Road bike tour in Lower Austria - With the road bike through Austria's Bucklige Welt
Have you got a bar?" is a question that should not be asked by those suffering from hunger pangs. At least not when cycling with locals in the Bucklige Welt. Then it can happen that your Lower Austrian friends don't pull anything nutritious out of their jersey pockets to satisfy their hunger, but instead head straight for the next ramp. For example, the one up the 896 metre high Kühriegel. Leaving the village of Krumbach, the little road swings up past stately farms, steeper and longer than expected. At the top, you need an energy bar even more than at the bottom. Just don't ask for it again, because in the Bucklige Welt, the bars stack up one after the other like waves on the ocean.
Kaiserriegel, Reitriegel, Glanznriegel - and Andreas Ottner knows them all. The Krumbacherhof landlord gets on the saddle when work in the kitchen allows. Often on his mountain bike, and more and more often on his racing bike. The difference between road biking and mountain biking in the Bucklige Welt, where the side roads are more like tarmac trails, is not that big. "It's best to always expect one more hill," Andreas recommends as we review our day's tour over a cold beer. That's right, I was fooled more than once on the way. From almost every direction, I could see the twin towers of the Maria Schnee pilgrimage church perched on the Lichtenegger Höhe. But the proximity was deceptive. When we finally reached it, we had crossed five or six valleys and travelled three times the distance as the crow flies, including a few "Zupfer", as the Lower Austrian racing cyclists refer to poisonous ramps. Obviously because the calves are really sore afterwards.
You can download the full travel report and GPS data for these tours below:
- Tour 1: To Semmering (85 kilometres, 1,900 metres in altitude, max. 12% gradient)
- Tour 2: Undulating pilgrimage (80 kilometres, 1,350 vertical metres, max. 15% gradient)
- Tour 3: Seiten-Wechsel (71 kilometres, 1,360 vertical metres, max. 9% gradient)
- Tour 4: Over all bars (96 kilometres, 1,880 metres in altitude, max. 13% gradient)
In Lower Austria, the Bucklige Welt, also known as the "Land of 1,000 Hills", stretches south from Wiener Neustadt to Burgenland and Styria. The border with Hungary runs to the east. In the west, beyond the Pittental valley, the Wechselgebirge and Semmering mountains rise up: these mountain ranges are often still counted as part of the Bucklige Welt. In contrast to the typical Alpine foothills (such as the Allgäu), there is hardly any livestock farming in the Bucklige Welt, but mainly fruit growing (apples and pears). In the hills themselves there are only a few, mostly smaller villages with barely more than 2,000 inhabitants. Larger communities can be found along the northern edge of the Vienna Basin.
The region could be described as a mixture of Alpine foothills and low mountain ranges. Accordingly, the tours are characterised by typical sawtooth profiles. They are mainly between 400 and 800 metres above sea level. In the direction of the Wechselgebirge and Semmering, the route goes up to almost 1,000 metres. Narrow side roads are common and you are more likely to meet a farmer on a tractor than a car. The main traffic flows through the Pittental valley (A 2 motorway) and towards Semmering. The gradients on some of the ramps should not be underestimated, and the sheer number of hills can be gruelling.
