Hallstatt, the UNESCO World Heritage Site

GOSH! We missed the train to Hallstatt and wasted almost half day! The trains changed their arrival platform but the train schedule on the notice board was not updated! We blindly waited from 12plus to 2plus for two hours. Then we realised something was wrong when no one was left waiting at the station.

In the end, we waited for another hour for the next train ride to Hallstatt. Our friend didn’t want to wait anymore and hopped on to the next arriving train to Graz. We didn’t follow him as we thought by the time we reached Graz on a 2-hour ride, it should be almost the same timing as we reached Hallstatt. We thought that was nothing much to see in Graz too.

We didn’t take the direct train to Hallstatt. We went to Bad Aussee first to enjoy the beautiful scenic ride.

To get the Hallstatt, we took a ferry ride from Hallstatt train station. It was a short ride across the opposite side of the lake to the “Cuckoo Clocks” town. It is called that way as the houses at the bank are pretty and look like cuckoo clocks. There are many salt mines and ice caves in Hallstatt. In fact, it has the oldest salt mine in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site for Cultural Heritage.

We were late when we reached Hallstatt, thus, didn’t join the salt mine tour. The bone house next to the Catholic Church was closed for the day too. In fact, many sites had closed for the day by the time we reached there. It took us half a day to arrive at Hallstatt, but the small town can be easily toured on foot in less than thirty minutes.

While back to the same train station for the next train back to our resort in Schladming, the station still had not updated their train schedules and had not corrected the platform numbers of the trains yet on the schedule board!

Fortunately, Jacky was able to spot the “changing pattern” of the train platform number for our designated train. If we were to stick to the uncorrected schedule on the board, we would have no time to cross over to the right platform. Guess what? When we boarded the train and were confirmed by a lady passenger that we were on the right train, the train had already started to move! We really couldn’t afford to make a mistake as the train would move if no one was boarding or alighting. Heart attack! And this time, we were lucky enough to catch the right train at the right platform back to our resort.

Budget Cooking Recipes:

Lunch
Step 1: Boil spaghetti
Step 2: Heat up the mixture of tomato and spicy sauces.
Step 3: Slice the sausages and cook them together with the peas in the mixed sauce.
Step 4: Boil water and prepare mashed potato.

Dinner
Step 1: Fry chicken fillets.
Step 2: Boil long beans and shredded mushrooms.
Step 3: Whisk two eggs. Add salt, pepper and shredded mushrooms.
Step 4: Fry egg omelette with butter.

The paradise behind our resort!