Eurotrip Day 02: Still in Salzburg
Today I planned on taking an epic adventure to Hallstatt, a picturesque UNESCO site on the shore of a lake. Unfortunately, a litany of failures prevented this trip and essentially ruined my whole day.
I arrived at Salzburg Hbf to catch the 11:10 train, and here’s a pic from the main station hall.
My train. OBB’s “CityShuttle” regional trains were my favorite trains out of all the ones I rode in in my whole trip, because their windows could be pulled all the way down (except in the compartment cars). The following few shots are taken from in the train.
Most trains are a mix of compartment cars and forward-facing seat cars. I sat in this compartment because the train was full when I got on and the only free space was in here.
Salzburg is basically surrounded by rolling fields.
This is where the trouble started. The 2.5hr train to Hallstatt is really two trains, and you have to transfer halfway at a station called Attnang-Puchheim. Since I bought my train ticket at the counter, I had a schedule printout that includeded that platform numbers for the connecting train. In Attnang-Pucheim the connection was on the same platform, just the other side.
When we arrived I just sat down facing the new tracks, with my back towards the tracks of the train I got off of. The new train was delayed by 15 minutes, which was no problem except for the fact they switched the tracks it pulled into the station on. All the station announcements were in German, and though I could decipher “train is late” announcement I didn’t understand the platform change one.
Needless to say my train pulled into the station on the track behind me; I turned around and watched it pull up but ignored it because it didn’t agree with my schedule. Then two minutes later a train pulled into the track I was watching, so I got on and happily continued my journey back towards Salzburg. It’s not uncommon to have a connecting train switch back in the direction you came from for a bit, but I knew something was wrong when 20 minutes into the ride we were still heading towards Salzburg.
Basically I got fucked because by the time I got back, I barely missed the next train and would have to wait another hour. Since it’s a 2.5hr ride I decided I would get there too late in the day to have enough exploring time, and besides that I would still have to buy another 50€ ticket and it just wasn’t worth it. I was extremely frustrated and this derailed my carefully thought out plan, so I just ended up walking around randomly (away from the tourist center of town).
The one thing I learned from this experience is to always look at the digital sign above the track before getting on any train. Just like the airport when you look at the TV monitor to make sure the gate hasn’t changed, I learned the same rules apply for training as well.
I didn’t take many pictures when I was walking around afterwards because I was in a shitty mood.
This building is notable because it says techno on the side lol.
And here’s a not-smiling-in-defiance picture of me on the bus heading towards the top of Gaisbergspitze, a backup destination I hashed from staring at the metro map for a few minutes at Salzburg Hbf. It’s actually right next to my hotel, so seemed like a convenient place to visit and hopefully enjoy grand views from the summit.
This plan also failed because the connection bus (at the base of the mountain) just left when our bus pulled up, and it was the last bus going to the top that day. I was royally pissed when this second idea of mine crashed and burned like the first, so I basically gave up and just started walking back towards my hotel.
I optimistically chose a course that hugged the side of the mountain in case I came upon any trails to hike up, but there weren’t any.
Here’s a crazy Jesus statue on the side of a residential street. I was surprised to see that Austria and Germany have a lot of random publicly displayed Christian religious symbols, though the populations themselves aren’t very religious.
This house had a very interested pattern on the walls, like dimples on a golf ball!
The mountain in the background with the tower is the one I wanted to summit.
Here’s a rather modern looking house.
Just like in Sweden, people rent out plots of land for gardening since nobody really has backyards.
This picture is terrible because it’s taken straight into the sunlight, but I was interested in the tunnel leading into the side of the mountain. I didn’t actually bother walking up to it or around the hill to see if there were other entrances, because I was fatigued from a long day of walking.
In the elevator of my hotel.
It was about 5pm when I got back, and after walking to McDonalds for dinner I edited pictures in my room. It started getting dark and I noticed a brilliant sunset forming outside my window, and in effort to salvage the day from becoming a total waste I decided to run back up the hill I climbed on the very first day to make a new panorama.
And here it is. I can’t decide if I like this one or the next one better, but the sight was spectacular.
At the same time as the sun dipped below the horizon, storm clouds amassed in the airspace over Hohensalzburg castle.
There was thunder and lighting over the castle and I knew it would start raining soon so I headed back down the hill towards the hotel. Here is a creepy path I saw heading towards the unknown.
This last HDR panorama looks over my hotel, which is the building just fore of of the orange one in the bottom center.
I stayed up the night editing photos, and got up really early to head to my next destination in Zell am See. It will probably take a week or so for me to process the photos for that post.
The end!
