We spontaneously decided two weeks ago, and yes that is spontaneous enough by the european standards, to visit Salzburg and Hallstatt on Friday, 8th August and return back on 11th August. Through our friend circle, we already knew that there’s the largest Salt mines of Europe in the Hallstatt region that is open for visitors. This was one of the things that we were looking forward to and apart from that we did not really have a concrete itinerary. The plan was to just take some time off from the usual routine and relax a bit in the chill town of Salzburg.
We started by taking the earliest train at 0557 hrs to Munich from Braunschweig (BS) on the 8th. We reached Munich by 1045 hrs. Thanks to the speed of ICE trains we covered around 450 kilometers in 4.75 hrs. In some stretches the speed even reached 350 kmph, Oof! After reaching Munich we had to continue to Salzburg. Unfortunately, there were no high speed trains that week due to construction work. Therefore, we travelled another 3 hours via Regional Bahn and reached Salzburg Hbf by 1400 hrs. After getting a quick lunch we made our way to the hotel, COOL MAMA.
Later the same day, we explored the city a bit and went to the Augustiner Bräu Mülln. To end the day, we got ourselves a mug of Märzbier which is traditional bew from the famous Oktober fest.
On the next day, we made an itinerary to explore the city a little better. We started from our hotel, visited Mozart’s Birthplace, his residence and then the Mozartplatz. The next stop was Festung Hohensalzburg. A fortress built on top of a hill in the middle of the city from the medieval times. We took the funicular to the base of the fortress and after having a pint (since it was freaking 37 degrees that day) we explored the fortress. The views from the top did however made up for the heat. Kind of reminded us of Heidelberg.
After a good night of sleep, we travelled to Hallstatt. The morning itself got a little thrilling than we had hoped for. The bus from the hotel ran 10 minutes late and we reached the Hbf 20 minutes later than scheduled as a result we missed the connection we had planned for. Now, since we had a flexible ticket it did not really matter much, we just took the next bus to Bad-Ischl after that we had to continue to Hallstatt by train and then finally cross the river by a ferry. While booking these ticket I fortunately found out that we can directly book the tickets to the Salt mines on OBB website, as a combo offer (48€ pp) . This was great, since the salt mine company don’t offer online tickets. The moment we got off the train, the views were breathtaking. I will now stop writing and let the pictures justify my point.
.heic "hallstatt-8")
