Innsbruck, under the Nordkette

The 10:40 Railjet to Vienna, the one I'd booked us onto as far as Innsbruck, came in with its first-class cars further down the Perron than I'd expected, and we did the small undignified shuffle along it with two bags while the board counted down the minutes we didn't have to spare.

The first stretch out of Zürich is the good one, and I'd argued for the left side: the Zürichsee, then the Walensee with the cliffs dropping straight into it. Then the thing nobody warns you about at Buchs, where the train stops at the border and the loco changes ends, so you spend the rest of the run facing backwards. We clipped the corner of Liechtenstein and settled in for the long pull up toward the Arlberg.

Through the Arlberg, down the Inn

I'd half expected the Arlberg to be a dramatic open climb over a pass, but it isn't; you go up through the valley, the windows go black for about five minutes in the long summit tunnel, and you come out at St. Anton in completely different weather, the Perron full of people in ski boots clattering like horses. Then the slow drop down the Inn valley into Innsbruck, dead on time. The Inn ran alongside us for the last bit, pale milky grey-green, just cold water carrying its sediment down toward the Danube.

The Nordkette sits right behind the old town and you can't really not look at it: a limestone wall, sheer, white that day with fresh snow, and it does something inconvenient to February. By mid-afternoon the valley floor is already in shadow while the peaks up top still catch the light. We walked into the Altstadt around three with the lanes dim and blue-cold, maybe two degrees, while somewhere far above the rock was still pink. They said Föhn was coming the next morning, which is probably why it felt mild for the date.

The Goldenes Dachl is smaller than its photos and better for it, a gilded oriel hung off the corner of a building, the copper shingles glinting even under a grey sky. Maximilian had it built as a box to watch the square from, which is a wonderfully extravagant brief, and I rather love him for it. Round the corner in the Hofkirche he turns up again, sort of: a great black tomb built for him, ringed by bronze figures cast larger than life, ancestors and heroes standing guard in two solemn rows. The catch is that the tomb is empty. He died down in Wiener Neustadt and was buried there, and never came back to the box his own court built. The locals call the bronzes the Schwarze Mander, the black men. You come in off a grey afternoon, your eyes adjust, and there they all are in the half-dark, taller than you, mid-stride, and it stops you a second longer than you expect.

A coffee, and a funicular I'd misjudged

Café Munding, just west in the old town, claims to be Tyrol's oldest Konditorei and bakes some of its cakes to recipes two centuries old. I normally roll my eyes at these heritage claims, but the Apfelstrudel was very good, the pastry thin and not soggy underneath, and the coffee held its own. The night before I'd had a Tiroler Gröstl off Hofgasse, fried potato and meat and onion in a pan, exactly the stodge a cold day asks for.

I'd assumed the funicular went up from the station. It doesn't; the Hungerburgbahn starts over by the Kongresshaus, a short walk from the old town, with those Zaha Hadid stations like white shapes half-melted in the cold. It climbs over the Inn on a curved bridge, and from the top you'd take two more cable cars to reach the ridge proper. We didn't go up the rest, this time. We stood at the top with the cold coming off the rock, looked down at the river threading through the town, and went back to find a Beizli before the light went.

— Tobi