Hiking in Salzkammergut

Perhaps we should have taken the cable car. Today we hiked straight uphill to the town's main tourist attraction, an ancient salt mine. I have never hiked up anything steeper without a ladder or ropes. The salt mine was used during the prehistoric age. The early ice age is even called 'the Hallstatt period.' We elected not to take the $28 tour and instead continued to hike up to a peak overlooking the town. An amazing vista!

Hallstatt on the edge of a huge lake and is surrounded by cliff-faced mountains on all sides. It looks like a large version of the crater or avalanche lakes in Colorado. The houses literally back into the mountains. We spent our two days here hiking the mountains to avoid the swarms of bus tours that come through. Fortunately they don't stay the night (because there is no place to house the masses). The first day we pulled in there was some sort of festival going on. All the locals were in traditional garb (trousers and high socks for the men, white puffy shirts and long jumper-type dresses for the women) and singing and clapped and playing instruments till all hours of the night. It must have been there only outlet in awhile because the other two nights we stayed here the place was deserted by sundown.

We are on to our Italian WWOOF farm this week, so we're probably offline for a week or so.

Love-Tera and Jim