Kyle & Chuck Go To Europe

Pictures

• Day 11: Interlaken

Started off the day with a good breakfast, after which we checked out. Then with Ben, Gabi and Tali we decided to hike a mountain! Well, I just thought it was a good hiking trail, but it turned out we were climbing to the top of a mountain! The trail started in Interlaken Ost, and we were in Interlaken West, so we walked over there first off. And then we started up the trail. It was crazy steep! The name of the trail is actually Harderklum, which means Harder Climb in German. So yeah, you can imagine!

After a while I took my shirt off because it as too sticky out to wear a shirt. If there was shade and a breeze, it wasn’t too bad. We passed only a handful of people while on the trail. There was a water fountain about half-way up, which was a nice respite! All in all, it took about 2 hours to climb the path. At the top was a restaurant which we just sat around. We did get some great pictures of the lakes that Interlaken sits between as well as the Jungfrau mountain! After taking a bit of a break at the top, we started down. We took another trail which would take us to Interlaken West.

It was probably tougher going down than it was up, because you use a different set of muscles. It did start to rain on the way down but we had tree cover a lot of the way. Some spots were scarily slippery because if you made one wrong footfall, you would tumble all the way down the mountain. There were a few times when we kicked a rock off and it rolled and rolled and rolled. I think the path down was my favorite. It felt ancient and had a lot of broken, moss-covered rocks. I felt like I should have been in the middle ages. That is why Switzerland is so cool! It only took us 1.25 hours to get down from the top, if my timing was correct. We didn’t stop nearly as much on the way down.

The trail actually ended along the path we’d taken along the river to get to the Thunersee only two days before. From there we walked back to the hostel. On examining my back, I found I got a bit sunburned, but only on the part of my back that the shirt normally covers. My neck, ears, arms and face are pretty well tanned already. Gabi and Tali (the brits) ended up leaving then for their next city. We showered again at the hostel and then sort of waited around a bit before we left for Bern. Once we got to Bern we had a 3 hour wait for our train. It was a long 3 hours, but I did make some good progress in Hyperion! Oh yeah, I don’t remember if I mentioned that I finished reading ‘I, Robot’ the other day and then started ‘Hyperion’ but I did!

The night train was interesting. There were 6 small couchettes (tiny beds) stacked 3 in 2 rows. We had some annoying girls who give the stereotype of Asian girls as giggly and annoying credence.  Luckily they shut up and went to sleep without much trouble.  I slept pretty well given the small space.