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Bohemian rhapsody: touring from Vienna to Budapest

John Borthwick revels in history, sublime art and architectural wonders on a tour from Vienna to Budapest.

Austria shrank from an empire to the size of a postcard in just one war. World War I left the Austro-Hungarian empire reduced to an area about one-third the size of Victoria but somehow Vienna, its gilded, Habsburg dynasty capital, survived mostly intact.

I start my trans-Bohemia jaunt, a coach tour, amid Vienna streets crowded with memory and a minefield of cliches — strudel, art and marzipan palaces, coffee, opera and Gustav Klimt.

Adolf Hitler once miserably roamed this elegant town, whose luminaries include Mahler, Freud, Mozart and Beethoven. Vienna has a stupendous museum quarter where art looks forward as well as a long way back. One gem that does both is the Albertina Museum, where I strike it lucky in a major exhibition of Albrecht Durer’s drawings with their infinite purity of line.

For sheer jaw-dropping grandeur, however, nothing beats the art-with-everything pile known as Schoenbrunn Palace, the Habsburgs’ obscenely opulent summer digs. Its most famed resident was Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) whose rococo living room, the Millions Room (“because that’s what it cost”), made of precious rosewood and gilt, would be reason alone to visit. And yet the Millions Room is just one of 1441 astonishing salons, including the Great Gallery and the Porcelain Room, most of them encrusted with Bohemian crystal and Belgian tapestries.

Rich fare such as this requires a serious antidote. I find mine on mid-city Kohlmarkt Street where the venerable Demel pastry shop and chocolatier — former purveyors to the Austro-Hungarian court — has traded since 1857. Mark Twain reckoned that, when compared to Viennese coffee, “all other coffee is fluid poverty”. The same might apply to their other drinks. I am consumed by a Demel hot chocolate of such silken density that the powdered, anaemic drizzle so often served back in Oz will never again suffice.

Coffee, as a Turkish proverb says, should be “black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love”. Which is a tall order for your average tats-and-earring barista to conjure up, although the grand coffee houses of Bohemia do come close.

Here is caffeine spiked with legend, one of which says that Vienna’s coffee obsession started in 1693. Having repelled an early Turkish bid to join the European Union (so to speak), the Viennese found several bags of curious dark beans that the retreating Ottomans had abandoned.

They brewed the beans and the result was a pot of coffee that — fast forward — eventually blossomed into a coffee culture heady with art, intrigue and even psychoanalysis. Its apogee was from the 1870s through the 1930s, when Vienna’s classic kaffeehauser — such as Demel, Sacher, Landtmann and the Central (all still operating) — served a brainstorm clientele that included, for starters, Freud, Lenin and Trotsky. No wimpy decaf-skim-soy topped with a marshmallow for these quantum-leapers.

I step into the Cafe Central, a world of marble columns, bentwood chairs, hat stands and Habsburg mysteries and mistresses, plus a cake cabinet rich enough to rot an empire’s molars. The apple strudel swims indecorously in a sea of yellow custard but it is light and delicious on the tongue. My starker kaffee loses nothing in translation — it is indeed stark, black and as strong as life, death, hell and love. The waitress doesn’t like me but with coffee this good, who cares?



We’re coach touring in style from Austria through the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, the heartlands of old Bohemia. It’s a manicured, mid-summer landscape of blazing yellow canola fields, wind farms and Christmas tree forests.

Entering the Czech Republic, we wander the almost fairytale Renaissance town of Cesky Krumlov and then roll on to golden Prague with its skyline aurora of spires, domes and Gothic towers. A quick list of the Czech capital’s historic celebs includes King Wenceslas (he of the Christmas carol), artist Alphonse Mucha and novelist Franz Kafka. The latter pair are ubiquitous, with their images, namesake streets and tourist cafes, all over the Old Town. If they didn’t exist, Czech tourism would have had to invent them.

Both men also have dedicated museums, as do numerous other curious obsessions, such as the Old Town museums dedicated respectively to torture, chocolate and sex machines — surely there is a connection?

