Fussen, part II - Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau ii

I followed the mountain path and it brought me to the Neuschwanstein. Even though I didn't buy a ticket, visitors were allowed to go into the courtyard free of charge.

After that I followed the mountain trail downwards, attempted a shortcut, which led me through some very deserted woods. The rain got worse, and the descent took me the better half of thirty minutes, although I walked really fast. Getting caught in a deluge when you're in a forest mountain isn't the sort of holiday I'd planned. I can't really imagine climbing up here, not unless you have loads of time, and the weather's really good.

The picture's unfocused because I think my camera's gotten a bit broken from all that travelling and jiggling and getting wet. Can't focus properly when I zoom in anymore, unfortunately.

The bus back to Fussen took another tedious hour of waiting, and I hate this.

When I got back to Fussen, I went to this rather neat restaurant which sold really cheap food. This only cost me 4 euros and it was massive, I could barely finish it.

The frozen veg was excellent.

This was the restaurant, which was more of a shop which just happened to sell hot food.

By the time I'd finished it was around 5pm, and guess what? The skies cleared and the sun came out. Thanks a lot. I considered going back, actually, but decided that it was too much trouble. So instead I went back to the hostel and chilled with my roomies, who had also gone back, and we all commiserated about the awful weather.

There's actually a rather good view of the Neuschwanstein from our room window.

Can you see it? No? Well, then..

Another unfocused zoomed-in picture.

Got a bottle of vanilla milk from downstairs, and talked a bit more before turning in fairly early. I had a 6 o'clock train to catch early next morning, and from there, six hours to Frankfurt. In retrospect I really shouldn't have gone to Frankfurt, it was just so out of the way since I spent most of my time in Bavaria - but when I booked the plane tickets Frankfurt was one of the cheapest German airports to leave from (Munich was the most expensive, costing a whopping 150 euros) and at the time I had no idea how my route was going to go. As always, I booked my planes a month beforehand, and I actually didn't finish planning the itinerary till about two days before leaving for Budapest. Budapest! Gosh, it seems like centuries ago, now.

Fussen, part I - Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau i

I mentioned in my last entry that I was going to do lots more moaning about the ridiculously convoluted journey from Hallstatt, which took over 9 hours. It's 4am and I don't feel so much like moaning, but just to give an idea of my itinerary that day, allow me to replicate my schedule.

1. Ferry back to Hallstatt Hbf (times need to be checked). 
2. Then from Hallstatt (14:32) to Bad Ischl (14:53)
3. Bus 150 from Bad Ischl (14:24), arrives in Salzburg Hbf at 15:57.
4. Leave from Salzburg Hbf at 17:12, arrive in Munich at 19:06
5. Then depart from Munich platform 30 at 19:52, and arrive in Fussen at 21:58 via Bayern ticket.

Yeah headache. Something along those lines..

The bus journey back to Salzburg was unremarkable. It had somehow gotten rather hot as it neared midday, and the weather was impeccable. The train ride from Salzburg to Munich was extremely boring. I had about 40 minutes before my next train, and I hadn't really eaten anything the whole day (got a sandwich at Hallstatt Hbf but that was it), so I got something to eat at the Munich Hbf. Overpriced and teeming with people. I had some wurst, and as I was eating, a rather drunk man came up to me, hugged me while I tried to see if he was robbing me, and gave me a rose. Which was a rather sweet if odd gesture. 

I gave it to the somewhat dour-looking till girl who looked like she could use a pick-me-up, bought some rather overpriced fruit for the last leg of my journey, and got onto the train. It seemed like everyone there was drunk - loads of sheepish grins from random people, and the guy opposite me kept offering me crisps to eat. An American girl sitting in my carriage was so drunk that she had forgotten to buy her ticket, didn't know where her hotel was or where she currently was at all for that matter, and the ticket inspector, when he saw the state she was in, sat down very patiently with her and talked her though all the possible hotels she might be staying at and therefore her destination. He talked with her for three quarters of an hour; I watched the time. Patient man. Meanwhile, all the Germans in the carriage were listening and watching the girl make a total fool of herself and sniggering and commenting in German: look at that idiotic Amerikaner, hahaha.

