Salt town

We start with a photo of the pond in Edith's garden. It is deep, and has lots of newts in it. Her ex-husband wants to remove the huge pine trees behind it... which I think is a shame but this photo may just hold some of their beauty.

Today we did a grand tour through the land of lakes up to Hallstadt, a lakeside town which has been replicated in full detail in China because the Chinese love it.  Hal = ‘salt’ in Celtic, apparently. I feel the need to buy a Celtic/English dictionary and look forward with interest to finding out whether ‘Celtic’ really is a unified language. When I think of the differences we encounter driving first through Wales for the ferry, and then on to Ireland, and the utter incomprehensibility of both native languages, I can only speculate what ‘a dictionary’ would make of Celtic in what is now Salzkammergut in Austria.  

We had a lovely day...

Our journey took us through the most exhilarating and ecstatic landscapes - rich rolling farmlands, plump farmhouses, spotless villages, and towering mountains with the remnants of the winter’s snow all around. We stopped and strolled around in Wolfgangsee where long ago they filmed ‘The White Horse Inn’.  That was a silent movie made in 1926, then there were some German remakes in 1930, 1952 and 1960.  The original inn is there, right on the edge of the lake, adorned with a couple of white horse statues (and facing the defiantly-named Schwartz Rössal/Horse Inn), and with the famous tune written out in staves on the front. 

  

The films have been the source of the town’s fortunes, as through the decades, the world and his wife have been to see the inn … bringing with them much good fortune.   This seems to be a winning formula in Austria, as they’ve been so successful in marketing Mozart, Haydn, The Sound of Music, etc.

We couldn’t get coffee at the White Horse Inn as it was surrounded by civic maintenance works, so we went instead to Peter’s Hotel, which offers Vitamin D on the terrace… (sunshine).  We had blueberry strudel and huge macchiato coffees, and I dashed off a painting of the view. Very pleasant place indeed.

  

Then we set off for Hallstadt - and I am almost lost for words to describe it.  The lake and mountains are glorious. The complicated wooden houses are built almost on top of each other, on the steep slopes. The tourism is nicely managed (esp in April as we are now). The funicular railway is astonishing - we have never seen such a tall one, but it costs €9 per person per journey, too expensive for 3 of us just to go up and down.  The street leading along near the waterside to the Zentrum was only built by demolishing several houses on the beach, and against the adamant wishes of the then-residents of the town (voting in the early '60s).   Presumably those protesters eventually died out, and tourism won.  Incidentally, a sign tells you there were two ways to die in Hallstadt: drowning or having a rock fall on your head.  The whole place is really very very pretty, and filled with Chinese tourists wherever you look.  I can only guess how this happened, but it would make a great film script.

  

We have had a lovely day out, with Edith entertaining us all along the way, and we are home now for supper and unwinding. Tomorrow we go to Linz, by train.  The mountains are really just breathtaking....