The elusive Bussalp
The weather on Wednesday wasn’t as bad as the forecast had led us to believe, and so we decided to go back up the First cable car again. This time we wanted to walk along the opposite side of the valley, with the aim of attaining a place called Bussalp. Bussalp is a popular destination for tobogganing in the winter, although the main thing it has to recommend it in summer is that it is lucky enough to have a bus-stop. Logic tells me that this fact cannot have anything to do with the fact that it is called Bussalp, but most of me would rather believe that it did. 
On the map, Bussalp looks a totally walkable distance from First. Things got off to a mixed start, however, as we made our way to a small place called Waldspitz which I assumed was the midway point. I loved the little winding path down the mountain, but my parents were slightly less impressed because my mother has an extreme fear of falling after an accident she had in Austria last year. I think to be honest that she would prefer to walk on nice level paths which are as wide as roads, but I find those kind of boring; little paths where you have to give some thought as to where you put your feet are more exciting
Anyhow, we reached Waldspitz in reasonable time and sat and had a delicious picnic lunch on a bench with a gorgeous view over Grindelwald. There was a small restaurant at Waldspitz and we wanted to stop for an ice-cream but, bizarrely, it turned out to be the only mountain restaurant in the whole of Switzerland without an ice-cream menu 
I was initially slightly annoyed by this fact, but it turned out to have been a blessing in disguise…
Somewhat disgruntled, we left Waldspitz and set off in the direction of Bussalp. The Swiss have this helpful system of signposting hiking trails, and at certain strategic places along the route, the signs contain not just directions, but estimated walking time. Our walking time is generally a bit longer than the time given because we stop to look at things, have a rest etc, but on the whole the times are generally reasonable. The sign at Waldspitz informed us that it was about 90 minutes to Bussalp.
I was a little surprised that the path seemed to be leading steadily upwards, but for the first half hour or so I wasn’t unduly concerned. That is to say, I had been expecting the path to lead vaguely downwards, because the map had implied that Waldspitz was situated a good 200m higher than Bussalp, but in Switzerland even a path between two places at the same altitude is never flat; you’re always having to either go up or down to cross little streams and the like. After half an hour, however, well, I would have been questioning whether we were on the right path at all had it not been for the fact that every sign we encountered was merrily pointing to Bussalp.
By this time the day had cleared up tremenduously and the temperature on my altimeter was just under 30 degrees. We were just above the tree-line, and prolonged walking uphill was beginning to become tiresome. When we eventually emerged into a meadow and saw a narrow path which appeared to zig-zag up, up, up endlessly, all our hearts sank and my parents started making mutinous noises. My sister and I adopted a policy of walking ahead of them, then when we felt out of breath sitting on a rock to wait for them, so that they were always motivated to continue. Bit by bit we began to advance towards a signpost mounted on the highest piece of ground we could see, and which we blithely assumed would be the highest point of the walk.
Erm, yeah, in our dreams When we finally reached the signpost, my sister and I were dismayed to see another hill straight in front of us. We’d been walking approximately an hour now, and there was still no sign of Bussalp. What’s more, the path began to become steeper and steeper, so that soon I was clinging onto random rocks with my bare hands. There came a point when I was particularly hot and bothered, practically hyper-ventilating, and desperately trying to keep pace with my sister in case I got to a dangerous bit which I was too scared to get across without a hand. I encountered a rather big step up, and halfway through my attempt to get over it, started to feel like I was going to fall. I instinctively put on my hand to steady myself… and grabbed hold of a thistle. Yes, that’s right; a thistle. One of those big evil spiky plants, like Eeyore used to eat. Let’s just say it hurt 
That was just the start of my disasters for the day. Being thoroughly exhausted and possessing a very sore hand, I finally made it to the top of that particular uphill delight, and feeling in serious need of a rest before I could go any further, I threw myself down on the ground on the far side of a small fence. By this time, despite the fact that it was still oppressively hot, clouds were beginning to gather overhead as if there could be a storm sometime soon, and the wind had started to pick up. I was looking idly at the sky and thinking that the only thing which could make this day worse would be if it started to rain, when I realised that the fence was blowing towards me.
