Day 92: Bernese Alps

We discovered that our tram line, #11, doesn't seem to run on Saturdays. Instead we had to take the S13 train (which stopped at all the tram #11 stops up to a point) and then switch S-trains at a later stop. It ended up ok; we just barely made the 9:32am train out of Zurich.

After getting into Interlaken and checking into our hostel, we headed to the Interlaken Ost station, discovering that we had just missed the 1:05pm train up to the mountains. And, the trains that usually come every half-hour only come every hour after that train until 5pm. So, we had to wait nearly a whole hour for the next train >_<

But actually, maybe that was a good thing in a way? When asking whether we could use our round-trip train ticket to travel in the opposite direction (we bought Lauterbrunnen => Gimmelwald => Murren => Schilthorn => Getshalp => Lauterbrunnen... but we now wanted Schilthorn before Murren), the ticket person directed our attention to the live feed of the Schilthorn view. It was foggy!! She said it probably wouldn't clear up today >_< We kept our tickets.

The rest of the hour was well-spent in the adjacent huge Co-op supermarket. This is probably the largest supermarket we've seen in Switzerland thus far. Lots of selection, but I think the prices are a bit higher than those we saw in Zurich. This *is* a touristy area after all.


There's a lot of parasailors above Interlaken.

Trummelbach Falls. It's not even in our Switzerland cut-out from the RS book. Did I get the info from his Switzerland book, or was it on the web? Anyways, it was definitely *the* best part of the day. The waterfall runs through the mountain and the crazy Swiss have blown through the sections of the mountain adjacent the falls such that you can walk into and up the mountain to various viewpoints of the falls. That's seeing the falls from *within* the mountain!! They also built a crazy elevator inside the mountain so that you don't even have to walk up the first half! Of course, we opted to take the elevator up and then walk down; we didn't want to miss the lower half of the falls. All the water from the big three peaks (Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau) flow down through Trummelbach!


Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau... meaning the Ogre, Monk, and Lady. The monk is protecting the lady from the ogre. They even have yummy choco bread with the three peaks ^-^

RS walk through cute, little Gimmelwald and then Murren. Gimmelwald only has ~100 residents but they're actual residents who are serious about the town. They even got it declared as an avalanche zone to keep out modernizing for a tourist economy. Seeing local animals (cows, chickens, and goats here) is always an M-pleaser.

Murren was more built up, but it still had it's cute points in some parts. Maybe it was better than we expected because we didn't see all the tourists we expected to see.

All the traveling around actually took quite a while; we didn't get back down to Interlaken until after eight. All the supermarkets had already closed but our hostel desk directed us to a Co-op pronto mini market that stays open until 10:30pm *everyday*, unique for Switzerland. Too bad we already bought a noodle dish from some Asian place (that served Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean (!), and they even told you which dishes were of what nationality). But we picked up a bit more and also bought food for lunch and breakfast tomorrow ^-^