Luzern Thursday

Interlaken Wednesday Another day of leisure

This was a more leisurely day. Out of the hotel and a gentle walk along the river to the Interlaken West railway station via Untrseen. Just before the lake there is a large fish pass at the  weir.

The ferry terminal is right beside the railway station and conveniently there is a very nice café where we had a coffee while waiting for the ferry to arrive . There were not that many people waiting to board and we set off backwards along a narrow channel for about 20 minutes. 

As we entered the lake at the end of the channel there is a distinct change of colour of the water where the river enters the lake. Almost as soon as we were in the lake a second ferry entered the channel.

We travelled the length of the lake to Thur calling in at lots of small towns and villages. The skipper didn’t seem too concerned about the amount of wash as he comes in by the moored boats. There is also a  paddle steamer that plies its trade on the lake.

The crew of the ferries have the sort of rope skills you would expect but even they missed the mooring posts a couple of times . At the end of the video you can see how fast they go backwards down the channels.

We left the ferry at Thur and had a walk around town, it was cut short by it starting to rain so a couple of beers were called for until it blew over. Like many places it has its covered wooden bridges. 

As we walked to the railway station to catch the train back we passed a bus at the bus stop that was going to Interlaken so we hopped on that instead and travelled all around the north bank of the lake getting off at the west end of the town for a look round. After finding somewhere for coffee we watched the Paragliders coming into land on the open area, remember this is an open public area in the middle of a built up area with people wandering around.
We wandered back through the town to our hotel as that evening we were having a group fondue night in the hotel dining room.

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Interlaken Tuesday Truemmelbach,Murren, Kleine Scheidegg

Well supposedly it was another day of leisure, lets see how that panned out, Along with Geoff and another member of our party we made our way to the railway station and caught the train to Lauterbunnen  and then a bus to the Trümmelbach water falls,  a series of ten underground waterfalls.These drain water from the glaciers and are the only underground glacier water falls open to the public. Thankfully there is a lift to take you up to where you enter the caves, although we walked down the external stairs when we left.

The underground waterfalls		A lift to the main entrance of the caves

 

We then caught the bas back to Lauterbunnen where we stopped for a coffee. A little further down the valley, opposite the underground waterfalls is a very high fall

before returning to the station where the second Geoff was also waiting to catch the narrow gauge train to the top of Klein Scheidegg which is quite close to the Eiger. There are two stations with three different rail companies on the mountain. Two lines run parallel at one station, the line we came up on and the line we will be going down on, the third carries on up the Eiger, we didn’t go on that on. 

 

 

Geoff left us at this point to walk along the ridge to the cable car.

While we were up there a helicopter was ferrying what looked like sections of a pedestrian bridge down from the Eiger as an under slung load. After a couple of ice creams we caught the train down to Grindelwald, here we changed to meter gauge track and took a train to Zweilutschinen then changed to go back to Lauterbunnen. Here we crossed the road and took the Funicular railway up the mountain and a shuttle train to Murren.

From Murren we took the cable car back down to the valley floor. This is steepest cable car in the world and drops almost vertically to the ground like a lift.

The whole of this valley is very popular with paragliders leaping off the high sided shear  mountain sides and landing in the valley, from the cable car they were flying below us. The Cable Car station is also the terminal for the bus, the same route that we followed to get to Trümmelbach Water falls first ting this morning. Luckily there was a bus waiting and we caught it back to  Lauterbunnen station. We had bit of a wait for our train so I took a few photographs of the local rolling stock.

When our train arrived it was a mad rush to board and we were hard pushed to even get in the doors, we then had to battle our way through to the first class carriage, where thankfully there were seats and we had a comfortable ride back to Interlaken.

By the station Interlaken has its own reflective pool, but unlike Mr. Trumps this one works.

So much for a day of leisure, we didn’t stop all day.

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