Austria 2 - Hallstatt

Today's agenda is what we came here for in the first place. We're going to visit the town of Hallstatt.

Hallstatt

In the morning I'll prepare a proper breakfast and Janet will prepare the little one. We leave the apartment around 8:30, when it starts to rain, so we walk to the station in the heavy rain. We complete the route in 25 minutes. To get to Hallstatt we use a special offer from the OÖVV (the regional transport coordinator for Upper Austria) called the Freizeit-Ticket OÖ, which is similar to our SONE for the regions with a few differences. The ticket is valid for a maximum of 2 adults and four children. On weekends it is valid all day. On weekdays it is valid from 9:00 am to midnight. It can be used for an unlimited number of journeys during its validity and is valid on regional trains, buses and public transport. It is not valid on long-distance trains such as Railjet or IC trains. It can even be used to reach several stops in Salzburg. If you are hesitant about whether or not it applies to a given vehicle, a good guide is the OÖVV logo on the vehicle, which indicates that it belongs to the transport association. The only confusing thing is that the connection search apps don't offer it when you enter your route, and I wasn't sure if we could actually ride it. We're going to ask at the station, but they're closed on weekends, so we're going to take a chance and buy it at the vending machine. It can also be bought electronically on the OÖVV app. The price in 2023 is 26 Euro, which will pay us handsomely on the way to Hallstatt, where the normal fare is 13 Euro per person.

Freizeit-Ticket

Gmunden - Traunsee Tram

Our train arrives at 9:24 a.m. Unfortunately, there is no express train at this time, but a passenger train that goes to Hallstatt twenty minutes longer, i.e. about an hour and twenty. The railway line we are on is called the Salzkammergut Bahn, and the best views are just beyond Gmunden to Lake Traunsee. We enjoy these amply while the little guy takes a nap in the carriage, lulled to sleep by the rocking train. Otherwise, if the Talent unit is running (you can tell it's not named CityJet and has a blue nose), the space for bikes and buggies is in the first and last doors. Whereas CityJets (being red and white) have spaces for a carriage in the middle cars as well. There weren't many people on the train except for a few tourists. On this train, we met the conductor for the first and last time, who checked our ticket and we got confirmation that the Freizeit-Ticket is indeed valid on trains. We arrive at our destination on time. The station is on the other side of the lake and must be reached by boat.

Hallstatt railway station

For the thrifty, you can combine this by taking the train all the way to Obertraun, and then taking a bus from there to Hallstatt. Freizeit-Ticket applies for everything, so you don't have to pay for the boat, where the return fare is 7 Euro. I didn't think of this option until after we got off the train, and we weren't even sure if they would take our stroller, so we took the boat as regular tourists. The boat takes strollers. The departure of the boat is synchronized with the arrivals and departures of the trains. The trip across the lake takes about 5 minutes. Fortunately, it doesn't rain as much in Hallstatt, but it's still far from perfect as it's drizzling slightly. Despite the cold and the generally nasty weather, there are quite a few people here. I didn't expect that. I imagine what carnage it must be like here in the summer when it's high season. We'll walk around town and take a million pictures.

Hallstatt - ferry

We reach the Salzbergbahn, an overland cable car that leads to Salzberg, where the salt mine mining museum is located. Janet, seeing the construction, said she wasn't going to get on it. You can also walk to Salzberg from the lower cable car station. The maps showed a distance of 2 km and an hour. The length is because of the high altitude. When it is clear that we will not go up, we will at least use the lower station for breastfeeding and then changing. In addition to the benches, there are free outlets to charge phones, so there are plenty of youngsters standing by them. Since we won't use the cable car service today and we won't walk up (because it's already one o'clock, it's getting dark at four, and we still want to make it to Bad Ischl by daylight), we'll slowly make our way back to the centre and the harbour. Again we manage to take a large number of photos.

Hallstatt - Salzbergbahn

The boat doesn't leave until 14:15. We still have enough time to go to the main viewpoint, from which you most often know Hallstatt from photos. There's a big sign in English at it saying that the locals live here and want to keep the place quiet, and asking tourists not to make too much noise. But the Asians didn't give a damn. Everyone here wants that cheesy Hallstatt photo on their cell phone, and since it's so crowded, you wait a while to get to the right spot.

Hallstatt from the most famous vantage point

Once we've taken enough photos, we take another walk to the end of Hallstatt and then head back to the harbour. Janet makes a quick trip to the same bakery for a second kremroli, and then we board the boat, which is waiting for us. If anyone would like to take the boat only one way, I recommend the cruise from Hallstatt, where the boat takes a big detour to the other side. This means that we sail along the coast of the city, and we get more new perspectives.

