it's one of those gorgeous rainy days where water's been falling steadily and gently from the sky since i woke up this morning and hasn't stopped in any real way since. it's the sort of cold wet day where if you were at home you'd look out the window in the morning and think fuck it, i'm not even changing out of my pyjamas, let alone leaving the fucking house, make yourself a steaming hot cup of tea, curl up on the couch with a bucket of popcorn big enough to feed Ethiopia and watch movies until you pass out under the blanket... but i'm not at home. i'm in Interlaken, Switzerland.
Interlaken is one of those places whispered about in hostels and cheap pubs - wherever low-fi travellers congregate. it's in the Lonely Planet and all, but unless you're in the Adventure Sports scene you've probably never heard of it. i hadn't either until i got chatting with two Canadian girls with more metal in their faces than the Statue of Liberty, waiting for the Airport Shuttle on my way out of Split. we did the standard backpacker's handshake of where are you going? where have you been? and they said
"We're going back to Interlaken."
back?
"Yeah, we had to totally rearrange our trip and add 2 weeks so we could go back. 3 weeks just wasn't enough."
wait... what the fuck's so special about Interlaken??!?
so when i got back to London i looked it up, promptly added it to my list of places to get to in Switzerland, filed under "i have too much shit to deal with right now to think about it too hard".
i pulled into Interlaken Ost Station at 3 in the afternoon a couple of days ago on a high. i'd spent the previous day wandering Bern with Chris from Colorado, hitting the Einstein Museum and generally enjoying the quiet little capital, then having some quiet drinks with him and the girls from Toowoomba. the girls were on an early train out, so Chris and i bummed around and took our time getting to the station. our departures were something like 2 minutes apart, and i spent the next 50 minutes ignoring my book. the view out the window was far too nice to miss - rolling hills and neat little villages giving way to a sky-blue lake in a valley of mountains which the train followed for about half the trip, stopping finally in the massively-touristy little town of Interlaken. picture a nexus of glacial valleys carved out between the mountains - a land-bridge between two lakes, one of which rates as the deepest in Europe at over 800 metres while overhead parachutes float down from helicopters, para- and hang-gliders soar and gondolas glide silently up to the top of mountains under a sky speckled with clouds. Interlaken is the Xtreme Sports capital of Europe, second in the world to New Zealand for people to run around like fucking maniacs and jump off or out of things in summer, or strap planks to their feet and slide down white mountains in winder. it's also possibly the most naturally-beautiful place i've ever been to, and after 16 countries it's getting towards the point where that's saying something.
i killed an hour or so checking out the town with my backpack strapped on under clear blue skies in 34 degree heat before i legged it out to Bonigen a couple of kilometres down the road and as separate from Interlaken as Queanbeyan is from Canberra. i'd been disorganised again and left booking a hostel too late, and without wifi at the YHA in Bern i decided to take the easy route and get them to book me a couple of nights in the one in Interlaken. this, it turned out, was something of a mistake. the Interlaken YHA's idyllicly located on the shore of the eastern lake with a nice little grassed area and decent facilities. it's also family-friendly, which came as a bit of a shock.
i'll admit that when i walked into the dorm in Bern to see a Spanish woman breast-feeding in a room that smelled strongly of "baby" i was a bit freaked out. rocking up in Interlaken to find out i was sharing the room with 2 families did not make me particularly happy. don't get me wrong - it's not that i don't like kids. i fucking hate kids. i didn't even like myself until i was in my 20's. they're loud, irritating, don't listen to anyone and you're not allowed to punch them or tell them to shut the fuck up. i'll admit that there are certain individual children i'm quite fond of, but on the whole i'd not be particularly upset if everyone under the age of 16 was sent to an internment camp until they became properly human and were allowed to join the rest of society. fortunately, my worst fears were never realised. there were plenty of kids around the hostel, almost all of whom were quite well behaved and apart from one little Indian girl who spoke only in short, sharp shrieks they managed to not actually force me to notice them.
