If you’re as fluent oaf Deutsch as I am, you can translate the name of this mountain town:

Bad Gastein = Bad Gas Town

… Not exactly great marketing to attract tourists.

But I love weird & unique Bad Gastein. I stayed over a week.

Catching up on the internet. Day hiking the Austrian Alps. And biking when I needed a change of pace.

Austria is very inexpensive this Summer due to the recession. Tourism is way down. I paid US$22.50 / day for a private room. With breakfast. (I can drink $20 worth of coffee in the morning.)

You could stay in the dorm for US$10 day. And get a complimentary mountain bike. It just might be the least expensive hostel in Western Europe.

The townscape is characterised by historic multi-storey hotel buildings erected on … steep slopes.

It surrounds a series of waterfalls, in fact.

The spas of Bad Gastein are a fashionable resort, visited by European monarchs as well as the rich and famous. … Well, they were in the 1860s.

Since the 1960s imposing and massive hotels mostly sit empty.

Somerset Maugham could have used this town as a setting for one of his short stories about eccentric expat recluses running out the clock.

The good people of the Rathaus have made an effort. To rejuvenate the resort, Bad Gastein renovated the hot springs and added an ultra modern (in 1970) Convention Centre.

The Casino is a little more appealing.

I’d love to shoot a movie here. In one scene an engrossed young couple, deep in conversation in the foreground, wouldn’t notice as a despondent hotel owner throws himself off the balcony into the waterfall.

Soccer balls, as well as the corpses of suicide victims, get washed downstream, eventually finding an eddy.

more bad Bad Gastein photos

I’m aus. En route to the Swiss Alps.