Two hours south of Salzburg, tucked into the soft green folds of Austria's Salzkammergut lake district, Hallstatt looks almost too pretty to be real. Pastel houses stack up a steep hillside, a slender church spire rises above the rooftops, and the whole scene repeats itself upside down in the lake below. Rick Steves likes to wander to the upper end of town first thing in the morning, before the day-trippers arrive, to watch that reflection hold perfectly still until a shuttle boat finally slices through it.
Behind the postcard charm sits a very old story. The village's name points back to salt, and people have been coming to these mountains for it for thousands of years, long before refrigerators made preserving meat easy. For centuries there was no road at all; you reached Hallstatt by boat, at the far end of a long, dead-end lake. Even today, Celtic and Roman stones lie hidden beneath some of the buildings.
- Ride the funicular up to the salt mine, pull on miner's overalls and zip down the long wooden slides between levels.
- Take a turn in a fuhr, the broad, flat-bottomed boat once used to haul heavy salt across shallow water.
- Book a lakeside table for reinanke (whitefish) or the more affordable saibling (lake trout), caught that very morning.
Food here is wonderfully local. Each morning the day's catch is sold to restaurant owners and neighbors who line up for it, and a lakeside terrace beneath a big chestnut tree is the classic place to taste it while swans glide past hoping for crumbs. Come early, linger late, and let the crowds come and go in between; the quiet hours are when Hallstatt shows its truest face.
Source: Rick Steves (The Herald)
