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.

Hallstatt, part III - Salzwelten i

Apparently my desire to finish up all entries last night were far too ambitious,but nevertheless I feel I'm getting there. After Hallstatt we have Fussen (the famous Neuschwansteins) and then Frankfurt, and then it'll be continental#1.

I had to split this entry up into two because there were far too many pictures for the one entry. I met a very friendly Chinese couple at the pier, where I stayed for a bit, enjoying the view and taking pictures. After I'd finished chatting to them, another East Asian man sidled up to me and introduced himself as a fellow Taiwanese. He admitted, with a bit of a rueful grin, that he had been eavesdropping on our conversation, and we talked for a while. I found out that he was a few years older than me, we had a couple of mutual friends, and that he worked at EVA Air and was taking some time off.

I adored Hallstatt - I mentioned, in my last entry, that not for nothing was it called the heart of Austria. Unfortunately, it's one of those places, along with the Neuschwansteins, which has become completely and utterly overrun with tourists, mostly elderly Japanese, Chinese and Korean people in tour groups. The Chinese were pretty damn unbearable - whilst me and EVA were ambling down one of the streets, an elderly camera-toting Chinese man glared at us.He asked us quite rudely to "shove it" in order to make room" for his photo. Of course, me and the EVA guy slowed down our paces. When I'm that old, I hope I'm never ever that obnoxious.

At another spot, another elderly Chinese man asked me to take a picture of him. He wasn't happy with the first, second nor third picture I took. "Too many mountains. Not enough water. I want my legs in this, bla bla bla." At the end of the third pic I really quite lost my temper, since I had actually been sitting there enjoying the view on my own, lost in my own thoughts, before he'd come up to me, tapped my shoulder and asked me to take his picture. "Sir," I told him sharply, "In case you're not aware, this is my holiday too, and I am in no way under any obligation to take pictures for you. I've already taken three, two more than I should have. Now please let me get on with my vacation."

He drifted away to bother some other people. There, that's my only beef with the otherwise pristinely perfect Hallstatt - far too many annoying, pestiferous tourists who think everything's beholden to them.

The Salzwelten was something I actually hadn't planned, but I figured that I might try to "wing it," and the EVA guy and the Chinese couple had recommended it. It was high up in the alps, and you first had to walk about twenty minutes along the main causeway to the ticket booth. It's the world's oldest salt mine, hence the name "Salzwelten", which basically just means salt mines in German.

You can see the railtracks of the funicular against the mountainside here

This is the ticket booth. Tickets didn't come cheap, including a return trip via the funiculars, and entry to the Salzwelten.

Once I'd gone up via the funicular - another painfully steep, dizzying ride, I had to walk a bit, take a lift up, and then walk up a mountain trail for another 15 minutes before actually reaching the Salzwelten. If I'd had enough time, I would have liked to stay longer, since the view was stunning, and I really wanted to do some hiking in the mountains, but time was of the essence. I did manage to climb around a bit though and snap some gorgeous photos. Commence photos. Once again, no Photoshop, no filter, no nothing. Just cold hard photos straight from the oven.

Hallstatt, part II - Where the water meets the alps

Sorry for the cornily terrible title but couldn't resist. A Viennese friend of mine told me that Hallstatt was considered the heart of Austria, and these photos bear testimony to that fact.

Photo entry. Will talk a bit more about what I thought of Hallstatt in the next one. For now, just enjoy the pictures.

Hallstatt, part I - transport

I got up at a whopping 4am in the morning, which is quite the norm. I don't think I got much sleep that night - probably 4 or 5 hours, but still so much better than Wroclaw.

At this point my cold had practically vanished, although I still had to blow my nose once in a while. I got the worst of the cold in Berlin, had to deal with a downsized version of it in Dresden, and it had gotten much better by the time I was in the Czech Republic.

