Salzburg, Austria

Fri 6^th - Sat 7^th June

Doe, a deer, a female deer! Ray, a drop of golden sun! There's something about Salzburg that makes it inescapable to skip down the street humming the Sound of Music tunes.

But why is it that so many tourists know Salzburg as the home of The Sound of Music when it's real claim to fame should be it's most famous musical inhabitant? I knew Mozart was Austrian, but somewhere I missed the news that he was born in Salzburg.

Well they certainly don't waste any time making sure you're well aware of this historical fact once you get there. You'd have to be blind, deaf and lost your sense of taste to miss it upon arriving in Salzburg. Every third cafe is named after him, every tourist shop has a cardboard cut-out of him standing on the street, his operas are piped into the open air and they even sell Mozart chocolates, ice cream and liqueurs. The apartment where he was born has been turned into a museum that's impossible to get a photo of without a mob of tourists in the foreground and men dressed as Mozart walk the streets trying to sell you tickets to performances of his operas.

Despite the obvious commercialism of the place, the Mozart museum is actually really well done. Instead of a typical display of his belongings behind glass, the curator has turned each room into an artistic expression to help understand Mozart as a person. For example, his bedroom has a baby's cradle in the centre of the room, with a very eerie porcelain doll that's dressed as a baby with a 30-year old's face. The scene is lit with pale blue lighting making the figure look ghostly and dead, but it's supposed to represent Mozart as a baby and how his music is timeless and ageless – just like the doll. Eerie but memorable!

Another room was turned completely upside down, with paintings of Salzburg at the time of Mozart's life hung upside down on the walls. The ground is painted like a ceiling complete with the lighting in the floor, and the ceiling has an upside down 3-D model of the city. It represents Mozart's prankster personality and how he often wrote his music upside down and signed his name as 'Gnagflow' – Wolfgang spelled backwards.

The museum is spread over two floors with each room following similar examples of a historical building using art to reflect the lives of its famous occupants. I definitely recommend it, even if you aren't a Mozart fan.

But the Mozart mania doesn't stop there. There's also one of the world's most renowned musical colleges built in his name, a large square in town called Mozartplatz and the annual Salzburg Festival – the largest and most important opera and theatre festival in Europe – was created in his memory.

Once we'd digested the Mozart mayhem, we focused on the architectural treasures by climbing to the top of the Hohensalzburg – a fortress and network of towers overlooking the city from the surrounding steep hills.

Exhausted and looking forward to the longest cycle back to the campsite yet, we decided to call it a day and head home, where we bumped into our kiwi friends! They had jump started our van back in Innsbruck and were staying just a few pitches over, so we invited them over to share a bottle of wine. With all of us so desperate for social interaction and the excitement of swapping van tips and stories, we finally crawled into bed around 2am much to the frustration of our neighbours.

View Salzburg Photo Album