We don't sleep well because we're a bit too excited. We're crossing the border into Austria today. The drive is very steep and winding but we arrive at the border town of San Candido in Italian and Innichen in Austrian. Mostly German is spoken here but they are bilingual. We find a beautiful Romanesque church with the most exquisite cemetery, each plot has beautiful ironwork and a small garden, all of them planted out. The town itself is colourful and we find a bar for a coffee and it's like a magical world. It looks like a chocolate shop and then becomes and bar and then beyond that a Xmas shop, a crystal shop, a gift shop and a wall of fossilised ammonites which captivate the daughter who finds out that there's also a museum here that we will visit on our return. We have the best cornetto (croissant) ever and fortified with coffee and a few purchases, we head off.
It's a 4.5 hour trip all up and in Italy, we're going ten over the limit but as soon as we hit the Austrian border, everyone does the correct speed and it changes constantly and everyone obeys. I feel like I'm back in Australia. Finally we turn off the highway and suddenly we are deep in the countryside, farms and a very small road that you need to pull over if another car comes. The road thins along a flowing stream and there are patches of snow encrusted ravines. I wonder if the daughter has got it right and she insists she has but if we breakdown, there will be very little reception. But finally we come out onto a normal road and I realise I was holding my breath and then we go through a few tunnels and the lake of Hallstatt appears beside us.
After leaving out car in a parking lot, we are ferried into the village by a friendly taxi driver and are relieved when he asks us all to wear masks. There is one small carriageway in and he manoeuvres around tourists and children and drops us off at Gasthof Simony, a bright pomegranate coloured hotel on the lake. Before we arrived, we were asked if we'd like an upgrade to a lake view and we agreed of course. The room is beautiful, wooden details, old Austrian folk art wardrobe and a balcony with a view of the lake through trees bursting into pink and white blossoms. It is magical even with the rain.
We set off to explore the main square. The houses are colourful and quaint with espaliered trees going up the walls and twining in between doors and windows, also in blossom. It's freezing so after doing the up and down of the main street, we go into a bar for a drink. Asking for the menu the owner, says: I am the menu. Succinct but difficult when trying to ask for what you would like. I ask for Gluwein, the warm, spiced wine but he tells me it is Spring and too hot for that, (it is 6 degrees when I check), we order a Spritz.
That night we eat at Brau Gasthof, originally three salt manufacturing houses that were combined in 1476 to become a beer brewery and restaurant which continued until 1914 when they confiscated all the copper brewing utensils for the war but eventually it started up again. That's when we find out that Hallstatt is the oldest salt mine in the world and that it has traded in salt since prehistoric times, 7000 years ago. I forgot to mention the dinner - chicken wrapped in bacon in a gorgonzola sauce with thin noodles.
After arriving with soft rain falling, we wake to glorious sunshine and a good breakfast.
Then we decide to become full on tourists and take the cable car up to the salt mine. It was expensive but the best decision. We had to change into white overalls for some reason that no one really understood and we began our walk through the roughly hewn tunnel walls, beams above us encrusted with salt crystals and via a series of wooden miner's slides (one of which I attempt, holding on tight to the daughter, the second one of 61 metres I offer to walk down the stairs and take a video of her coming down - excellent decision seeing her face in the video), we end up 400 metres below ground watching videos in different theatres. We see a salt lake where they project the cataclysm that forced this sea (that had dried up when the earth was heating up), inland with the associated salt deposits when the African and European plates collided and pushed up the Alps. We see the oldest wooden staircase 3400 years old that was used by people to extract the salt or 'white gold' and take it to the surface. Then we were taken up on a wooden train back to the surface. Honestly, the best working museum ever and our guide had a great sense of humour and embraced the Easter spirit with rabbit ears.
After that we went to the suspension platform that juts out 350 metres above the town and we eat at the restaurant, freezing but blown away by this tour. After that we had to go to the Museum with the relics that were found from different periods within the mine itself. Then we crossed the road to a shop that you walked down a staircase and are able to walk through the ruins of a Roman bath. Also we walk up to a beautiful little church on the hill with the most perfectly manicured and kept cemetery. This place just keeps on giving.
Dinner is at a lovely restaurant with one remaining table for two. We dine on traditional fare, bread dumplings, cut and fried with bacon and egg and topped with sage butter. Surprisingly delicious! And an ice cream dumpling with a centre of apricot sauce and a crunchy outer cover of hazelnuts.
On our last morning we eat out on the terrace by the lake, rugged up but determined to enjoy the last of this lakeside beauty and then we're off to collect our car from the parking lot. We have an issue. We got new sim cards and new Italian numbers which seem to work well in Italy but as soon as we crossed the border we seemed to be locked out. We were organised when we left as I'd googled the map but we forgot to do that on the hotel wifi and when we went to get our car, we had no maps to get us to the next destination. Once, long ago (about 20 years) we would have travelled with the big European book of maps, those days long gone, the daughter realised we would have to walk back to the tourist office and log into their wifi and download an offline map. Glad to have her with me.
Then we were off to Seeboden, picked because I didn't want a long drive back again. A lovely little country town, minutes from a lake, with cows and ducks as our neighbours. But we were hungry and the places that were supposed to be open weren't and so we had to go to a castle for lunch - as you do. There was an antique market as well and music. We'd lucked out and surprisingly we got a table with a short wait. Castle Sommeregg was built in the 12th century. The restaurant is warm and inviting, with armoured ghosts and swords to good Austrian food. We drink the Radler beer which we both like only to find out it is a shandy made with sparkiing grapefruit juice!
Satiated with hearty food, we head home to walk to the lake, watching the swans flying low across the water, the snow gorges like melted wax on the mountains.
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