Well I didn't lie exactly in yesterdays post (and the previous ones for that matter) ... because anybody would know anyway that I was just joking. Or so I thought. But then I should consider my (currently) four extra-terrestrial readers; how are they supposed to know about such things? And they might not even have acces to the world wide web, thus no means of checking wether I was making fun of anybody, especially them.
So here it is, the whole truth: Americans beat me to the peak, but they played unfair - they carried those people you can see here up to a plateau a two hundred metres below the peak; they even put poles into the earth to mark their path so that they will find their way back to the copters:
No, not true again, sorry - it wasn't Americans but Russians. No, Chinese! - Well, Indians then!!!
Okay so you're still sceptic. Here you can see taking them photos before a monument they built, as proof that they were on top; and as anybody knows it is the Japanese who have to take a photo of themselves:
Ah no, I shouldn't do that, I only will alienate my extra-terrestrial readers - and no one would like that, right?
So here it is, the complete and utter truth: it is mostly Austrians you can see in those photos, some Slovaks though, some Hungarians (I suppose), and even a Black man speaking English whose nationality I don't know. Schneeberg is but a tourist resort, they've even built a restaurant on top, and right now they're building a new road up there so that it is even easier to reach:
But I swear that I still met no one on the ascent yesterday; while on the ascent, I only met one person on the descent - all other people you can see here went up the mountain on the other side, and not on foot: they drove up there with Schneebergbahn (a kind of funicular railway). And this 'other' side of Schneeberg still is beautiful, and not quite as overcrowded as the railway side.
But still too crowded for nature as this photo proves:
This is Gentiana pannonica but hardly recognisable anymore as almost all buds have been picked by reckless vandals. Where I took this shot about twenty plants were growing but hardly had any flowers left. Here's the beauty of this high Alpine flower:
The shot was taken two weeks ago on the same mountain, and sadly this one here also has become victim to vandalism. And no, it wasn't Americans that did it, or Russians or the Chinese, or even Indians, or the Japanese; no, Austrians did it. What a shame.
