Munich

The riders have rolled over the line to complete stage five of the Tour de Fat and we are now enjoying a well-earned rest day. Of course, those of you familiar with Tour de Fat Edition One will know that the rest days come a lot sooner than those in the real Tour de France. I would argue that this is only fair; after all, we are carrying a little extra weight around the waist compared to those guys , commonly known as a beer gut. We're not doing ourselves any favours either considering our current location: Munich!

Munich, the home of beer and... well, beer. We arrived on a damp but warm Saturday morning having spent Friday night in the fabulously comfortable Park Hotel in Traunstein and proceeded straight to a beer garden to drink beer from buckets with handles and eat whole domestic animals such as pigs and chickens roasted and served with tortured cabbage. This carried on into the night as Germany gave Portugal a football lesson and the four of us awoke this morning with vague memories of getting back to the hostel in the wee small hours of Sunday...

Friday's stage five had taken us from Attersee through the foothills of the Austrian Alps and into Salzburg, the home of Mozart. Salzburg is undeniably a picture perfect town with an unrivalled collection of charming buildings topped with steeples and domes all nestled gently by the imperious Alps. Yet one can't help wondering whether it is worth visiting at all only to add to its tourist-horde woes. It is absolutely choked with tourists who all seem to graze on the sights in packs of two or three, one of whom is always scuffing along despondently, clearly having had enough Mozart Kugel to sink a boat. Choc and Jonnie visited the Mozart exhibition (apparently quite superficial) and I saw the inside of another hospital having the stitches in my foot checked on the orders of the doctor who had put them there some days before. As Salzburg slid into the distance behind us we decided that it would be better if it were restricted to tourists who had sweated blood and tears to get there, such as those who had cycled from Vienna to nominate a random example; it would certainly cut down on the congestion.

We will leave you here with some photos of the early days. There will be more, but it takes a software engineer to get them uploaded in these shitty cafes, so we'll do our best. Tomorrow the Tour resumes, heading towards Switzerland and taking us to our first real encounter with some serious climbs.

Cheers,
Choc, Jonnie, Dave and Tommy (DS).