Day 46 – Salzkammergut (Tuesday 28th May 2024)

Time to explore the regions surrounding Salzburg. To do that, we visited the Sixt Car Rental office in the east of Salzburg to pick-up a car I’d booked just a couple of days ago. We’d always planned to get car, just hadn’t got around to working out exactly how long we’d want it for. On Sunday night we mapped that out.

 

 

The weather was lousy. Rain was forecast and the rain came. Just before 8:00am we caught the No. 9 bus and changed top the No.12 bus to get to the Sixt office. This was a new route for us but as expected it all executed very smoothly dropping us right at the corner of the street the Sixt office is on. We’d nominally booked a VW T-Cross SUV but, as is always the case, we didn’t get that. Instead we got a current model white, manual, diesel VW Golf which I was more than happy to take as an alternative. When the paper work was done we walked across the road and found our car and sat there for 15 minutes getting to know it a little. The chap who served us didn’t venture into the rain to help us get going, which will be a bit of a minus for him in review to come. The first and most important job was to work out how to change the German language system controls to English so we could at least set the SatNav to our first destination. Everything is managed via the touch screen so we poked this and prodded that in different sequence until I pressed a button that looked like it was to do with language selection, which it turned out to be. I set the computer to English and it was all very straightforward from there. An episode like that really reinforces the importance of the universal “symbol” language that all cultures use. I’ve got no idea of the word for SETUP in German but I recognised the “cog” symbol.

Last night I’d put together a rough plan for a circumnavigation we’d do for the day, just listing the towns that looked interesting or took us to an area that looked interesting, in the region known as the Salzkammergut. The Salzkammergut is the area immediately to the east of Salzburg, the heart of which is just 45 – 60 minutes drive away. It’s a land of beautiful lakes surrounded by rugged, high mountains. It’s the area that made Salzburg rich as it’s from here that the precious commodity of salt was mined for centuries. In case you haven’t work it out already the “salz” in Salzburg, Salzach and Salzkammegut means salt.

 

 

Our first stop was the town of Mondsee on the shores of the lake by the same name. BTW, “See” in German means lake. The weather had worsened and their were serious roadworks along the thirty mintue drive along the A1. If I can survive such an introduction I can survive anything, I reasoned. We were in Mondsee for nothing to do with salt. My investigations last night had uncovered the fact that St. Michael’s Church was the location at which they shot the wedding of Maria and Georg in “The Sound of Music”. A “must not miss” for fans of the movie like Kerry. The Roman Catholic church is a good example of Gothic architecture even down to it’s very dark interior, which was aided greatly by very dull day. We got some cash, got out of the rain at a cafe and then walked down to the pretty lake before moving into our next destination at Schorfling am Attersee a town that sits at the top of a lake called Attersee. I couldn’t be sure if the car’s tank was full or almost empty so we had some fun finding a petrol station and after squeezing in three litres, determined it was full.

 

 

As we hugged the shoreline of Attersee heading for Bad Ischi the mountains became taller and their tops were lost in the clouds. A car-park on the roadside near the hamlet of Steinbach am Attersee provided a place for our simple lunch of ham and salad rolls, the ingredients for which we’d bought at a supermarket in Seewalchen am Attersee. The rain had begun to ease a little by now and I think the sky was brightening just a tad also. We moved on through Bad Ischi setting the GPS for the village of Obertraun on the southern end of Hallstätter See – probably the “star” lake of the district.

 

To get to Obertraun we drove around the town of Hallstatt even though that town was our primary target. Why so, I hear you say? Simple. Approaching Hallstatt is best done from a boat sailing across the waters of Hallstätter See. From here one can truly appreciate the majesty of the enormous mountains that encircle the beautiful lake. The best boat leaves from Obertraun, travels up the eastern shoreline well past the Hallstatt railway station boat dock, across the lake and then proceeds down the western shoreline to the Hallstatt dock – a journey of about 25 minutes. Not cheap at €15.00 return ea. But worth the money for such a superb view. The mountains in this part of the Salzkammergut are particularly tall. Sheer rock walls plummet into the lake from great heights on all sides. The dull and cloudy day added some mystique to the whole scene with many of the mountains tops lost in the clouds while on other mountain sides small clouds hung in the air low enough to reveal the peak above.

 

The little village of Hallstatt is a picture postcard town hugging the western shoreline of the lake and somewhat reminiscent of Walhalla in that much of the town is built on impossibly steep slopes. A small but majestic Protestant church by the dock with it’s pencil thin tall tower dominates the town’s skyline. The Roman Catholic church is much larger, holding a commanding position part-way up the hillside. The beautifully coloured houses and shops fill the cobblestone lanes that follow the contours of the land. Everywhere there are steps leading into places unknown. A fast flowing stream races down the hillside from above, in and out and under the buildings and lanes emptying into the lake by the church. At the southern end of the village is a funicular that takes visitors up the the old salt mine (now a gold mine, I suspect), a huge ice cave, hiking trails and viewpoints that offer splendid vistas across the whole of the region. We did none of that given the weather and our need to catch the last boat back to Obertraun at 4:00pm.

 

From Obertraun we circled back past Hallstatt and drove along the 166 route through Gosau and towards the A10 autobahn. At the hamlet of Lammerer GPS-man (yes, that’s right Janine, she’s been usurped in Austria) ordered an abrupt right-hand turn of a perfectly good main road to take us along the 3km shorter path through the Moselberg valley and along its namesake river. It was beautiful drive though a lovely setting of small farms, rolling green fields and local people going about their business. A great diversion.

 

 

Thirty minutes later we hit the A10 and sped along the autobahn to Salzburg, approaching from the south. GPS-man redeemed himself by finding a way to our hotel completely avoiding having to go anywhere near the main town itself, exiting the autobahn just a few minutes from home.