Just steps away is the Bavarian Schnitzelhaus with its Havana Room serving up cigars and martinis. The Yodelling Woodcarver's small store may be the most authentic thing here, given that its shelves are lined with elaborate wooden carvings handcrafted by local Adi Unterberger, legendary here for his yodelling talents as well. To see a town in need of a new identity, all you have to do is stroll Kimberley's Platzl, where a Bing Crosby tune is wafting past stores ranging from the Mozart House Pub & Grill to the Bavarian Sports & Home Hardware. I'm the only one here who has an authentic Alpine building. "It's a Walt Disney Bavaria as it is now – it's more funny than anything else. But we're in the Purcells," says Schwarzenberger exploding into laughter. They say it's the Bavarian town in the Rockies. "They say we have the biggest cuckoo clock in the world, but it's not. It wasn't long until they were serving up hearty helpings of schnitzel and schnapps.īut even Schwarzenberger has grown tired of all of the Bavarian kitsch – as have many of the locals who believe it's time for Kimberley, now a booming ski and golf destination in B.C.'s picturesque interior, to reinvent itself once again. It helped that he and his wife brought with them two gigantic crates containing a centuries-old Alpine house and cider barn, which they painstakingly rebuilt into the Old Bauernhaus restaurant. Schwarzenberger arrived here from Germany more than 15 years after the makeover and found himself in some strange version of home. Locals shut the main drag to cars, constructed a giant cuckoo clock in the midst of the new pedestrian mall and refaced turn-of-the-century shops with peaked facades and enough bric-a-brac to create a kind of gingerbread village.Īs the Sullivan Mine died, a tourist town was born – complete with an annual accordion festival, a yodelling woodcarver and a city hall that could double for the von Trapp family homestead.
7,000) which 35 years ago did a Matterhorn-sized makeover aimed at turning what was then a dying lead and zinc mining community into "the Bavarian town in the Rockies." So too, it seems, is the unusual history of this tiny town (pop. "It must be the belt," local fix-it man Tony Schwarzenberger says later when told that Hans appears to be on his last lederhosened legs. Suddenly, what sounds like a badly scratched record crackles to life and a Bavarian tune blasts the length of the Platzl as Hans – beer stein firmly in hand – belatedly comes out to play.
Even the young girl who has just put a quarter in the clock and has been waiting patiently for its tiny wooden door to swing open seems ready to give up and head for the hills. It's late afternoon and there's hardly a soul on Kimberley's pedestrian-only main street, the Platzl. But then, so has this former mining town and Hans' humble home, touted as the biggest cuckoo clock in the world.
KIMBERLEY, B.C.–Happy Hans has definitely seen happier days.
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