I was about to start what will probably turn out to be a very long series of posts about my holiday by announcing that I am now home. This would technically be inaccurate, as to be precise I am currently in the Premier Inn at Euston I successfully returned from Switzerland on Saturday evening, but early this morning I was off again, this time to London where I am working on the audit of one of our solicitor clients. It would be difficult to imagine more of a contrast to where I have been for the last two weeks than London; all the noise, the bustle of the Tube, is a far cry from the small mountain village of Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland where my parents had rented a chalet for a fortnight. It was a thoroughly enjoyable holiday, admittedly not without it’s frustrations, but nevertheless truly lovely I was totally relaxed when I returned to the UK, but that has been marred slightly this afternoon by the fact that a member of client staff used an F word at me. Back to reality :cry:

This time I learnt from my mistake in Hungary and managed to force myself to write a paper diary as I went along. I spent most of the holiday feeling utterly exhausted, and so some days I may have written less than others, but I certainly have enough to go on for my blog without the painful wracking of brains which I had to subject myself to after the IJK

It all started on the morning of Tuesday 26th August. I had had no hand in booking the flights, and so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that our plane was leaving Birmingham at the comparatively civilised hour of 9am, and so with online check in the night before, it wasn’t necessary to get up until 6 We flew with Swiss, which was quite a novel experienced, accustomed as I now am to flying with budget airlines. I initially tried to refuse the offer of a drink, being unwilling to shell out extra cash to an airline once I am sitting in a plane, but then my sister reminded me that a cup of coffee was actually free, as was the raisin bun which I was presented with. The latter was somewhat of a mixed success as I don’t actually like raisins; I spent a happy half hour attempting to extract crumbs of bun from around the offending fruit, but before I got two thirds of the way through I lost motivation and surrendered the rest to my sister.

The aircraft actually arrived ten minutes early in Zurich, and in true Swiss style we weren’t allowed to land but were forced to circle until our appointed time. The people behind me made a terrific fuss about this and started telling stories about aeroplanes which had circled round airports and never been given the go ahead to land, with the result that the engine ran out of fuel and the aeroplane simply dropped from the sky, exterminating everyone on board. I seem to be condemned to sit in the region of nervous flyers this summer They should have stopped moaning and looked out of the window. Zurich is actually an exceptionally nice airport to circle around. Whilst the city itself lies in the comparative lowlands of northern Switzerland, from the air you can often see further afield to the Alps themselves, which is always a spectacle worth seeing. Furthermore, the city is built on the shores of a significant lake, and whilst I’m not a big fan of the Zuerchersee up close, from the air it’s really quite a pretty sight

Zurich airport is wonderfully designed, and in fact I think I have to award it the prize for being the best situated airport I have every been to. After a baggage reclaim as efficient as one would expect from the world’s most orderly country, we merely had to stroll through customs and descend on an escalator to the railway platform to make a swift connection into the city centre. Certainly not the hour hike to which one is subjected at Frankfurt, and the transfer time to the city is a mere ten minutes (cf Munich 50 mins).

Once there, we took the opportunity to stock up on some food. Zurich is a city which I struggle to love, despite how high it habitually ranks in sruveys of the best place to live in the world. The city centre to me lacks character. There is admittedly a certain thrill to be gained by walking down Bahnhofstrasse and knowing that beneath your feet lie cellars and cellars of gold ingots, but on the surface Zurich comes across to me as a place which lacks soul. There are too many banks, which don’t impress me at all, and too many posh shops, which impress me even less. Yes, the lake is pleasant from a distance, but to be honest in hot weather I think it smells a bit whiffy and it certainly isn’t going to win a prize for being the cleanest stretch of water in Switzerland. As for the river… well, any time I walk out of the station and into the park which lies along its banks, I kind of feel like I’m going to be mugged. There are a lot of slightly strange looking people in Zurich – far more shaved heads than one would expect to see in a cross section of society – and I can’t help feeling that there is a very strong fascist undercurrent…

Perhaps I’m being unfair, but it doesn’t even have a Pizza Hut to recommend it now that Pizza Hut Switzerland has gone bust, and so it was on this occasion that we elected not to venture beyond the doors of the Hauptbahnhof. Whilst my family busied themselves with choosing vile looking sandwiches full of gherkins, I headed off to a little stall which was selling rather attractive slices of pizza, and had a chat with a delightful little man who upon learning I was British, proudly informed me that he was a Liverpool fan, despite “you’ll never walk alone” seemingly being the only words of English he possessed

