Hallstadt and Obertraun (last part of the hiking saga)

The trail down from the restaurant is a switchback. It's long. And steep. And it was getting dark (this is at about 3:30 pm). More pics...


The view of Hallstadt - so pretty!

Within Hallstadt...the town is built on a tiny spit of land, so the houses all go up the cliff - and the roads are stairs. And the address are things like, "25 X Stair, Hallstadt". Settlements have been here since basically the Bronze age.



One of the craziest things about living in an area with no horizontal land is that that means that there is nowhere to bury your dead. So in Hallstadt (they don't do this anymore - they stopped in the 1980's) - you only got to be in the ground for 10 years. After that, they dug you up, and then they gave your skull to your family or loved ones to decorate (paint). Then, they stacked them neatly in a building next to the Catholic church. You can't make up stuff this weird. Here's the proof....



After admiring the skulls, we went for dinner (yum), and then took the ferry back to Obertraun and walked another mile back to the town. We decided to look for a place to have a drink. That's where Jim will pick up the story in another blog post, since he'll do a good job with it :-)

Walk back to Obertraun - view of Hallstadt across the lake.
Total distance - 24 km. In miles, that's 14.9 miles. I think we can call that 15 :-)


And a bit of a non-sequitor-the next day, we wandered around Obertraun a bit, and got this neat picture of the traditional wooden buildings with traditional wooden boats on the lake... pretty.