#brenner pass

Brenner Pass (German: Brennerpass [ˈbʁɛnɐpas]; Italian: Passo del Brennero [ˈpasso del ˈbrɛnnero]) is a mountain pass through the Alps which forms the border between Italy and Austria. It is one of the principal passes of the Eastern Alpine range and has the lowest altitude among Alpine passes of the area.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Pass

🗺️If you ever get the chance to cross the Brenner Pass by train, take it immediately and ask questions later.

We boarded in Munich and rolled all the way down to the fabulous floating fever dream that is Venice, watching the Alps unfold outside the window like Europe showing off for several uninterrupted hours. Even the light rain couldn’t dull the scenery. In fact, it gave the mountains that dramatic “brooding postcard” effect.

The First Class tickets cost us just €60, which still feels faintly illegal considering the experience. The onboard food was genuinely excellent too: chilled beers, properly hot coffee, and a slice of Linzer cake so good I briefly considered missing Venice and simply living on the train forever.

A spectacular journey from pretzels to pasta, one railway carriage at a time.

Part I: The Brenner Pass (Altitude & Appetites)

Leaving Munich, the train began its ascent into the Brenner Pass. For a man accustomed to having a tunnel ceiling six inches from his forehead, the sheer verticality of the Alps felt like a personal affront.

The Scenery: Towering, snow-capped peaks being effortlessly majestic. Classic Alps move, really.

The Triumph: I secured an onboard sandwich that was, shockingly, quite reasonably priced. A rare victory for the rail-bound traveller; usually, such things cost a king’s ransom once you hit the clouds.

The Milestone: Reaching the summit at 1,371 metres. I felt a bit lightheaded, though that may have been the altitude or the sheer adrenaline of finding a cheap baguette.

Part II: Venice (Three Fabulous Days of Salt and Splendour)

We ended the rail journey with three days in Venice, a city that is quite clearly a floating theatrical set designed specifically to confuse me.

The Navigation: A "beautifully confused" labyrinth where every bridge promises a shortcut and delivers a dead end. I spent forty minutes looking for a chemist and somehow ended up in a glass-blowing workshop.

The Emotional Milestone: Sitting by the Grand Canal at dusk, watching the gondolas bob like a group of overdressed crows. It was a moment of superlative peace, only slightly marred by the price of a small bottle of water which cost more than my first car.

The Exit: After seventy-two hours, I mastered the 'vaporetto stance'- the specific lean required to avoid being pushed into the lagoon by an over-eager tour group.

Venice is a tragedy of beauty, and leaving her felt like waking up from a particularly vivid fever dream. Back to the Underground soon, but for now, the overground has truly outdone itself.

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Pyjama touring – Innsbruck and Munich

This was to be a marathon day with breakfast in Italy, lunch in Austria and dinner in Germany. It’s really no surprise that in the travel industry this is what is known as a pyjama tour (no time to change out of your pj’s before you’re off again)!

Much better if you can take it more slowly, but what the heck, it’s certainly an experience, although shouldn’t be attempted by the faint-hearted or…

Coming face-to-face with the refugee crisis

Living so close to the Brenner Pass, it was inevitable that I was going to come into contact with the refugee crisis at some point this year. However, I never thought that it would genuinely involve me.

Last week there was a parent-teacher day at school, which meant I got the day off. Making the most of this free time, I got on the train and casually popped over the border to Innsbruck for a bit of exploring (and shopping!). It was my first time benefitting from Schengen, and I loved it. I got on the train, halfway through the journey a police officer popped his head into the carriage and asked to see my passport, he handed it back, and I carried on my merry way.

On the way back, I had to change at Brenner and had a half an hour wait. I was surrounded by snow that must have been at least ankle deep, so made it my mission to find some form of warmth in the form of a waiting room.  When I got there, I saw there were three Alpini (Italian army soldiers) waiting in there as well. This is nothing unusual, you see the odd soldier on most days around here, and I was stood at the nearest Italian train station to the Austrian border, after all.

