Interlaken

Interlaken - literally "between the lakes" - is another place I first saw whilst on my Contiki tour. We were on a bus and first saw the town from high above. It's in such as beautiful location that I always fancied coming back to have a look around. On Contiki we just drove past it.

There are two train stations in Interlaken Ost and West. You can walk between the two in less than half an hour. We arrived at Ost and stayed close to there. We decided that we wanted to go up one of the mountains. The weather was overcast and the ski channel showed that the tallest mountain in the area (Jungfrau) was covered in clouds. Shilthorn however was below the cloud base so still had great views. The top of Shilthorn is close to 10000 feet high (2971 meters). To get there we caught a nice old train to Lauterbrunnen (literally, Valley of Waterfalls). From there it was a bus trip to the bottom of the cable cars. We were a bit stunned by the price to go up the cable cars but decided to do it anyway.

It took four cable car runs to reach the top. The views were amazing. Each new cable car giving different views. Shilthorn was used in the filming of James Bonds' "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". After looking around we took the topmost cable car down to the next level where there was a nice outdoor area to have our picnic lunch. The sun had burnt off a lot of the clouds
by this time and it was really warm and the view had improved too.

Then we made our way to the bottom again. From there we wanted to an area where the waterfalls have carved out great holes in the mountains. This was quite incredible as you got quite close to the waterfalls. There was plenty of spray and noise. Some of the shapes formed by the water astonishing. There was a chute called the corkscrew that you got to view from above and the side. The water was twisting through this at incredible pace.

From there we made our way back to Interlaken. A great day!