"In Hell"

Yep, that’s where we went today, and boy was it beautiful. The small village of Hallstatt located in the lake district of the Austrian Alps. Before you worry too much about my calling this place hell, I’ll tell you the story. So Hallstatt has been a salt mining town since prehistoric times. In the 1800’s, some of the workers nicknamed the canyon that they had to travel through to get to the mines “In hell” because it was so steep and treacherous and people sometimes died while coming down its river carrying salt mining supplies.

We came to Halstatt by bus and train from Salzburg. It was a gorgeous bus ride, but we were pretty tired during it because we got up at 5:30 to be able to maximize our time here. We had a crazy experience when checking out of our Salzburg youth hostel. We came down to the office to check out, and the guy at the front desk was asleep in his chair. We rang the bell. Nothing. We tried talking to him. We rang the bell multiple times. Still nothing. We started yelling, “WAKE UP!” and Wayne picked the bell up and rang it next to his face multiple times. He opened his eyes and just looked at us. We began telling him that we needed to check out now because our bus was leaving soon. He was completely unresponsive. He just looked at us and closed his eyes again. It was bizarre. Finally Wayne got so fed up that he walked behind the desk to the man and picked up a pen and piece of paper and wrote a note saying who we were and that we were checking out. He left it there and finally as we were walking out the door, the dude picked up the note, kinda chuckled and said, “Yeah that’s fine.” Totally weird.

The first thing we did in Hallstatt was ride the ferry across the lake to the town. The train drops you off on the other side of the lake, so a ferry comes to pick you up. It’s totally radical. We then went and found an amazing little café/bakery and got some eggs on ham and some really good bread. By the way, this town is tiny. There is one main road that goes through it, and “main” is really quite an overstatement. The road is like 12 feet wide. And there all these cute houses and shops off to the sides. And then it’s right next to this glassy lake, which is in turn surrounded by gorgeous peaks of the alps. It is unreal.

We next went to the Salt Mine that is above the town. We had a tour and it was really cool. It was annoying though because the lady would speak for like 5 minutes in German, and then follow up with like a few sentences in English. But it was still really awesome to go deep into the mountain side and walk through little caverns and stuff and see how the salt was mined.

Next we hiked up from the mines to the top of Hohe Sieg (which means "high victory"). We peak bagged baby! We got to the very top of a mountain in the alps! It was an incredible view from up there. You could see all of Lake Hallstatt and the various little towns that surround it. Beautiful. Oh, we also saw the largest ant hill I’ve ever seen in my whole life on the hike. Check out the pic.

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By the time we got back down our legs were dead. We went to our hostel, rested for a bit, then went to the beinhaus or bonehouse. It is this house by the church where they have bones and skulls pilled up dating back to the 1700’s. There’s like 1000 skulls stacked neatly just staring you down. They have the names of the person painted on them, along with other symbols. It was kinda creepy, but kinda cool.

Lastly, we had a killer dinner of gourmet pizza and fresh fish and then finished off the day with a few rounds of darts. They have a sweet electronic dartboard here at the hostel. It’s bomb.

I’m gonna zonk.

Peace be with.

-N.

Quote of the day: from the jovial, mustachioed guy who runs our hostel and the pizzeria downstairs. Every time we said thank you to him, he responded: “My welcome.” He also brought out three shots of brandy to our table after dinner, “a gift to you, on the house.” It was such a warm gesture that we felt bad declining. So we drank them. Just kidding.