Your next great ride

THE SALZKAMMERGUT, AUSTRIA

IMAGINE A LAND where everything works with Teutonic efficiency, but the locals are as laid-back and friendly as the Italians. A land with towering mountains and deep blue lakes, where cuckoo-clock wooden chalets stand amid well-tended green fields with miles of smooth, twisty roads, baked in blue-skied summer sun. But this isn’t a Mitteleuropean fantasy – it’s Austria.

The Salzkammergut is the area of mountains and lakes to the east of Salzburg – a fabulous city with a well-preserved medieval old town overlooked by a lofty schloss. But it’s the riding outside it that’s special. Austria’s a wealthy nation, which means the roads are well-maintained and – as already mentioned – they have the natural advantage of cutting through a spectacular landscape with the kind of steep hills and low mountains that encourage road builders to come up with ingeniously bendy solutions to the problem of getting from A to B.

It’s easy to string together a series of stunning rides – whether over the Postalm ski road (which carries a small toll), doing a lap of the Wolfgangsee, Attersee and Traunsee or exploring the back roads between the lakes and Mattighofen, home of KTM. But from a base in the Salzkammergut, it’s easy to head out to some of Austria’s classic passes – the Grossglockner, the Silvretta or across the border to Germany’s Berchtesgaden. That’s some of Europe’s finest riding, easily reached from one beautiful base – the kind of riding destination we fantasise about.