Our route first took us on an inter-city express bound for the Swiss capital, Bern. The journey between there and Zurich is surely the most uninspiring in the whole of Switzerland. The landscape is so flat you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Holland, and everywhere you look are the ugly blemishes of industry; power stations, business parks, factories. Fortunately for me, I was in so much pain taht I didn’t actually care. The sudden onset of my time of the month explains why I had been somewhat tearful the proceeding weekend, but why this month should prove to be so much more drastically painful than last I have absolutely no idea. I had had the foresight to pack some tablets, but these were in my toileteries bag which was at the bottom of my suitcase, which was in turn wedged at the bottom of a luggage rack – in short, inaccessible So instead I concentrated on breathing exercises, and found distraction in an argument with my mother about the gherkin in her sandwich; apparently she hadn’t known there was a gherkin in it when she bought it, and it didn’t go down too well when I stated that I’d bought pizza specifically because I knew there was a gherkin in the sandwich. I should apparently have informed her of this fact, despite the fact I didn’t know she didn’t know, and it was news to me that she didn’t like gherkins anyway…

At Bern we transferred to the waiting regional connection, bound for the biggest town in the Bernese Oberland; Interlaken. Interlaken is a place I know quite well, having spent three winter holidays there in the past, and despite it’s slightly tacky tourist elements, I rather like it. It occupies a truly bizarre situation between the two lakes of Thun and Brienz. It isn’t until you see it from the air that you realise what a narrow stretch of land it is. Geography is not my strong point, but at some point the two lakes must surely have been one, then for some reason a thin strip of land between them must have dried out and people decided to build a town on it.

At any rate, after Bern the journey begins to become far more enjoyable, and we were blessed with a prospect far more pleasing to the eye as we travelled past the Alpine foothils and alongside the banks of Lake Thun. It never ceases to amaze me how foreign lakes achieve such a beautiful shade of blue which is completely unheard of in the UK. Once you are in Interlaken, you have reached the Alps proper; the imposing range of the Eiger, Moench and Jungfrau rise high above the town, all of which attaining altitudes in the region of 4000m and thus being snow-capped, even in August

Interlaken is thus where the “real” railway ends. From the little station known as Interlaken Ost, small rickety trains depart on what I believe is a narrow-gauge line bound simultaneously for the two opposing destinations of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen. Woe betide the traveller who speaks no German and ends up sitting in the wrong part of the train. At a village called Zweiluetschinnen, a name which I once thought a dreadful German tongue-twister but now find quite pretty, the train is randomly uncoupled and the two resulting segments set off up different valleys. The local geography is such that two small rivers, the Weisse Luetschine and the Schwarze Luetschine, both fed by the glaciers of the high Alps, have formed two different valleys before coming together and joining up at the aptly-named Zweiluetschinnen in order to flow onwards into the lakes. You may think that you have never heard of the Lauterbrunnen valley, but in fact you probably did as a small disgruntled child in a geography lesson – it is widely acknowledged as being one of the world’s most perfect examples of a U-shaped valley, and for that reason textbooks on physical geography abound with photos! No matter how many times I see it, I never cease to be amazed by the way the sheer vertical rock of the valley sides and the myriad of waterfalls which pour down them.

Our route, however, lay inside the other valley and towards the small mountain village of Grindelwald. There were times when I thought the train wasn’t going to make it as it somewhat painfully ascended the 500m or so necessary to reach the terminus station. Grindelwald is quite literally the end of the track, an elevation of just over 1000m giving it a comparable altitude to the top of Snowdon. Having visited the location several times in winter, I was not at all prepared for how different and how beautiful it would look in summer. Situated in the shadow of the Eiger and other impressive peaks such as the Wetterhorn, the views just from the main high street are truly stunning

Our first taks was to find the offices of the company from whom we were renting the chalet. After only a couple of wrong turns we achieved this, and were promptly greeted by a helpful woman who very kindly volunteered to give us and our luggage a lift to our appartment. I say very kindly, because it soon transpired that what was described on the internet as having a “central” location was actually a 20 minute slog uphill from the town centre Having arrived, we discovered that the cleaner had inexplicably left the wrong key in the door, and so we had to sit on the terrace for ten minutes whilst the lady returned to the village to swap it. It was certainly no hardship to wait outside and contemplate the Eiger, and time passed very swiftly.

Once inside, the chalet proved to be as nice as I thought it bloody better be given how much we were being charged for it. It appeared to be the second home of a rather wealthy English family who had furnished it with bathmats from Harrods and china from Villeroy and Boch. My sister and I, by virtue of a bit of careful suitcase manoevering, managed to secure the only bedroom with a kingsize bed, and that substantially lessoned the pain of sharing over the days which followed

We got a lift back down to the Coop, the only foodstore in Grindelwald, and picked up some essential shopping. After that there was just time to unpack before heading back to the village for a much-needed meal. The food we had was delicious – a perfect example of the Swiss national dish Roesti , complete with cheese, bacon and a fried egg, but when I got the bill and realised that a modest plateful had set me back ten quid, I was rather horrified. Expensive, and not necessarily good, food was to be a theme for the duration of the holiday :cry:

Tags: Grindelwald, holidays, Interlaken, Zurich

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 8:25 pm 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.