'd come to Klobenstein to do a walk towards the earth pyramids, an unusual geological formation. But on the way we had some amazing views of the mountains.

Before too long we caught sight of a little church, which looked very familiar. When we came in 2019 this one was almost completely obscured by clouds.

From this point we were able to get our first glimpse of the earth pyramids.

These unique structures are formed when there are large, hard rocks in the soil. The soil below the rocks is protected from erosion and over a long period of time it forms a pyramid, complete with rock on top.

Not all the pyramids still have their rocks on top, but we saw some that did.

There were some particularly good views of them from the viewing platform.

And there were some great views of the mountains from here too.

The benefit of being here in summer was that more of the path was open, so we were able to walk further than we had done before.

Eventually we came to a restaurant where we stopped for lunch. I had Speckknödel which were very tasty

Then it was time to retrace our steps back towards the train station in Klobenstein.

Unfortunately, when we got to the cable car station we found that the cable car was closed for some sort of maintenance this afternoon  

Some replacement buses had been laid on but there were nowhere near enough for the volume of people trying to get down the mountain. We ended up having to queue until 5pm, at which point the cable car started working again. It was a slightly frustrating end to what was otherwise a lovely day