Hallstatt Walkabout

Today we took a vacation from our vacation in another slice of heaven - the tiny town of Hallstatt (HAHL-shtaht), Austria. Hallstatt is located on one of the most beautiful lakes I have ever seen about two hours from Salzburg.

There's not much to do here besides walk up and down the two streets in town, sip a local beer in a biergarten and gaze at the water, visit the Catholic Church and Bone Chapel, peek into the Protestant Church, or take the funicular up the mountain and hike back down. So after a quick bite to eat, we started with the hike.

It was an easy and pretty downhill hike and most of our group members went with us. Some decided to tour the salt mine first, supposedly the oldest in the world, then hike down. Salt mines are what actually attracted settlers to this area in the first place, centuries before Christ was born. We passed several salt mine tunnel openings (now closed and locked) on our way down.

The hike ends in the Catholic graveyard near the Bone Chapel. I'll try to delicately describe the Bone Chapel. Because the town is so small, it is situated on a sliver of land between a mountain and a lake, the citizens ran out of room to bury people. So they started burying whole families in graves, on top of each other. And when they ran out of room again, they started removing people/bones from the graves after they'd been buried for 12 years. Many of the bones and skulls ended up in the chapel after being lovingly named, dated, and decorated with paint by their descendants. There are currently around 600 skulls in the chapel. Since cremation is now acceptable in the Catholic church, the citizens no longer dig up the bones and paint the skulls. I went inside for a look and they were actually quite beautiful, and it was obvious the painters spent a lot of time respectfully decorating the skulls of their ancestors.

When we arrived in the morning and throughout the day the water was, in water-skiing terms - glass. If the water wasn't so cold and we had a ski boat - we'd be out there showing off our skills. Except I don't think they allow water skiing on this lake - they only allow electric motorboats, and very slow ones, at that. So we rented one of those for an hour and took Tara and Karen for a ride around the lake.

We spent the rest of the day on the deck outside our hotel room, drinking wine and beer and gazing at this....

and this...

and this.

It was the perfect ending for a perfect day...

Hallstatt is a place to go to dream, honeymoon, write a book, convalesce, or spend the end of your days. 

I hope I can return someday for a longer visit. YOLO!!