Interlaken

Willkommen in meinen Träumen - Willkommen in der Schweiz



Switzerland is one of the most lucky countries in the world. The people are blessed with a high standard of living (high costs too), natural landscapes (70% of Switzerland are mountains), beautiful and CLEAN lakes, fresh cold air and the world's best tap water.

Language wise, there are 4 official languages in Switzerland. The language which most Swiss speak is German (orange coloured regions) which corresponds to about 80% of the population. Next up is French (green), and the southern region of Switzerland speaks generally Italian. The 4th language is known as Romansh, which according to a Swiss guy whom I spoke to, sounded like Latin and has Latin origins.


The first part of the big Europe trip, I was in Lausanne, the west of Switzerland, near Geneva, which was a French speaking region. This time I spent my time in Interlaken, as well as Luzern and Zürich, which were German speaking Cantons. And I thought Lausanne was beautiful until I came to Interlaken.... where I felt that I was living in the times of Heidi, the storybook which we would read as kids.

In fact, Interlaken is one of the top tourist destinations in Switzerland because of the Jungfraujoch, the highest point of the Europe at 3454 metres. Also most tourist would flock here to do winter sports or sports of all kind, or just to spend money. And such was the impression that I got when I walked out of the train station:

Signposts to hotels in all directions.

Contrary to living in a hotel, I had booked a place in a hostel instead. It is a very popular hostel for Americans and for whatever reason I am not sure. And as expected, partying at night is very much on their agenda. Anyway, given my tight budget, I did not join in the booze, but rather I had packed about 2 days of food supplies from Prague and a bottle of wine from Germany to last me through.

The first night was mainly settling down, making my dinner and then waking along the main road in Interlaken, doing window shopping and looking at how rich tourist splurge their money in places like the Casino below:

Actually I was quite dismayed the first night to see so many tourists around. I have expected Interlaken to be touristic but the level of tourism is damn extreme here. I was determined to wake up early the next day and take the hiking routes which would lead me to meet as few tourists as possible.

And so I woke up at 6.30am the next day and went to get my breakfast. Not surprisingly, most of the people who were up early for breakfast were the Asians. Most of the Americans were still dead in bed. And after that, I left the hostel at about 8.10am and began my long walk for the whole day.

Here are some of the morning shots just outside the hostel and a 10 minute walk down in the direction of Widerswil.

It was great to walk like that in the morning because firstly, the air is fresh and the sun is not totally up yet so its not sorching. Secondly you can be sure you will not bump into any tourists but rather locals who walk their dogs or jog. And some of them would stop and talk to you for a while.

My target for that morning was the town of Lauterbrunnen, which was 795 metres high. Actually I was given the transport card which allows me to take the bus to a certain distance, reducing the time and effort needed to reach Lauterbrunnen, 12 km away from Interlaken. Or with the train it takes only 15minutes from Interlaken to reach. But by foot it would take about 2.5 hours. And it was a great idea to actually walk because of the following pictures below:

The train which everyone else would take uphill. Still walking is better because you could stop by and take pictures of all angles whenever you want.

Although there were signs showing the Wanderweg (hiking route), sometimes I strayed off course or cut through fields, in order to have a close look at what some of the Swiss homes are like. And here's one of them. I met this old man who was watering his vegetables in his little garden behind (pic above), as well as stopping by a barn where a guy was sweeping the hay and talked for a while.

At about 11am I finally arrived at Lauterbrunnen, where I was greeted by a row of houses displaying the Swiss architecture. Most of the houses are of course guesthouses, or hotels or anything catering to making money out of tourists.

My attention was then turned to the waterfall in the picture below:

Although not a fantastic waterfall in Switzerland (when they have the Europe largest's waterfall in Schaffhausen - a town bordering Germany), I went close to have a look at it. And they have actually constructed a path, which was acutally quite dangerous to use cos of the elevation, to get as close as possible to the waterfall:

The closest I could get to the waterfallSplendid views of Lauterbrunnen from the "Waterfall" This is really what they mean by Rest in Peace.

After having enough of Lauterbrunnen, it was already afternoon as I made my way down to Interlaken. And here are some of the beautiful flowers that I managed to capture along the hike up and down:

Once on level ground at Interlaken, my next target spot was Bönigen, a municipality about 35 minutes walk from Interlaken Ost Station. The reason why I wanted to go there was because of the Lake Brienz.

On the main street of Interlaken.

Along the way to Bönigen

Lake Brienz
Best waters I have ever seen so far in Europe

Facing Bönigen

I was in luck that day, because there was an event going on at the edge of the lake. And its not some kind of touristic thing (there are no tourists anyway, only locals), but rather like a display of different stalls showing the regional culture.

This stall demonstrates how they used to wash clothes with soap made from ashes. After scrubbing and cleaning the clothes are put in the pot of boiling water with soap. According to the lady, laundry is done only in Spring, Summer and to a lesser extent during Autumn. What is interesting is to look at the type of clothes they wear. For exmple the ladies wear pants in with slits so that they could just squat down and pee in the fields when they were working in the open!
This is a demonstration of a very intricate form of sewing by pulling and crossing different treads with so many "skewers" which looks so complicated that it could not understand how they managed to produce the following butterflies and stars:
And of course, not to be missed, Swiss horns:

The animals you see above are Lamas. According to the explaination, a well trained Lama is one which is a good companion to help to carry goods as well as transportation when treking. And there is also a club which does treking with Lamas in the mountains too. What is further interesting is that the Lamas always seem to be smiling if you look at their faces.
Of course, what is Swiss culture without some tradtional food? Here's Chäsbrätel, which is actually Grilled cheese with Praprika powder on bread. The long queue to get the food

It was a great open air gathering for the locals without the tourists around. Everyone was yanking away in the Swiss German dialects, which in this region is known as the Bernese Oberland dialect. For us Standard German speakers or native German speakers from Germany, its almost impossible to understand. If you thought German was mouthful and the people speak like machine guns and sound low-class and uncouth, then Swiss-German dialects would be even harder to swallow. It sounded more like Dutch than German to me and the vocab is almost incomprehensible. But they write and read in standard German, and they could also talk in standard German as well. When there are standard German speakers, they would be happy to switch to standard German so as to be more accomodating. Its like you know, talking to your Grandmother in Chinese instead of dialect. But the thing is that while most young Singaporeans are losing their dialects, the speaking of Swiss-German dialect can also be heard in kids. This contact with them has got me even more interested to pick up Swiss-German dialects.

The short time spent in Interlaken actually opened my eyes to Swiss-German culture. I calculated that I walked about 40km in one day of hiking. My foot developed blisters and it was very tiring. But it was a great experience, especially when you talk with the locals. The Swiss-Germans are super friendly and chatty without any air of snobbishness at all, not like some other country's people (there is no need to mention which). And although I did not have enough money to accend to the Jungfraujoch with me, I am very sure I will return one day to go up the Jungfraujoch again. The experience with the locals is in my opinion, much more valuable and interesting.

In my next post I will write about the interesting train journey from Interlaken to Luzern where I made friends with 2 Swiss Heidis.

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