i'd got myself settled in, read my book for a while and took the chance to enjoy some downtime for a couple of hours when a brain-wave hit me: town between two lakes, one east, one west. the sun sets in the west. there must be at least even odds of there being a great sunset! i had about an hour to get to the other side of town, so i powered off and caught the bus out to Interlaken West. when you check into your hostel in this part of the world you get a "Tourist Card" which entitles you to free use of the bus system, plus various discounts around the place, so i had no concerns about abusing it as much as possible. 4 hours later i staggered back into the hostel unfulfilled - i'd power-walked for nearly an hour trying to get to the western lake, only to realise that i'd massively underestimated the distance involved and had to walk back into town to get the bus back to Bonigen, then spent another hour walking down the street with my laptop out sniffing for open wifi connections. i eventually found one and sat down on a pile of bags of fertiliser, obviously looking dodgy as hell, but refusing to move until i'd caught up on my email.
sitting in the hostel going over the day's photos shortly thereafter and beginning to despair of meeting anyone interesting in this slice of family-friendly hell, i met Jason from Halifax, Nova Scotia and we've been hanging out ever since. with absolutely no effort we managed to hit it off in about 8 seconds, and 5 minutes later we'd agreed to meet at breakfast and go exploring the next day. Thursday was beautiful and warm with a sun which smiled down upon us like a golden god. when i dragged myself out of my bunk on Friday it wasn't just raining, it was pissing down. i'd known this was going to happen - in a town where the primary source of income relies on the weather, everyone knows what's coming tomorrow so i'd been warned about the incoming storms the day before, so Jason and i convened over low-GI cereal to discuss our game-plan, which turned out to be "get to town, hit the Tourist Information Centre".
Friday was one of those days on which, irrespective of the weather, the gods did smile upon me. between meeting at breakfast and heading out, the rain stopped. the bus arrived 2 minutes after we got to the stop so we didn't have to wait, and by the time we got into town there was some clear sky. there was no climbing mountains - the peaks were all obscured by clouds. they have CCTV up there on a public chanel so that anyone can check out the conditions, and that made planning the day much easier. in the end we wound up firing off to Lauterbrunnen by train to check out the Trummelbach falls which cut through the mountain past 11 viewing galleries and pump 20,000 litres of water a second down into the valley. the train's obviously been designed with tourists in mind: the windows all wind right down, and we spent the half-hour ride hanging out of them like a pair fools, taking photos and giggling like clowns with views sliding by that make you want to curl up in the corner and gibber quietly.
the weather was still holding out when we got back to Lauterbrunnen, so we headed off to Grindelwald if for no other reason than that it was there and accessible, and wound up not having to pay for the train because, out of sheer luck, the conductor just didn't get to us. Lauterbrunnen's famous for sitting in a valley with something like 72 waterfalls and was breathtaking. Grindelwald used to be a farming village before tourism reared its lucrative head and gives access to some of the region's peaks. we looked long and speculatively at one of the chair-lifts, but noted at the darkening sky and opted to skip it and head for the train. we were barely on it when the heavens opened, and our ride back to Interlaken was accompanied by a light-show to go with the pouring rain.
it was 3 hours later that we staggered into the hostel, soaked, but full of the cheapest pizza in Interlaken (still the equivalent of AUD$11.60), exhausted but jubilent and sat down to sink some cheap beer from the supermarket, high-fiving each other every couple of minuites. it was a fucking great day.
today's been a washout. Jason and i have shifted hostels to the Funny Farm which is far less of a mission to get in and out of town from. i'm booked in to go Canyoning tomorrow in Grimsel and we're heading out with a couple of Americans we met when we arrived to get pizza and watch the fireworks that are going off in the park. i'm loving this town, the quiet Swiss people wandering around and the backpackers and adventure-seekers who are all talking about what amazing activity they've just done, and what they have planned for tomomorrow. i was only supposed to be here for 2 nights and this is night 3 of what will turn out to be 4 and... well, i'm sure Lyon is lovely and all, but right now it could be turned into a smoking glass crater tomorrow and i'll not regret having missed seeing it because i still have one more day to enjoy being here.
yes, it IS worth coming back to... how shocked am i?
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