Like Peregrine Roam

The happenstances of travel often enjoins or engenders random marvels — be it a chance encounter, a quaint village, interesting people, or even a rare local delicacy. I’d mostly given up on planning my itinerary more than a week out. My Schengen Visa is due to expire in 3 weeks time. As such, the route from Slovakia through to Slovenia was more rushed than expected, and reluctantly, I had to pare time in Austria to 5 days. As such, one of the marked highlights I had wanted to visit was omitted; namely, Hallstatt.

Now, as it happens, I encountered a friend of a friend of a friend (so to speak) who is a sports statistician (so to speak). While enjoying drinks along the riverbank at night, he casually mentioned that he had a football match to attend in Bischofshofen in western Austria, and suggested that I attend if I was interested. Being not much of a football fan, I enquired if it was near Hallstatt. As luck would have it, Bischofshofen is right adjacent to Hallstatt and I hitched a free ride with him for the day through magnificent Alpine country of the Slovenian and Austrian Alps before arriving on a football pitch at the foothills of the Alps. The friendly match between Munich and Salzburg staged on neutral ground was not eventful…Munich, being the better team, won easily.

After the afternoon match, we wound through the mountains and through many a tunnel before arriving at a most unusual town nestled right by Hallstatter Lake in the low Alps. With a population of under 800, this Unesco World Heritage site is more than a quaint town (albeit, it is rather highly trafficked town due to the influx of tourism). With it’s majestic lake-side setting, Hallstatt is most famed for being the oldest still-inhabited town in all of Europe. Hallstatt itself is the namesake of the Hallstatt Culture, a early iron-age culture dating back back to the 8th century BCE. Aside from that, it is purported to have built the world’s first pipeline 400 years ago out of thousands of hollowed-out trees to transport brine from the local salt mines.

Almost every parcel of flat land is fully utilized. In fact, there are homes built off the sheer cliff right next to the waterfall. Land is so sparse that the local cemetery only buries the bodies for 10-15 before the corpses are exhumed, cleaned, and then encased in the ossuary in order to make room for new burials. Resultantly, the cemetery on the chapel grounds are extremely well-maintained with decorations and flowers adorning the graves of the very recently-deceased.

The winds blew off the high cliffs. Across the lake, a skiff ferried in front of some estate or castle on the opposite shore. In time the moisture evaporating off the lake re-condense with the cooling temperatures and formed a thinly veiled fog layer over the waters. The sparse tourist crowd thinned out and we too bid farewell to another magical and mystical fairy-tale land.