So last week I took my last personal trip through Austria. With Chris and Jana there seems to be a little trip somewhere nearly every week (for instance, yesterday we went to Wels and then Steyr, yet another tiny beautiful town), but I went to Hallstatt on my own and stayed a couple nights. I had both read and heard often of its grandeur, so the decision to go wasn't a hard one, and the only question was how long I'd have to save up my illegal earnings to afford to get there. All I can say is that that little place lived up to its reputation for capturing every magical element of Austria and tucking it all neatly into one small lake valley. Be advised that no photo I took really did Hallstatt justice, but I do what I can with my little cyber-shot.
Ever wondered what it'd be like to exist within a Grimm's fairy tale? Go to Hallstatt. Don't drive there, but instead take the train through the mist-shrouded mountains and allow the immense Romance of it all wash over and submerge you until you nearly drown. When you arrive at the depot, you walk down the small path labeled "Schiffweg" and board the Stephanie, a small boat that trolls across the lake. You can gasp as loud and long as you please before the mountains' immensity and your first panoramic view of Hallstatt: houses, churches, hotels lining the lake and more houses wedged into the side of the Salzberg and what seemed to be on top of those on the lake.
The train ride there:
The trip across:
From the moment I got off the boat I don't think I stopped smiling for the first several hours of my time in Hallstatt. It was like my childhood steeped in legend and fantasy books come to life. Hallstatt is a town of about 1000 people, and given its being wedged between a mountain and a lake, there's little room for growth (I read it peaked around 2000 in the 19th century and has been dwindling since). The town itself dates back 4500 years and somehow you get a sense of that even if your tiny head could never truly comprehend so long a time for something to survive. Towards the end of the Austrian empire, the Kaiser Franz Joseph (uncle to Franz Ferdinand) and his wife Sisi, beloved by her people perhaps even more than Diana was by hers, visited Hallstatt often as one of their favorite vacation spots. Sisi was a big fans of swans, so the locals loaded the lake with them, and even today you can see them hanging around on the lake. I saw for the first time a mottled swan. I'm not sure if that was an indication of sex or what, but I was able to up close and personal with one of them before she/he started hissing at me.
I walked around for a while with my "luggage" (my computer bag filled with clothes) because nothing was open at midday. I hadn't booked a room or anything beforehand though I had done a lot of searching online for a place. As touristy as Hallstatt is said to get, I couldn't find anything in the right price range online (i.e. cheap). Eventually I did get a room booked via the nice lady at the city's TI station. She only had to make one call to Frau Gamsjäger and I was set. Frau Gamsjäger was just a nice old lady who let out a few rooms of her house. The room itself was pretty much what you might expect from a nice elderly woman: nicely but sparsely furnished, picture of Jesus and lambs hanging above the bed, and a beer bottle opener sitting on the table. The room featured a fantastic view of the lake, and I spent a lot of my chill time in Hallstatt just up on the balcony looking out at the calm. The nice Frau was the wife of a nice old man who could barely speak. But despite his difficulty making himself understood, he was always bearing his beautiful dentures with a big smile and pointing me this or that way to show me something in his house worth knowing about. True to his name (game hunter), the walls of the house downstairs boasted his exploits of the hunt, and this sort of clued me into something else I had already started to notice about Hallstatt: that aside from the salt mined from the Salzberg -- which comprised for thousands of years Hallstatt's primary commerce -- the town bore the remnants of a hunting and fishing culture going slowly down the buffalo's road. Around town there hung the antlers of small animals as well as wooden anomalies from trees, and every menu I passed advertised fresh delicious fish. Another quirky thing I noticed was how they planted trees flush against their houses, growing them up out of the pavement it seemed and then basically binding the limbs to the side of the house. Later in my trip, to reinforce the whole hunting & fishing theme, I found a pretty mean-looking fish-head choir, all mouths opened wide and held in an eternal note silent to my human ears.
After dropping my things off at the house, I took a self-guided tour of the town and tried to get lost. As it really only takes about 15 minutes to stroll the length of the city, I had to be a little creative. Eventually I found myself looking at some nice old houses and got a good view from above on the other side of town. I found a big yellow mansion that was unlocked and being renovated. I stepped inside to see if there was anything interesting to see, but really it wasn't all that great inside so I left. I strolled back along the riverside and played on the town's one playground. I tried riding a seat chained to a zipline but I was just too heavy so my butt scraped along the melting snow. Heading back through the center of town I found a lot of small alleys and narrow steps and tried to check them all out. At one point the sun broke and the whole town started to gleam. A lot of these old Catholic towns have the stations of the cross "stationed" throughout the city, giving passers-by something of the Lord to think about. I stopped and tried to shoot a few good shots of Jesus in the garden as his disciples slept and the Roman guards approached. Eventually I found the best view of the old town near the Catholic church which houses the famous Beinhaus, which I would enter the next day and I'll talk more about in a bit. For now I just went into the Catholic church and sat a while. I lit a few candles for friends before going, and when I came out the sun was already behind the mountains and I could tell the town would be winding down soon (not that it had really been all that wound up). While I was up top I made friends with a chubby orange cat. I took a few blurry fotos of the cemetary before heading down. On the way down I noticed another narrow stair that I would be climbing the next day (foreshadow!). Here's a mishmash of pics from my walk in the town:
Night fell soon afterwards. I realized in Hallstatt once the sun goes down there's nothing really left to do. I had read about a single pub that stayed open late, but I was really already pretty tired and didn't feel like sitting in a smoke-filled room. So instead I ate a pizza from one of the town's two pizzerias and then strolled again through the town after dark. I walked up a set of stairs I had seen earlier but not gone up. This is where I found my little cat buddy again strangely enough. I got to the top of the stairs and found there only a parking lot and a long tunnel for cars to pass through, so I took another set of stairs back down and into the small very dark streets. I eventually found another station of the cross, and tried to photograph it despite the darkness. When I finally realized that really and truly there was
no one to meet on the streets, and no where for a young robust man of nearly 28 to romp, I headed back to Frau Gamsmjäger's. It seems it was the best decision anyhow, as nearly as quickly as I plopped myself in bed with a book and a friend's letter to read, I was drifting off at only 9 PM!
