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Published: June 12th 2008
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Sorry my entries are getting so late, but as you’ve probably guessed traveling with someone means I have less free time that I should spend on writing 😉 I have a 9 hour train ride tomorrow (the 12th) so I should be able to catch up then…
We decided to use today to travel to Grindelwald, which is close to Interlaken but higher up in the mountains. It’s actually in its own valley, completely secluded and surrounded by mountains. We took a local train company’s train through some really pretty scenery unlike anything I’ve seen in the USA (although I could guess Montana and/or Colorado might be similar, if I’d ever been to those States). And into the valley, which is oppressively huge and is sprinkled with houses here and there like God took a salt-and-pepper shaker and shook them over the valley. And of course the main part of the town centers around the train station, and due to its touristic and secluded nature is full of very expensive stores. The town was apparently originally built around ice mining, and when that industry died it turned to granite mining the granite mine is still there on the river and
active).
The are a number of cable cars running from the town to the surrounding mountains, so we decided to take one of the more famous of the cars to Pfingstegg. The lift was one of the more impressive I’ve taken since the valley is so huge and bowl-like, so you could see more ground than normal without the distance being fogged since the clouds stayed largely above the basin.
At the top, we did a toboggan run-ish thing with roller sleds that, while short, got to decent speeds (if you controlled it to do so) and of course had awesome views. Got a good video of the trip. Surrounding the mountain the cablecar went up to were a larger number of paragliders than I had ever seen before, even when I went paragliding at a paragliding event. There had to be 20+ parachutes in the air at any one time, in just the area we could see. And many of the mountains had their tips covered in clouds, so while I doubt anyone would glide in the clouds, someone might just be that extreeeeme. And they seemed to follow us as we went on the next part:
the mountain hike to the glacier gorge.
Note that the glacier gorge doesn’t have glaciers in it in June, so we didn’t see glaciers, but it’s not hikable during the winter anyways. The hike started uphill and continued that way for a while, but not anywhere near as steeply as Cinque Terre or Hallstatt. All along the path, very cold water fell off the surrounding rocks. As a matter of fact, something we noted about the entire Interlaken area is that there are dozens and dozens of waterfalls that in America (and many other places I imagine) would be called impressive and be attractions in themselves. Here, they’re commonplace enough where they’re pretty much ignored, except for by the silly tourists like me. Seriously, you’ll see 5 of these things within one photo-able area.
We passed a few far-too-overpriced restaurants and made it to an area where people apparently bungee jump from (although nobody was there at the time). And looking down, we saw why: the glacier gorge. This is a really deep and relatively narrow gorge with the ultra-cold river flowing through it. Directly below the gorge, you could see the beginnings of the gravel mine works,
where the water changes color from clear to gray. It’s really cool because, later on during the walk (at the bottom of the mountain), we saw where the post-mine gray water joined with another river with clear water, forming two joined but distinct streams that eventually swirled into one.
After finding an odd but cool random somewhat human-modified cave with electricity and tables and a pool and everything in the middle of nowhere, we crossed the gorge to the path down. This path goes by the dam where they used to allow large ice-blocks flow back down to the town, which has since all but disappeared. Continuing down the mountainside past some vine formations that had to be at least somewhat manmade, we made it to flat ground.
Here, we followed an easy paved path back to town. This path went right past the gravel mine, which you could tell was expanding to encroach on surrounding and trees and such. It’s probably a seasonal thing, since I doubt they can do much mining while the place is frozen solid. Just like Hallstatt, I’d like to see this place in the winter, as it’s bound to be very different.
We took the train back to Interlaken and continued on our way to Lucerne, which is nowhere near as “quaint” as all the guide books seem to claim, but we’ll give it its chance tomorrow. On the train ride over, there was a double rainbow (which the pictures don’t do justice to) over the too-blue lake that was a perfect finishing touch to the Interlaken region.
We also watched the Germany-Poland game with a bunch of German supporters in the bar next to our hostel. Germany won. It was great, as it had the energy of the larger Portugal-Turkey crowd with the coziness of the Switzerland-Czech crowd.
Anyways, tomorrow should be a big day in Lucerne. Good night!
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