I was relieved to wake up on Thursday morning and find I didn’t feel ill, and Thursday turned out to be an absolutely fantastic day, despite the fact that it was raining far too heavily when we got up to even contemplate going for a walk.  Normally when the weather is appalling on holiday we resort to catching a bus somewhere, and we decided to try out this familiar plan in Grindelwald too.  Because of its geographical location at the end of a valley, long distance bus routes from Grindelwald are a bit limited, and in fact there is only one place you can catch a bus to:  Meiringen.  So, erm, to Meiringen we went

There are two reasons why the name Meiringen might be familiar to you.  The first is that the town was apparantly the birth place of the meringue, although despite having been there, I haven’t managed to get a definitive version of the story as to how this occurred, and indeed there seems to be more debate about who invented the meringue than the people in Meringen would like you to think.  Regardless of the truth of the matter, I can tell you for definite that Meiringen abounds with meringues, and in the afternoon we treated ourselves to the biggest, sickliest pudding which I have ever encountered in my entire life.  I tried to take a photo of it to capture its enormity for eternity, but I’m not sure the camera of my mobile phone has done it justice!

At any rate, I am jumping ahead of myself!  The journey to Meiringen was in itself a very exciting one.  First of all we travelled up the road to Grosse Scheidegg which we had descended a few days previously, but this time the bus went right over the top of the pass and began to descend on the other side.  Once again it was breathtaking.  I can’t imagine what sort of driving test one must have to pass if one wants to become a Swiss bus driver, but I’m 100% certain that none of the bus drivers in Birmingham would pass it!  The Grindelwald bus terminated at a random point in the middle of nowhere to which someone had attributed the name “Schwarzwaldalp”.  There we had to change onto another bus belonging to a Meiriingen company in order to continue with the rest of our journey.  The last bit was probably the most spectacular, and required the most reversing by the bus driver as we met farm vehicle after farm vehicle.

When we finally arrived in Meiringen it was just about lunchtime.  The tourist information office was, of course, closed for lunch between the hours of 12 and 2, so we were rather at a loss for what to do. And it’s now that I move onto the second thing for which Meiringen is world-famous; Meiringen is the place where the famous detective Sherlock Holmes met his death.  If you don’t want to know about the death of Sherlock Holmes, that I suggest you don’t read this post, Babel!

Babel accused me when I later told him about my exciting day out, of having spoiled the story line of Sherlock Holmes for him.  As anyone who has read a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories will know, and as I can most certainly attest on the grounds that I possess the entire box set, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t have a story line.  There are a few general themes which run through the stories in general; Watson being stupid, Holmes doing drugs, etc.  But as a rule the individual stories are self-contained, and it doesn’t matter what order you read them in.  As far as the death of Holmes goes, I think it is one of the worst kept secrets in literature.  Just as I can’t imagine anyone embarks on reading Jane Eyre without knowing what Mr Rochester is keeping in the attic, I can’t imagine that many people who have read Holmes don’t know that he is going to die, in particular because Penguin Classics disclose the fact in the resume of the life of Conan Doyle which they publish at the front of each collection!

The reason is that Conan Doyle took a cold-blooded decision to kill Holmes on the grounds that he wanted to write more serious literature.  He felt that he was in danger of being known only for his detective stories which were so popular that all his other work was totally eclipsed.  And thus it was that he devised at ingenious death for Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls above Meiringen, in a story called “The Adventure of the Final Problem”.

Holmes managed to stay dead for about three years, by the end of which period poor old Conan Doyle had been subjected to such a terrible amount of fan mail, that he was forced to resurrect him.  I won’t spoil the story of how he achieves that for those who haven’t read it, but in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes”, more specifically in a story called “The Adventure of the Empty House” Holmes is resurrected in a manner which is almost as impressive as what Jesus managed

If you’ve followed all that, you should have established that Meiringen is famous for being the place where a person who didn’t exist didn’t die :P  It has managed to capitalise on this nothingness exceptionally well.  Within a few years of Holmes supposed death, an enterprising persons had built a funicular railway up alongside the Reichenbach Falls, and over 100 years later the same railway is still in operation, transporting 24 visitors at a time to a point halfway up the falls from where it is possible to walk to the top and look down on them.  There is a proper Sherlock Holmes museum complete with a rather cool statue in the town itself, but up here there is also a small room which displays general Holmes memorabilia.

The spot where Holmes died is actually on the opposite side of the valley to the funicular, but the exact spot where he didn’t fall to his death is marked with a white star big enough to be seen from the cable car station :)  What I found slightly incredible is that there actually exists a Sherlock Holmes society who travel to Meiringen on the anniversary of his non-death and, on occasion, re-enact it.  If you don’t believe there could exist people without anything better to do in life, here’s the website with photos of the last re-enactment!

http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/galleries/beeline/index.htm

You can watch a video of the whole bizarre affair at Reichenbach.  I found it touching how the organisers had managed the translation into different languages.  In English, the explanatory text read “Sixty British people travelled to Meiringen to reenact the death of Sherlock Holmes”.  In German, it read, “Sixty highly eccentric British people travelled to Meiringen…”

How beautiful the Reichenbach falls are you can probably deduce from my photos without me attempting to describe them to you.  Definitely the most inspiring waterfall I have ever seen, and overall it was one of my favourite days of the holiday.  After such a high, whatever we did on Friday was always going to be a let-down.  In fact, we spent most of the day arguing over where to go, and then did what I can only describe as a poxy little walk to an obscure place called Brandegg.  There wasn’t time for us to do much on Saturday on account of our flight back being quite early.  We did try to visit Bern, but a combination of rain, overcrowded trains and a dearth of Ritter Sport made the experience less pleasant than it could have been.

All in all though it was an amazing holiday which I really enjoyed.  It was certainly far more enjoyable than last year’s holiday.  Part of that was thanks to Babel who managed to behave himself this year, but part of it was undoubtedly due to the stunning location.  The Bernese Oberland is very expensive and I doubt I shall be able to afford to go back there for many years to come, but it’s certainly a place worth visiting, at least once in a lifetime

Tags: holmes, meiringen, meringues

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.