The first thing my mom said to me on listening to a video I had made about our trip around Hallstatt, was “Where is Hallstatt?”. Apparently she had never heard of it before and neither had I until just before we left for our trip. For the record, it is in Austria.
I’m sure a lot of other people do this, but I just love to Google the prettiest towns or cities in the country I am going to and then try to make a plan to visit them all. It doesn’t always work out, of course, but at least I sort of have a plan to start off with and I’m not just making it up as I go along.
So when I Googled prettiest city in Austria – Hallstatt came up and I fell in love. Not only were there these perfect, postcard views, but all the houses right on the water just looked magical. Even more so in the winter just covered in snow.
Of course, visiting a city is not always the romantic, relaxed time that you think it is going to be and unfortunately for us; we found that in Austria. We had no idea at the time that it was such a popular tourist destination, but we were just grateful that we couldn’t afford the 5 star accommodation that seemed the norm in the city itself. Instead, we decided to stay in a town (Obertraun) 10 minutes down the road in an Airbnb apartment.
We walked from the train station to our accommodation and when we arrived were told that unfortunately our apartment that we booked was undergoing some construction, but not to worry, they had another house just down the road where we could stay. We would only have to walk a few streets over, since our host had arrived on a bicycle and couldn’t really give us a lift. 🙂
The house was better than the apartment I had booked, so I wasn’t really worried at all and the best part about it – the view out the lounge windows. It was all mountains and sitting there in an old wicker chair, with a cup of coffee and pastry in hand felt magical. It was pretty much the only time we had a break from all the other tourists as well, which was a miracle in itself. Even though we knew we would have to walk to the train station, catch the train and then a ferry into Hallstatt, this didn’t worry us in the least.
What we didn’t know about Hallstatt could have filled a book, but boy did we find out about everything within 10 minutes of our ferry arriving. As it turns out, Hallstatt has been a salt mining town for over 7000 years and the main sight to see was the Salt World and Sky Mountain. I love going into mines and it particularly appealed because it was like 39 degrees outside and I knew it would be way cooler inside the mountain.
What we loved about the mine tour was sliding down these old fashioned wooden slides and taking this small train back out of the mountain. We felt like little kids again. Even the oldest in our group decided to take the slides down and screamed and laughed all the way down. It was way more fun than we were expecting and ended up being almost a full day activity. What with the mine tour taking over an hour, then walking around Sky Mountain to see the most amazing views over Hallstatt, the two towns surrounding it and that Hallstatt Lake in the middle of it all. The huge salt shop afterwards was too much fun and I kept picking up things I wanted to buy. Needless to say with our restriction on luggage and money, I bought nothing.
Since we only ever spent 2 nights in most cities, we knew there wouldn’t be time to go up another mountain which was closer to our accommodation and see the Five Fingers – walkways at the top of the mountain with viewpoints. We actually regretted staying longer, but rather visiting other cities and just doing a day visit to Hallstatt. One day was enough. You know it’s bad, when you can’t even walk down the street without running into hundreds of people. I actually started to feel a bit sorry for the people who lived in Hallstatt. Imagine trying to go about your daily life, or just get to work through crowds of tourists.
Tourists aside, it is beautiful. Apparently China thought it was so beautiful that they created an exact replica of the town. Having seen it, I can totally understand why. Around every corner seems to be another amazing viewpoint or flower box to ogle over. And I do so love flower boxes.
After Hallstatt though, we made the mistake of thinking we could just spend one night in another Austrian city. I had picked this other city for the exact reason I picked Hallstatt. I had heard it was also very pretty. So, we packed up our stuff and headed to the train station once more. For once I’d actually booked a hotel, mainly because I couldn’t find an Airbnb and it was also the cheapest option.
I’d even planned ahead to see that the train would come in at a specific time and then we would catch the bus up to our accommodation, because I knew it was a 40 minute walk. The only thing the internet failed to tell me was that it is a really little town (Grunau im Almtal) and the buses don’t actually run on a Sunday. So there we sat at the bus stop trying to figure out what to do next. We couldn’t really phone a taxi and probably wouldn’t be able to afford it anyhow, so what could we do. We walked.
We walked and we walked. Pretty much on the side of what felt like a highway because it was the main road in and out of town and cars kept on flying by us, while we dragged our suitcases up a hill. It felt like we walked for days and the sun was almost setting when we finally arrived at our hotel.
We needed a shower. We needed a clean place to sleep. We needed food. The first two were easy enough, but the third not so much. Turns out that they didn’t really offer room service and the Restaurant’s kitchen had closed about an hour earlier. Luckily they offered to make us some pizza or we would have gone hungry.
It was so incredibly humid and we couldn’t open the windows because all these bugs would come in as if we were camping instead of staying in a really great budget hotel. We tried not to think about our long walk back to the train station the next day, but it really weighed on us.
So, the next morning we got up and went to breakfast which was luckily included in the room rate. What we didn’t realise was that if something got finished like for example the orange juice, no one was replacing it and also no one said anything. We came across this a lot on our travels and we weren’t entirely sure why. It was like no one ever wanted to make a fuss. Things would happen, people would be upset, but never say anything. That is definitely not the South African way.
We spent the morning dipping our feet in the ice blue water outside and just relaxing before we knew we would have to walk back. We were lucky enough on checkout though to have a lovely lady working there who would give us a lift to the train station, as the bus wasn’t coming again. She actually told us all about their town, the surrounding attractions and what we should come back and do. She will never know how much she helped us out on that day and actually made us want to return to Austria and see so much more of it. Maybe this time we’ll just rent a car. 🙂
