Hallstatt

The town of Hallstatt sits on the opposite side of the lake from the train station, so I had to take a little ferry (the ferry in this case was just a boat with long benches) over to the town. The mountains around the lake literally cascade into it and Hallstatt just looks like a little dot of buildings built into the hills. I made sure I got directions to my hotel from the ferry dock, but they weren’t needed as you can walk from one side of Hallstatt to the other in about fifteen minutes and my hotel sat in the main (read: only) town square. Hallstatt looked like a movie set. It contained traditional, wooden Austrian houses, the sound of a mountain waterfall permeated the square, and a lakeside breeze swept through the alleyways. My hotel sat right on the lake, and I had a nice balcony overlooking the water. The town had houses, restaurants, and shops and that was pretty much it. There were a lot of natural bath product shops for some reason, and cute little knick-knack shops as well.

One of the first things I noticed when pulling up to the town were large signs on many of the balconies of the houses with red and black German words and red x’s through some of the words. I eventually found a notice, in English, that explained that UNESCO is trying to claim the entire town as a World Heritage Site (some of the buildings and area is already under this protection, but not all of it). The signs were saying, “Neine dienke” (no thank you) because the people of Hallstatt don’t want to be under the jurisdiction of an organization that is thousands of miles away and can tell them exactly what they can and cannot do to their properties. They say the buildings are already under Austrian protection and that is good enough. They want local protection with local people making decisions for their town. Over the course of my year abroad, I have been to many UNESCO World Heritage Sites, all praised, so it was interesting to see opposition to the organization.

All the websites I read about Hallstatt said it was overrun with tourists during the day, so I was expecting large crowds in the small town but was pleasantly surprised. There definitely were other people around, but not many. What was also surprising was the number of Asian tourists in Hallstatt – after being in China for so long, I kept wondering what they thought of Europe and I wanted to be like, “I know how you feel!”