That probably makes no sense to someone who is now visualising a British fence, but in Switzerland farmers don’t tend to build permanent walls or fence-like structures. I don’t know why, perhaps because they would only get destroyed by the snow during the winter. Instead, they seem to favour delimiting their little pieces of land with a thin strip of material supported by little poles. That probably doesn’t sound very effective, until I point out that the material is electrocuted…
This thought slowly penetrated its way into my head just as I registered that I was sitting a foot away from such an electric fence and that the wind was blowing the electric cord within a few inches of my face. I quickly lay down flat, and proceeded to panic for several minutes until the weather calmed down a bit and I was able to climb away to safety without being electrocuted 
Making my way to a bit of higher ground which looked somewhat safer, I was just congratulating myself on my successful escape, when a fly flew straight into my eye 
I spent the next fifteen minutes or so vainly trying to extract it again by means of excessive blinking and pouring evian onto my face, but it was all to no avail and the fly was destined to stay in a rather uncomfortable position behind my eyelid until such time as I might get to Bussalp and find a toilet with a mirror.
Meanwhile, about a mile behind, my parents were having a crisis of their own. They happened to have stumbled across another English couple, and asked them how much further it was to Bussalp. The English couple said something clearly ridiculous like that they’d been walking for five hours and still hadn’t got to Waldspitz yet, and scared my mother so much that apparently she actually started crying!
The minutes ticked by, and still we were going uphill. After three hours, there was still no sign of Bussalp and both we and one other German couple who had the misfortune to be walking the route, were beginning to lose faith in the existence of Bussalp at all. We certainly couldn’t see any sign of it but we could, however, see a signpost looming hopefully on the horizon. Another twenty minutes we were there… only to be told it was another 50 minutes to Bussalp.
We’d already lost the will to live a long way back, but there seemed like nothing for it but to continue, despite the fact that two hours had passed since the last sign post told us that Bussalp was an hour and ten minutes away 
Fortunately, our spirits received a much needed boost shortly afterwards when we caught sight of a group of huts on the mountainside below us. Bussalp! It had to be.
Our pace picked up a bit, although on my part at least this was purely an attempt to get away from a series of unpleasant smells which seemed to be hounding us To start with there was the stench of cows. I don’t mind cows in moderation, but these were a particularly dirty bunch who had been messing right, left and centre. We’d just passed those when we came across a herd of pigs (Swiss people seem to leave their pigs out to run free) and crikey, did they smell or did they smell…
So it was that around 5pm we finally staggered in to the restaurant at Bussalp, only to find that we just had time for a quick cup of coffee before boarding the last bus of the day. It my utter disgust with the cruel deception practised on me by the Swiss signposts, I regret to say that I forgot to take a photo of the blasted place, and so there still exists no objective proof that it exists which I can offer to anyone who might right now be trapped in the dreadful No Man’s Land outside Waldspitz.
Let’s just say this was a walk which I won’t be doing again!
If you thought that was the worst bit of my day, however, you’d be wrong 
Oh no, the best was yet to come.
I said at the beginning that expensive food was a theme which had been running through my Swiss holiday. I was really trying to keep costs down as much as possible, but after a few days in the most expensive place on earth, I was beginning to regard £10 for a pizza as a bargain. I certainly hadn’t been able to afford to eat any meat since I left home, and so it was with glee that I chanced upon the menu of a certain hotel close to the station in Grindelwald, which seemed to do a very reasonable range of evening meals for less than CHF20. One of the options on the said menu was Schnitzel and chips, which just happens to be my most favouritist meal ever, so I was dead pleased when we went to eat there on Wednesday evening.
It turned out to have been a mistake. I wasn’t very impressed from the start, when I ended up with a load of cabbage on my plate, but this turned out to be the least of my problems. My father kindly removed it for me, and I started work on my chips. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of chips, so I can only manage to eat them when they’re hot and crispy. In between I had a couple of bites of Schnitzel, but I was eating it in an absent minded sort of way and not paying very much attention to it. It was about ten minutes into the meal, by which time I had eaten quite a sizeable chunk out of the Schnitzel, that I realised the inside of it was pink and blood was running out onto my plate.
My thought process went like this:
Yuk, my Schnitzel is all pink and bloody.
Oh well, never mind. It tastes okay, and other people eat beef rare all the time without getting sick.
This isn’t beef, this is pork.
You’re not supposed to eat raw pork.
Shit.
I’m going to die!
At this point I had the presence of mind to stop eating, and mentioned the problem to the others at the table in an offhand sort of way. I couldn’t be bothered to complain to be honest because I knew that if I did, all they’d do was offer to cook me another one and my appetite for Schnitzel had suddenly disappeared quite dramatically. My mother was determined to make a scene however, and did so quite successfully. The owner of the hotel assured me in no uncertain terms that I was not going to get sick because the Schnitzel came from a Grindelwald pig, but I still felt rather nervous about the whole idea, and it wasn’t helped by a quick google I did when I got back to the chalet of nasty things you could catch if you ate undercooked pork