The Storybook Town of Hallstatt

After I had finished in Salzburg, my next stop on my travels was in the tiny town of Hallstatt in the Lake District of Austria. When you arrive there the train station is actually accross the lake from the town, so you have to catch a ferry over there. I had bought my winter clothes just in time cause it was raining and freezing there.

The town is a tiny little town. There are only 1,100 residents. It is built right up between the water and the mountain so there really is no room for it to grow. It is really cute though. It reminds me of one of those small east coast towns that you would see in a movie in the fall cause all of the leaves were changning colors here too. There is exactly 1 hostel in the town, 1 bank, 2 churches, 1 grocery store, about 5 restaurants, and 1 main square. It was real cute.

I dropped my stuff off and headed off to the Salt mines that it is famous for. They are the oldest continuously mined salt mines in the world, being in operation for 7,000 years. You have to take up a furnicular that is all glass so you can see all of the trees below you as you are headed up. Once I got there, I had to walk up about 20 minutes in the rain, but it was really pretty cause there was a stream running alongside the path surrounded by all of these trees. It felt a bit like I was in a forest.

In the mine it is guided tours and I really had a great time. You have to put on this miners outfit and mine was bright green. Having that over my winter clothes I looked like a big green marshmellow. Then we set off on the tour. They took us through levels 6 and 7 of the mine of which there are 12. They explain about the history of the mine, what is still going on there and the legend of the Salt Man who was found there. He was this perfectly preseved body found in the 1700s there. We also got to do down these 2 hige wood slides the way the miners used to go before they got high tech and built lifts. That was great! They took our pictures and recorded our speeds of which mine was 28 something kilometers per hour (do not ask me what that is in mph cause I am not good with the whole conversion to our screwy system from the metric system).

After that, I headed into town and explored it. There were a few little shops, a main square, a waterfall that drops off in the back of the town, and a couple of restaurants. Since I was freezing and it was 2 in the afternoon, I decided it was time for a warm up and lunch, so I found myself a cafe and got some hot chocolate and this dumpling salad thing. Then after I had warmed up, I headed over the see the Catholic church there. This churches claim to fame is that the cemetary is so small there that they were running out of room in the past so they started digging up the graves hundreds of years ago and made this house where they painted the skulls with designs and placed them in there with the persons name and birth and death date. It was a little creepy cause there were so many of them stacked up in this little house, but they do not do that anymore. The last person placed int here was in 1983 and that was only by special request. I was surprised though cause the graves there in the cemetary were really pretty. Nothing like our graves here in the US. They all had really pretty and different markers, a lot of which were wrought iron designs and each plot had tons of different flowers actually planted on it so that they grew year round. That was kinda good to see.

Later that day, I meet up with some people from my last hostel and we went to the only hostel in town at 4, when it opened, to get a room. There were 6 of us and luckily they had room for us cause it is the off season. It was kinda funny though cause all of them were from Japan and China and spoke extremely broken English so we did a lot of communicating with hand gestures and acting things out if I was not understanding them or they were not understanding me. That is always fun!