I think I mentioned in the last entry how late it was when I arrived in Fussen. Fussen is one of those places that is just basically in the middle of nowhere, and I had to keep very late/early hours with it. The train station was pitch dark and would have been scary if not for the hordes of other East Asian tourists. As I mentioned, the hostel took quite a bit of finding, and then there was that annoying business with its door and management, or rather lack of.

No matter. I managed to get a bed to sleep in, and the next morning woke up along with the other people at about 9. Everyone was fresh and ready to go to the castles. The roomies were rather nice: an Aussie couple (AGAIN), a Thai boy a year older than me who was also studying in the UK, and was pretty funny. I actually rather miss him - he wasn't any great wit, nor was he particularly good-looking, but he was friendly, open and fun to be around, and had this rather hilarious gullibility to him. When we all came back in the evening, he told us how he'd accidentally broken the doorknob whilst showering (apparently it just came off in his hand), effectively trapping him in the bathroom, and he'd pounded on the door and shouted for help. A pair of Chinese girls had gone downstairs to alert the very irate landlord, who was the grumpy and unhelpful German I'd called the day before, and the landlord had proceeded to let him out with a scowl. The story made all of us roar.

But back to the morning, and the weather started out criminally well.

Caught a bus to the castles, which was actually only half an hour's journey, but waiting for the bus took aaaaaaaages. Menawhile the village of Fussen, just like Hallstatt, was awash with tourists, again mostly Asian.

When I arrived there the weather had turned into this. 

This was the Hohenschwangau, the "old" castle, built by King Maximilian II of Bavaria.

Of course, his son, Ludwig II, wanted to outdo him (Freud would have a field day), and I guess he did, because he built the Neuschwanstein.

I took the shuttlebus up to a vantage point for this picture, a bridge named St Mary's Bridge, or the Marienbrucke, also built by Ludwig II. The shuttlebus was a) another annoying thing that ran on schedule b) took me half an hour to queue for bus tickets and another to actually wait for the damn bus and c) incredibly stuffed with people. I kept getting poked by selfie poles.

Anyway, it was freezing up here and kind of boring (the castle's just a castle after all), it was really windy, and it had begun to drizzle.

But of course since I'd gone to all the trouble of getting up here, I figured I might just stay and take a hundred pictures which all looked the same.

I didn't want to take the shuttlebus down and figured I could walk. Weather got exponentially worse as I did.

I found this plaque really funny, for some reason.

TBC..

Hallstatt, part IV - Salzwelten ii

This entry has still somehow managed to score 19 pictures, but I don't really want to split it up anymore. The last entry left us climbing the rather steep pathway up to the Salzwelten, or maybe I'm just out of shape. I had to cut the whole thing pretty close; the Salzwelten can only be accessed via guided tours which have a fixed schedule, so it's not as if I could just sally in whenever I pleased. The tour was meant to end at 10:50, and considering the fact that the ferry left the pier at 11 o'clock sharp, I was actually rather nervous during the whole tour, which ruined it a bit for me. Getting from the pier to the Salzwelten had taken me about 40 minutes, although I had to factor in the ticket-buying, ambling, photographing and waiting for the funicular. The funicular, too, operated on a fixed schedule, which left me about one minute apiece for the journeys between each point of departure. Why does EVERYTHING have a operate to schedule here? I admire order, but this is too much. I wish they were like normal lifts, and you could just press a button or two and be on your way.

Anyway, the Salzwelten took a lot of prepping. First we had to wait for the tour to start, and we had to put on these overalls over our clothes that were either purple or orange. Apparently Salzwelten  is a popular destination for school trips (lucky Austrian and German kids) because my entire journey, starting from the Gnigl, was just overrun with teenagers. This was no different, and my tour group mainly comprised a large group of kids in their middle teens. There were only about 6 other mature visitors besides me, two of which were an elderly and rather pompous American couple who asked the tour guide, rather disparagingly,if they could wait till the next tour since they "didn't want to go with all these kids." Unsurprisingly, the guide said no. I didn't think she was very friendly - or maybe she had a bad day - but her English was fairly good, and she conducted the entire tour in both German and English. German is, surprisingly, a very pretty language to listen to.