Anyway, I got up that morning and made myself a nice cup of steaming coffee and looked over my itinerary for the day. I was on a pretty tight schedule - I had to go over to Hallstatt, which was a three hour journey from Salzburg, then come back to Salzburg, catch the Meridian back to Munich, then take a regional to Fussen, where I planned to spend the night. Thinking about this day gives me a bit of a headache to be honest - I spent SO much time on trains and transport, and the Meridian was fun the first time but it was just so droll and uncomfortable the second time. Saved up quite a bit on the cost though, again thanks to my Bayern day ticket. I remember sitting in my kitchen at London Bridge and planning out this part of the trip, and thinking that I was going to have "one helluva day", but unfortunately there aren't any straight means of transportation from Hallstatt to Fussen, both of which are very secluded, out-of-your-way areas (yet are home to the most famous landmarks in the Bavarian region. Both also charge an exorbitant tourist tax. Thanks for that).

Journey was not at all straightforward. I had to first take the bus 150 from Salzburg Gnigl, which was only 5 minutes away from my hostel. It pays to look up every single detail sometimes, otherwise I would have had to take an unnecessary bus to the Hbf. I remember listening to We Are Young, and pacing about the bus stop to keep warm, since it was freezing and still completely dark, and pretty much deserted. Rather scary to be honest. The bus was actually more like a coach, very comfy, and I got a seat at the back. We entered the mountains fairly quickly, and the sensation of watching the dawn breaking over the Bavarian Alps as the bus hurtled through the alpine highway, was really quite magical.

Breaking dawn. You can tell from this picture that we're pretty high up. 

The journey to my next point of transfer, Bad Ischl, took an hour and a half, and I really needed the loo by the end of the journey. Shouldn't have enjoyed that coffee so much.

Had to wait roughly an hour for the train to Hallstatt Hbf, so had plenty of time to walk around and take pics of Bad Ischl's small but quaint train station. Nice place, buried deep in the mountains, FREEZING, a bit lonely. I wouldn't really want to live here, gorgeous and pristine though it is. I bought my Hallstatt train ticket here. Didn't buy a round journey, a fact I would really regret when coming back but we'll get to that when it comes. Moral of the story: always plan ahead when possible.

Got increasingly excited as the view outside just got more and more spectacular.

How can you keep your cool when even the railtracks are so pretty!?

My first sight of Hallstatt's glacial lake. Here's a teaser of what's to come.

I then took the ferry, the only means of transport to the village of Hallstatt, across from the Hbf. Took about 20 minutes and it was just breathtaking. The ferry captain was very friendly indeed. A glimpse of how the earth might have been.. I'll save the truly breathtaking pictures for later.

A few notes on Hallstatt transport, from Salzburg at least:

1. DO plan ahead. Write down the exact times of the trains and buses you need to take from points of departure x, y and z. DO NOT WAIT TILL YOU GET THERE. DO NOT "WING IT." It is not wingable. You have been warned!
2. That being said, when planning ahead, you should know that Bus 150, the only bus from Salzburg that goes all the way up to Bad Ischl, has a fixed schedule which you can find online. I've included a picture of the bus schedule from Bad Ischl to Salzburg - it's marked in red, but you should double check with google.
3. The schedule for the regional train from Bad Ischl to Hallstatt Hbf can also be found online. 
4. The schedule for the ferry to and fro Hallstatt and Hallstatt Hbf is ONLY AVAILABLE AT THE FERRY PORTS, but they generally leave by the 00. When you arrive at the port in Hallstatt, make it your first priority to write down the ferry times which work into your schedule.
5. The whole process of planning this journey is convoluted to say the least but completely worth it. I must have spent hours on planning this part of the journey alone. There are a few other alternatives rather than the bus-train-ferry route; apparently there's a bus-bus-ferry, or a train-train-ferry. As you can see the last leg of the journey can only be managed by ferry; the village of Hallstatt is completely and utterly isolated from all the other land masses. I went with bus-train-ferry because it was apparently the most scenic, and second cheapest.

The bus schedule from Bad Ischl to Salzburg.