Reading about the Compatsch area of the Dolomites is confusing. We have a vague picture of roads, chalets, green meadows, towering rock peaks, trails of varying difficulties, remote mountain "huts", chairlifts and gondolas running this way and that and roads that close between 9 am and 5 pm. We have two full days in the area and want to maximize our experiences here, but are unable to put a plan together without first untangling the elements of the area, sorting out what is where and open when and surveying possibilities. The one element we can understand is that if you arrive after 9:00 am you cannot drive your car to the upper meadows and therefore must ride the gondola, at $17.00 each. This crimps our budget.
Last night we packed a day pack for hiking. We got up and out the door by 6:45 am. Google maps told us it was 45 minutes to the Spitzbühl chair lift, where we thought we might start a hike. Good to its silicon word, we arrived 45 minutes later.
Now in the area, the explanations we had read began to make more sense. We drove up to the upper area, called Compatsch, and checked out the area from the car. It cost €17 to park in this lot for the day. Too much. We drove back to the Spitzbühl chairlift parking lot, a half a mile by trail away, where parking is free. We grabbed the daypack from the car and hiked back up to Compatsch. We found a restaurant to get a pop for Sally. While there, we noticed they had apple strudel, big pieces of apple strudel. And reasonably priced. This delayed our exploration of the area a few more minutes.
We walked over to the TI office to increase our understanding of hiking and chairlift options. A pleasant, but typically distance German speaking woman of about 23 answered our questions, exuding zero compassion and zero warmth. We tried to coax a smile out of her by asking her about herself and employing small talk, and we succeeded to a point, but her smile always faded quickly. Is it the contortions the human face must go through to create the German words that causes them to rarely smile? We have found the Italians happy and quick to smile and laugh but the Germans are mostly stern and stoic. Why is that, and am I profiling an entire country of people. It is just my observations.
With the answers we got to our questions, we decided to take a leisurely walk on the Panorama trail today. We also made reservations at one of the mountain huts, a five mile hike in and 2000' up, for tomorrow night.
We walked leisurely to the shops a bit to the west where the gondola deposits people riding up from below. Here we found a shop with an outside display selling trekking poles for €9.95. They seemed to be well made, so we bought two for Sally. For some reason the clerk sold us two for the €9.95 price. Maybe we read the sign wrong, but we were happy with the poles. We walked down to another gondola that would deposit us on top of a hill. From here we spent the next two hours slowly hiking in a large loop with tremendous views of the Dolomies and the low country surrounding them. We ended up back at the village of Compatsch. We met many, many people along the way whom we enjoyed talking to. It was a Saturday. Lots of families were out for a hike in the glorious, sunny, blue bird conditions. The trail wanders across a vast meadow at 6000’, dotted with small log or wood framed structures. The rolling mountain meadow is all farmland, most of it fenced to keep cows with clanging bells in their places. We saw farmers using tractors to cut hay and bail it in typical round bales as well as using scythes to cut grass on the margins.
We left the meadows about 3:30 pm to return to our hostel. We wanted to get groceries for the dinner tonight and for our overnight hike to the hut. On the way down we stopped in Castlerotto, a picturesque Swiss looking mountain village with a beautiful town square. We parked in an underground parking garage and strolled through town, reading Rick Steves tour of the place. We found a grocery store along the way and bought enough salad makings for two dinners, eggs to hard boil and bread meat and cheese for sandwiches.
Back at the hostel (we found a parking place!) we prepared two large bowls of salad, one for tonight and one for the hike tomorrow which we placed in a gallon ziplock bag we had brought from home. We were both very tired. After dinner in the back patio, I relaxed and wrote while Sally tended some laundry and researched coming traveling options.
Our new roommates in our hostel room were two Polish men who had riden their motorbikes from Poland to here, intent on riding for a week, including Stelvio Pass. After introductions and 15 minutes of small talk they kept mostly to themselves, talking in Polish. About 10 pm, as we were settling into our bunk beds for the night, the one started a conversation with us. He is a pediatrician who grew up under communism and witnessed the transition to democracy. He said under communism at least everybody had enough, not a lot, but everyone got by. He preferred the capitalism and democracy he now lived under, but was upset by the extreme wealth and extreme poverty that now existed in his country. His English was very limited, but his search for a word to describe an idea usually proved fruitful, although often he would have to restart a sentence, changing the structure to match the words he could recall. About 10:45 pm, we agreed the conversation was interesting, but it was time to sleep.
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