As I have already written, the boat connects to the train, which arrives in about ten minutes. This time, instead of the Talent, the CityJet has arrived, so we'll be trying out the state-of-the-art that runs on regional lines in Austria. Next stop is Bad Ischl, where the journey takes twenty minutes as we take the Regional Express (Rex). At Bad Ischl we give ourselves an hour until the next train departs, with the understanding that if it's worth it, we'll take the next train. But we didn't see anything special here, so we walked into the center and then a bit along the boardwalk along the Traun River.

Bad Ischl

On the way back, Zanet is attracted by a fast food stand offering sausage called Bosna. Zanet, remembering our Balkan travels, orders one. Unfortunately for her, they serve spicy aivar and especially cabbage, which as a nursing mother she cannot have, so I have to eat most of this dish. That's how we exhausted our hour. We return to the station and take the train to Gmunden.

It took about forty minutes to get there. We still plan to shop for dinner and souvenirs at Hofer (the Austrian version of the German Aldi), but since we have a Freizeit-Ticket, we'll take the tram one stop here to make the most of it. To my surprise, the tram had a conductor who checked everyone's tickets. When he was checking us and saw our Freizeit-Ticket, he read it in a "Hmm, connoisseurs" tone. Otherwise, there is a machine on the tram if you need a ticket. So we ride one stop and go shopping. After shopping, we decide whether to take the tram or walk, and we choose the walking transfer because it's downhill the whole time. If we had taken the tram, we would have had to walk part of the way uphill, and we didn't want to do that with the carriage. We didn't buy everything we wanted anyway, so we still popped into Norma's, which was on the way. At the hostel, Janet would serve the little one and I would make dinner. After we put the little one to sleep, we will pack up all our things and clean up, because tomorrow we have to leave the hostel before 6:00.

Our train leaves at 6:24 a.m. We are going so early not because we are inhuman and torture the little one, but because his wake-up time is between 4 and 5 a.m. So why delay when we can go earlier and be home early? Compared to coming here, we're doing it in one go and there are more transfers to make. We walk to the station again. It's raining, perhaps even more than yesterday, which doesn't bother us so much since we'll be on the train for half the day.

The train arrives in Gmunden on time, and right from the start we are faced with the most critical point of our return journey. At Attnang-Puchheim, we have seven minutes to transfer to the Railjet, which doesn't wait for delayed trains. Any delay to the train from Gmunden would be fatal. If we missed it, we would have to go to the Austrian Railways ticket office where they would have to issue us a replacement ticket. Our early ticket from the ČD is tied to specific connections and is not valid on others (as of the new timetable this should no longer be the case and the ticket should be valid on subsequent connections automatically).

However, we arrived on time and we made the Railjet. The Railjet has only one space for a pram, located in the last carriage (the one behind the locomotive). The pram space fills the door space, which is missing here, and is boarded from the penultimate carriage. After boarding, I notice a complication. The opposite door is out of order. I use the OBB app to find out which track our train will be arriving on in Linz, and according to the station layout I've googled, I find that we'll be arriving on the opposite side, i.e. at the out-of-order door. We need to somehow get across the entire carriage to the next door. Only the Thule buggy is wide and won't go through the door into the interior. So I quickly, like an F1 technician, take the wheels off the carriage, and we carry the little one as if we were on a carriage. However, even that was tricky, because there are dividers in the carriage that narrow so that we couldn't get through without the wheels. I had to do a bit of maneuvering, but on the other hand we got there in plenty of time to get off in Linz.

Stroller in Cityjet

Stroller in Railjet

We've got 20 minutes to transfer here, so it's cool. We are going to České Budějovice by the same type of train we came here by. Somewhere before Freistadt the snow starts to appear and lasts a little bit beyond the border. Not a flake in České Budějovice. There we get another surprise, when instead of a modern air-conditioned children's carriage, an old, smelly leather carriage is added. At least the young lady conductor is helpful and apologizes for the situation. Moreover, everyone gets vouchers for sixty crowns as compensation. A large number of people and a carriage with a maximum speed of 140 km/h with a scheduled journey time of 160 km/h cause us to arrive in Prague twenty minutes late at around 12:30. So the whole journey took about 6 hours.

On the way out, the little one remembers that he is hungry, so Janet feeds him on the platform. He can thus claim to be fed up with the train and the station. It's a good thing the weather in Prague is spring that day. After such an unplanned snack we walk to Florenc again. We take the elevator down to the underground and take the metro to Černý Most. To our surprise, we still catch the earlier bus, and at two o'clock we are back in Mladá Boleslav, thus ending our first trip with a new family member.

Useful links:

Czech Railways
Austrian Railways
Upper Austrian Transport Association
Accommodation in Gmunden
More accommodation options in Gmunden