The next morning was beautiful. The mist hadn't yet lifted from the lake but I could tell it was going to be a bright, sunny day. Perfect for climbing the mountain Hallstatt was dug into. I found out later that this mountain was the Salzberg, and had I known, I would've done my best to get to the top, but as it was, I reached about 1500 meters, noted my soaked and numbing feet, and having no idea just how much further I'd have to go to reach the summit, I headed back down the slope steeped in knee-high snow for fear of losing a toe or two. But on the way up I nevertheless saw many a wonder, and as usual with mountain climbs, had to stop time and again to catch a breath-taking view and fail miserably at capturing it with my camera. Most of the way up, actually, there wasn't all that much snow. It was nevertheless a difficult climb as my shoes had hardly any traction after a year of trekking here and there and everywhere in between. Had I known better I would've worn my big black and white-laced boots, despite the fact that most Austrians automatically think "white-power" and "neo-nazi" when they see them. The boots are a lot warmer and keep out the wet much better than my leather/rubber-soled Clarks. But before any of that, while still at the bottom of the mountain I stepped inside the town's only protestant church. For a long time Roman Catholicism was the only legal religion in Austria, and while most of the town was made up of protestants (the working class), only the rich were allowed to have a proper church building. Until the late 18th century, Protestants would meet in home churches, but once the Kaiser of the day gave the green light to allow for Protestant churches to also be built, the working class pooled their resources to build this impressive church (the pointier steepled one from without). From inside you notice pretty fast that it's Protestant. The focal point of the whole interior is clearly the pulpit, and less attention is given to the Saints (though I was pretty surprised to see quite a few saintly icons displayed, which is not really something you see at all in most P churches). Not to mention there was a painting of Martin Luther hanging on the wall next to the pulpit. So after the church I climbed the narrow stair again to the Catholic church I had seen the night before, where I again entered the cemetary and this time paid my one euro to see the legendary Beinhaus, a crypt where the bones of the previously buried dead are on display. I'm not quite sure of the history, but at one point in the 20th century, in order to make room in the ground for the newly dead, the long-deceased were exhumed and their bones stashed in this small room beneath what I think is the priest's living quarters. Then, the families of those unearthed would come and hand-paint their skulls to mark just who they had been, when they had lived and died, etc. Pretty wild. And the painted skulls made for a very eerie experience, all staring at me as I treaded on their sacred concrete. Having never really even seen a human skeleton before, I committed sacrilege (or maybe just a major dis) and reached across the rope barrier to place a finger on one of the skulls. But now that I've finally satisfied the urge to handle human remains, I guess I can cancel that killing spree I had planned. (Black humor, anyone??)
Before the climb (church & beinhaus):
And... the climb (gradual progession upwards -- if yr looking for a more detailed desc. of the climb, I'm gonna try to give a little more detail to each picture, but not at the moment):
I made it down the mountain just in time to save my feet from falling off. Two working fellers sped down the mountain and I hitched a ride. I'm really really thankful for them given just how wet and cold I was, and how loooooong the alternative way down I was going to choose would've been on foot. I honestly didn't understand a lot of what they were saying to me in the truck, so strong was their Hallstatt accent (which is somehow a problem I didn't have with any of the other locals). Anyway, tonight was my night to go to the pub I had shunned the day before. I finished out The Town and listened to the locals howl and cackle at their own jokes. The two tiny rooms were pretty packed with both natives and tourists (tourists I could tell by the Rick Steves books they were toting upon their entrance), and I sat alone and pondered just how good God had been to me this whole year abroad, despite what seems to be a constant forgetfulness or ungratefulness on my part. He's a very patient God.
On the walk back from the pub, I stopped by the lake to look up at the full moon, which shone behind the clouds. Its light illuminated the the mountains' shape and lined the clouds themselves. I thought to myself I'd never before been privy to so sublime a beauty and calm as I was in that moment. There was no one there, and yet I felt surrounded with the saints and angels who down the ages had also looked out over that peace.
Still more to come....
