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Published: June 10th 2008
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Interlaken as a town is all about the extreme sports. I know some of you all would love it in this area.
I spent the first Interlaken day mostly traveling. It seems getting in and out of Switzerland by train takes a while, likely due to the mountains. Took me about 12 hours to get from Munich to Interlaken including one missed connection. We decided to skip Zurich and head straight to Interlaken, mostly due to the fact that any Zurich and any neighboring town is completely boooked right now with the Euro08 soccer stuff. From what I've heard, Zurich isn't really a place to visit anyways, so bonus.
I got to the hostel around 10pm, where I met up with Brent (who will be joining me on the rest of the trip, yay :D ) and we hung out at the bar with a roommate from Korea until 1am or so. The guy (called himself Rain, or DJ Rain sometimes) was on his last break before his compulsory 2-year military service. Ouch. Let's just say, though, that the guy broke any sterotypes about not being able to drink. After 2 beers he was quite drunk, but he still
put away at least 9 huge beers that night, often faster than I can drink water. Hardxcore. He also was in computer science, and kept talking about how Microsoft was his dream company and how jealous he was of us. Here's hoping we can put in a good word for him in a few years 😉
We got up early (8am is early, shutup) the next morning to book a canyoning trip. The trip didn't start until 1:30pm, so we decided to walk to one of the lakes. Interlaken is named as such because it is bounded by two lakes, one on each side. After tromping throught the town, which is charming but not exactly photogenic without the surrounding mountains, we made it to the bluest lake you could ever see. seriously, it's so blue it looks like a ginormous swimming pool. Tht's exactly correct, look at the pics yourself! We pondered for the next two days about how that color was possible, even at night or when the sky was completely gray with rain. We thought maybe they concreted the river and the close parts of the lake, since the river definitely looked terraformed, but the train ride
out showed the entire (quite large) lake to be that color, so I have no idea how it's possible. Either way it was certainly pretty.
We walked back along the river to the town center, on the way passing a cow field with so many cow bells the farmers must want to kill themselves all day, a long line of biking-marathoners (which basically passed us, each saying sorry in seemingly a different language-- a cool thing about Switzerland), a couple of nice ferries, and of course the requisite random cool mountainside stuff that you see all over Europe (abandoned towers, interesting houses, etc). 'twas nice. And the walk through town was a great introduction to just how ridiculous prices are here in Switzerland. The Swiss Franc might not be higher than the dollar, like the euro so much IS, but the prices are easily twice what you'd expect to pay in the US. Luckily there is one haven of decent prices in Switzerland, the coop grocery stores. We would frequent them many times over the next few days 😊 Toblerone for a dollar!
We then hopped on the van to the canyoning trip. This is where it gets
"EXTREEEEME". Canyoning is basically going down a canyon looking for cool stuff to do. In our trip this included crossing rapids on foot, jumping into deeper parts from 20 feet above, rapelling down waterfalls, swinging across gorges and sliding down natural waterslides. Of course this was all under a professional guide's watch, or I wouldn;t have even thought of most of the stuff we did. Putting on the wetsuit was somewhat of an issue. The guide told everyone that the suits were inside out so to be sure to invert them when putting them on. Well apparently mine was the only one that wasn't given to me inside-out, so when I inverted it I had a nice blue set while everyone else was black. They told me it didn't matter, it should still work, and Hey I should be easy to pick out in the photos! Har har. My Broken glasses (TM) were also an issue so I taped 'em up like nobody's business. But then we were on our way.
We started with a simple fording of the river to get used to the balancing acts, and then we rapelled down a waterfall which was a lot of
fun. You can see me in the pics under the helmet name "Vladimir" (bwaha). The photos were 26CHF additional by the way, a ripoff considering the "professional" photogrpher missed half the trip, hardly ever got people's faces in the shot and used a 2 megapixel camera (won't matter much to you 'cuz travelblog.org rapes the pic quality anyways). I quite seriously could have done better without ever looking at the screen. But anyways...
We moved on, doing superman and barrel jumps into the deeper parts and working past some pretty strong currents (and bloody cold water), and it went pretty well. The only exception is there two Korean women who kept claiming that they understood their instructions but never ever followed them. One was in some pretty serious danger when the waterfall pulled her under because she didn;t rapell away from the waterfall at the bottom like everyone was told. Luckily for them DJ Rain was in our group (with a killer hangover) and could help explain. He was pretty good at this stuff too.
After the canyoning (about 3 hours), we decided to join in the soccer revelry gripping the continent. Brent wanted a Switzerland hat to
show our (temporary) allegiance, so we perused the huge selection of store in the town for a while, and then went back to our hostel (which is actually primarily a bar) to watch the Switzerland-Czech game and eat dinne. This was, by far, the most disappointing game out of the 4 I've seen this far (writing this in Lucerne 2 days later). The game was slow and sloppy and the food was super-burnt (that's what I get for odering wings, ribs and fries in Europe). Plus, Switzerland, who literally all of the people in the crowd supported, lost. That didn't help 😊
So, afterwards I went i search of a place to do laundry. On the way, we saw the dam for the city, which was pretty cool, but what's better is that we found where the REAL soccer party was, in the city's Altstadt (old town? old town center? something like that). Here, a thousand people were watching the Portugal-Turkey game, and as far as I could tell, not single person supported Turkey. Guess we're lucky Portugal won. Brent and I were discussing whether or not this was a racial thing, but that's a more serious subject than
I want to try to one-sidedly discuss in a travel blog 😊
It was a lot of fun watching the games here, and it makes me wish that the US had a sport that we got as involved with as a country. I think having teams associated with countries that are so close and have so much history together really helps. And it seems everyone here has something like a "top 4" countries list, where they can simply go from cheerig for one country to another in the same day.
That's enough for now. The next day is for Grindelwald, which is supposed to be more of a quiet, relaxed place than the "extreeeeeeeeeeme" Interlaken. We shall see!
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Josh Smith
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ZOMG!!! I am so jealous and so excited for you! I wish i was there, Blogariah!