Day 3 - Eagles Nest

OK, so I've been a little slack.....  Sorry.

I'll do some updating now hey :)

Day 3 we hopped aboard a tour bus and headed to Eagles Nest.  Eagles Nest is the Tea House built for Hitler as his 50th Birthday present.  The tour left Munich City at 8.30 am and headed straight for Eagles Nest.  Our tour guide was a lovely old German lady named Uta, who taught us all about the Bavarian Country side and traditions on the way out.

We arrived and had a short time to look around at the base of the road up, before we needed to hop aboard a local coach to get to the top.  Only local buses are able to travel the road that was blasted out of the stone, no private vehicles or buses can go past a certain point. 

The road itself was amazing.  It only has one hair pin turn on its assent and is all perfectly uniform, even down to the cobblestone guttering the entire length of the road.

From the bus stop at the top, we were all ushered down a very dark and damp tunnel, again with perfectly symmetrical brickwork.  We all squashed in and waited for the lift to arrive.  We were unable to take photos of the lift ride, but it was awesome.  The entire inside of the lift was shinny brass, and it very quickly took us to 124m high.

 

The view was beautiful! The mountains were  so close and so beautiful.

 We saw the places where Hitler had been ect including a beautiful Marble fireplace.  The Fireplace had hundreds of names graffitied into it with dates right back to just after the war.  I found this really interesting.  

 

There wasn't enough time for us to climb the mountain to the large cross, before we had to be back for the bus trip back.  This was a bit disappointing.

We came back down the mountain and had time to visit the Documentation Centre.  Here were learnt about the rise and fall of Hitlers career and the actions he was responsible for.  We then went down to the Bunker that was built for him.  This was amazing.  A small entrance opened out into a maze of tunnels, ramps, rooms, air-raid shelters, elevator shafts ect.  And this then linked up to more of the same.  It was unbelievable that all this could be under the beautiful mountains we drove up.

So after lunch we left Eagles nest and headed for Berchesgaden.  This is a sleepy little town, but so beautiful.  Here we had a quick wonder through the streets and Clay and I ended up in the cemetery. I was absolutely astounded!  One plot would be fairly recent, say within 10 years and was entirely planted out with flowering plants and lit candles.  The plot beside it was exactly the same, but it was from 80+ years ago.  I was taken aback as to how much the culture cared for their lost ones.

 

We were then on our way back to Munich, but on our ride our guide Uta passed around a beautiful white flower, called adelvize (I really don't know how to spell that one).  This flower is now so rare that if it is found growing wild, and you pick a flower, you can be fined an extraordinary amount.

We arrived back in Munich about 6.30 pm exhausted.