It wasn’t until I sat down that I realised there were two more people in this room; a Muslim woman and a man about my age who appeared to be her son. The soldiers were attempting (and I mean attempting) to question this pair in English, but to no avail. I realised the best thing I could do was keep my head down, so I buried my nose in my Facebook newsfeed at the earliest opportunity.

After a couple of minutes, one of the soldiers started to make his way over to me. My first thought was that he was going to ask me to leave, but no. In Italian, he asked me if I spoke German. I responded yes, I did. He asked me if I understood Italian. Again, I said that I could. Then, he asked me if I could translate for them. This definitely wasn’t included in any of the millions of university pre-departure talks or handouts.

I tried my best. I’ve done English-Italian and English-German translation before, it’s one of the core parts of my degree, but I’d never had to completely get rid of my mother tongue and try to go back and forth between my two weaker languages. Nevertheless, I persevered, with one of the Italian soldiers feeding me questions, which I would then have to translate into German for the lady. She would respond to me, and I’d have to turn that into Italian for the soldiers to continue.

It’s only describable as an incredible experience. I physically felt myself block the English part of my brain, and for the next half an hour, my only thoughts were German or Italian. Just at the point when I was wondering if this whole year abroad thing was actually doing my languages any good. 

I don’t know where they were from, but my first guess was Syria. The woman told me that she’d been living in Germany for the past three years. Her son had now come over, and she was trying to get back to Germany with him, but due to him having the wrong kind of passport and the current political atmosphere in Europe, they’d ended up stuck in Brenner.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naïve and I do understand both sides of the debate. If we didn’t accept anyone, it would be a catastrophe, genocide. If we accepted every single person who washed up on European shores, then it’s inevitable that the odd mentally-unstable extremist would be in the mix. However, it wasn’t until I met this woman that I realised how blind I’d been to the whole situation.

Britain has some of the best border defences in the whole world. Not because of how many patrols we have or how much money we spend on defence, but because we’re a bloody island. We’re automatically given an advantage over a lot of nations when it comes to who we do and don’t let in, simply because they can’t just walk over! As a result, my own opinions about the refugee crisis have been able to sit above the clouds. I’d watch the 10pm news, think “oh dear, how tragic”, and then carry on with my life. I might have donated a coat here or there, but the situation never once affected my day-to-day life.

After meeting this poor lady and her son last week, I can’t get them out of my head. If you saw the blankness in their eyes, the numbness, you would know that they had seen things no person should ever have to experience. You would ask yourself why the hell hadn’t we let more of these people in? She explained to me that neither the Italian nor the Austrian authorities wanted to deal with them, so they were simply being bumped back and forth across the border. Once, when they arrived in Austria, they’d taken her son in for questioning, taken his fingerprints, photographed him, and sent him and his mother straight back into Italy with no explanation.

She (because I don’t even know her name!) asked me what she was supposed to do. I relayed the question to the soldiers, and they said that they couldn’t stay in Italy, they just had to get on the next train to Austria. The only way they could have stayed in Italy would have been to declare asylum, but you have to do that in the first country you arrive in, and that wouldn’t have allowed the pair to continue to Germany.

The awful thing is that they were so close! From Innsbruck to Munich it’s just two hours on the train. Just two hours. Yet every time they arrived in Austria they were sent backwards.

I’m sorry that this blog doesn’t contain my usual lightheartedness or film metaphors. I do want to be able to give this a happy ending, but the fact is I don’t know the ending. The lady and her son were put on the next train to Austria, and were told they would be able to get to Germany that way. I don’t know if they eventually got there, or whether they were bounced back again. I got on my own train and headed back into the Puster Valley.

When I got to work the next day, I told some of the other English teachers about my experience, and they weren’t surprised at all. This lady and her son were in no means the first, or the last, to arrive in Brenner in that situation.

I’ve been left with a lot of questions and not many answers. You can call me too liberal, too sensitive. Maybe I should just mind my own business. But the fact is that if Britain had been torn apart by political disarray, war and extremism, I’d pray every second of every day that other countries would help.

Until next time,