The breakfast at Euro Youth Hostel in Bad Gastein was epic. There is no other word to describe it – cereal, yoghurt, fruit, cheese, meat, bread, rolls, juice, tea, coffee the works. It certainly put us in a good mood for the day. We also Skyped with Grandma and Grandpa, which I think they were pretty impressed by. Grandpa was a natural and who knows what will happen – he might subscribe to this webcam thing soon…
Our first stop of the day was the thermal baths. The complex is incredible. It is situated just over a natural thermal spring, and around 750,000 L of water runs through it every day. The water from the spring is so hot (around 50°C) that it has to be cooled down before they can use it in the pools. There are four large pools, a waterslide, a sauna, but best of all, one of the pools is outdoors. It is absolutely incredible to be sitting in a pool while snow falls on your head and shoulders. The view over the ski slopes is amazing, and the fog generated by the interface of the cold air and hot water gives the whole thing a little bit more magic. Sitting in the bubbles and warm water seemed to release all of the tension in our muscles after lugging our packs around for the last little while, and we walked away feeling very refreshed. It was a great experience.
The chapter on Bad Gastein closed pretty quickly after that – we got on a train to Salzburg after lunch and arrived in the afternoon. The city was initially a little disappointing as so many people we've met had built it up to be gorgeous (a little like Prague I suppose). It was pretty, but not particularly stunning. The castle is suitably foreboding overlooking the town from its seat on the hill, and the old town is actually quite enjoyable, with markets and lots of good window-shopping lining the cobblestone streets. One especially interesting sight we saw was a couple of guys hurling big iceblocks off their six-storey roof onto the pavement below. One of those things we just would never see at home (obviously). The night passed slowly as we waited for our 11pm bus to Bern. The Austrian Eurolines (bus company) website was useless and the number they gave for their call centre wasn't connected. Additionally, the pick-up point was in a back road near the train station, there was no timetable up, and the lady at the tourist info was not exactly reassuring ("the buses almost always go from there"). We joked about having to catch the 12:44am train to Zurich, but the bus did come and we spent a long, restless night undoing all the good work the thermal baths did.
Bern is a fantastic town (it doesn't exactly come across as a city in the Australian understanding of the word), and it probably helped immensely that the sun was out and it was a spectacular day. Our hostel is pretty good, with a cool common room and good kitchen. Keeley struggled much more than me with the tiredness so she spent most of the afternoon on the couch relaxing. I didn't accomplish much myself, although we did see the cool cathedral with its 12m-high stained glass windows and beautiful Gothic tower and interior. It is a really pleasant place to walk around – almost every block has an undercover arcade so it would be great if it were raining. There are some really modern structures like the wavy tram stop outside the glass-box Hauptbahnhof (central train station) mixed in with the old, Renaissance and Swiss-Gothic buildings. There's a cool fountain near our hostel depicting an ogre feasting on small children, we saw the bear pits (a pretty sad affair after seeing the good pits in Prague zoo and the Alpine zoo, as these were little more than holes in the ground), I explored the parliament building complex and its gardens, and generally just soaked up the city. It's one of those places that is hard to leave, but would be boring if you spent too long here. Besides, we're going to much more exciting places tomorrow (Interlaken).
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