Prague’s icons deserve their fame. Its 1200-year old castle-on-steroids covers more than 7ha. The tourist-thronged promenade of Charles Bridge funnels its walkers through a gauntlet of saintly statues and heraldic flags. And at the Gothic-rococo-Renaissance fantasy land of Old Town Square, gawkers gather hourly before its wondrous timepiece, the 600-year-old astronomical clock.

The crowd gives a Pavlovian cheer as a trumpeter high in the battlements heralds the hour with a fanfare blast. Beneath the giant clock face an ancient apparatus jerks alive with puppet-like saints and sinners shuffling on and off this mortal coil. We gather here for the spectacle as, I imagine, Prague’s medieval citizens once reverently did, although might we, as totally-digital ironists, now view their instructional tableau as a sort of moral cuckoo clock?

I climb the tower above the clock to photograph the tiled, spired and domed panorama of alleys, palaces, 17 bridges and numberless secrets that Prague reveals from above.



On descending, I join a more sobering tour of the old Jewish Quarter — home to 118,000 people before the nazi era — and its psychedelic, Escher-esque Spanish Synagogue. The quarter’s ancient graveyard is packed with 12,000 headstones, below which lie many centuries of Jewish souls.

In Slovakia we overnight beside the Danube River at its castellated, musical capital, Bratislava. Here you can stroll streets near where Beethoven composed his Moonlight Sonata and Liszt performed at just nine years of age — although both were trumped by kid Mozart, who played here in 1762 at age six. The town square is a beautiful synopsis of architectural styles, from 13th century Gothic to 20th century Art Nouveau and almost everything in-between.

We cross into Hungary and take a quick look at Esztergom, Visegrad and Szentendre — more forests, castles and cathedrals, all washed with disputatious history.

Our final destination, Budapest, spans the Danube with its twin cities of hilly Buda and flat Pest. The contrasts continue throughout the town, exemplified in its dandified Habsburg palaces and the counterpoint hangover of sullen, Soviet-era structures, and in Budapest’s dining options — veal paprikash or Burger a la King? The background music might be Liszt or, a few paces away, a strummer doing goulash Cash but, surprisingly, I never hear the Blue Danube Waltz.

A century ago Budapest’s coffee houses, like Vienna’s, were magnets for high and low society, writers and revolutionaries. I climb a staircase to the classic emporium of that era, Lotz Cafe.

The entrance today is through a bookshop that gives no hint at what’s to come. Suddenly you’re in not so much a coffee palace as a coffee cathedral, a baroque-rococo confection of vaulted ceilings, mirrors, chandeliers and swirling frescos.

It’s like stepping directly from Dymocks into the Sistine Chapel. Will the barista be a bishop — or more importantly, can His Eminence do a decent macchiato?



Elsewhere, Budapest’s actual cathedral, St Stephen’s, looms in enormous, domed opulence.

From it, we follow the long, Parisian-style Andrassy Boulevard to Heroes Square, where our guide runs through a list of his favourite, most-famous-ever Hungarians: Biro (of the pen), Rubik (of the cube), Estee Lauder, two Belas (Lugosi and Bartok), 22 sundry saints and 13 Nobel laureates.

And Miss Hungary 1936, the flirtatious Hollywood starlet, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

I look around the square where there loom 14 massive bronze statues of the official, all-time greatest Hungarians.

There are Magyar warrior heroes, crowned kings and sainted bishops — but nowhere can I see the world- conquering biro or Rubik’s intriguing cube.

And where is the glamorous, much-married Zsa Zsa?

Statue or none, she will be forever remembered for quipping: “I am a marvellous housekeeper: every time I leave a man I keep his house”.

John Borthwick was a guest of Insight Vacations and Emirates.

FACT FILE

Insight Vacations’ nine- day The Bohemian tour, with stays in Vienna, Prague, Krakow and Budapest, is priced from $2313 per person (valid to April 30). insightvacations.com.au.

Emirates flies from Perth to Vienna via Dubai. emirates.com/au.