Clad in our overalls, we were led into this dark, narrow tunnel.

Where we walked on, and on, and on.. until we reached a huge slide, which we had to slide down. It felt like we were sliding all the way to the core of the earth, past the mantle and crust. I didn't like this very much. Again, vertigo.

We then watched a rather run-of-your-mill 3D film introducing the geological formations of the Alps and how salt was formed here.

Then another slide, urgh. Apparently this is the longest slide in the world, spanning 64 metres. Did not like. There was a staircase as an alternative, but who wants to bother with that?

Then we watched a light display of the rock formations. This picture is atrocious, but for posterity's sake I'm still going to include it.

Then we watched another presentation on a fascinating figure named the "Man in Salt." His body was discovered in 1734 and was initially thought to be one of the town's miners who had gotten trapped underground, but later forensics showed that the man was actually from a Bronze Age miner from some 7000 years ago.

Lots more walking, and then we came out to my favourite part of the tour, this little train-like carriage that carries you out of the mountain. Considering all the slides and the extremely long downwards tunnel we walked to get where we were, it's a very considerate thought of them.

Even though I had less than 10 minutes to make the desperate dash up a mountain, down another mountain, wait for a funicular and then charge along the highway to the pier, I still somehow managed to get some more pictures in.

Let the dashing begin. Here I am, waiting for the funicular, w a i t i n g, whilst playing out all the scenarios that would happen should I miss the ferry, and by extension the train to Bad Ischl, the bus to Salzburg, the train to Munich and then the regional to Fussen. Even thinking about that day still makes me exhausted. How DID I manage?

Somehow, magically, I MADE IT. And here I am on the ferry, bidding Auf Wiedersehen to Hallstatt.

I would love to come again, under less rushed circumstances. After all, Salzwelten was sort of a last-minute addition.

Just when I thought I was safe and sound with my schedule, I found out - along with a bunch of other similarly flabbergasted visitors - that the ticket machine in Hallstatt Hbf WAS NOT WORKING. This is why I strongly recommend buying return tickets at Bad Ischl, where there were too ticket booths and at least 3 working ticket machines. In Hallstatt Hbf there was only one machine, which was out of order, and the office was, for reasons ungraspable to the average visitor, boarded up and looked nothing more like an abandoned woodhut. Fortunately, the ticket conductor on the train (when it arrived) said, in broken English, that he was aware of the situation, was very nice about it, and let us buy our tickets from him, which he then proceeded to punch.

On the bus from Bad Ischl to Salzburg.

This entry is overlong already so I shall talk a bit more in the next entry about the lengthy and convoluted journey from Hallstatt to Fussen, which took about 9 hours in total, so that when I got there it was almost 11pm. Oh, and of course the trains were delayed. And then the hostel took AGES to find, and when I did find it, it was apparently in the throes of construction so I had to weave my way gingerly through piles of rubble, and then the door proved very hard to find, and when I DID locate it, it was locked, and no amount of hammering could alert anyone (no doorbell), and chucking pebbles at the dimly lit windows didn't work either, and then when I called the hostel phone a very grumpy German with broken English answered, did not help me in the slightest, and I eventually only managed to get in because another few similarly disgruntled houseguests showed up and we made enough noise for the person "in charge" to come out, and she turned out to be from Taiwan too... and when I eventually managed to get into my room it was already 1am, and by the time I was done with washing and stuff and could go to bed, it was 2:30, all the lower bunks were taken as well as the power sockets so I had to surreptitiously remove one of them for my tablet, OH NOT TO MENTION THE RIDICULOUS TOURIST TAX..

What a day. This stuff probably should go into the next entry, but I really needed to stress what a looooooooooooooong day this was.