From pole dancing to pole climbing….
One thing I didn’t expect to find when I visited the Tyrolean resort of Ischgl was so many gourmet restaurants in one mountain village. This is a real foodie paradise, which boasts many fine restaurants including the Paznauner Stube in the five-star Trofana Royal Hotel, which was voted the best restaurant in the Tyrol this year.
The Stube’s highly decorated chef Martin Sieberer is the man behind Ischgl’s Culinary Jakobsweg, in which four Michelin-starred chefs from around Europe devise menus to be served in four of the region’s mountain huts throughout the summer months.
The village is also home to Austria’s youngest award-winning chef, 23-year-old Benjamin Parth, whose degustation menu at the Stuva Restaurant in the Hotel Yscla (run by his family) is a work of art, with dishes like mustard icecream and beetroot, goose liver with cherries and scallops with saffron and spinach. It costs €92 a head.
One of young chef Ben’s creations
For me though, the best meal we ate was at the four-star Hotel AlpVita Piz Tasna, cooked by the owner Roland Salner. As a keen biker, Roland promotes the property as a good base for motorcyclists to explore the region – Ischgl has bikes for hire for €60 a day and the village stages a Harley Davidson Mountain Rodeo every July – but it’s a comfortable place for any visitor, especially those who love their food.
Of course, you can only really justify devouring all these calorific meals if you’ve done some exercise first and when you’ve walked the 300kms of hiking trials and cycled the 1,200kms of bike tracks around Ischgl, there’s always the high-rope garden, a sort of mini-Go Ape, at the edge of the village.
It doesn’t look too much of a challenge from the ground, but the high-rope course is actually quite challenging. I found the climbing wall to reach the first platform quite tricky and spent much of my time clinging to telegraph posts in fear rather than swinging from the ropes. The high swing at the end – when you’re placed in a harness and hoiked several metres high before being released and plunging back to the ground – elicited squeals even from the big boys.
Actually, I thought the swing was the end, but that was until Stefan, our wiry instructor, pointed to a 10-metre telegraph pole and told me I was supposed to climb up and stand on the top for the finale. During the ski season in Ischgl I’d danced round a pole after a few too many beers in the Fire & Ice nightclub, but standing on the top of this one I got a much bigger round of applause, I can tell you.
Me on the pole, snapped by Andy Mossack (andymossack.co.uk)
Crystal and Inghams offer summer packages to Ischgl; easyJet flies to Innsbruck, 90-minutes away, and SWISS flies to Zurich, 3-hours away. I stayed at the Hotel AlpVita Piz Tasna.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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