[CR Switzerland] Day 11-2

September 27, 2006
Interlaken - Jungfraujoch Optional - Trummelbach Falls - Interlaken

Arrive Lauterbrunnen: 3.00 * Trummelbach Falls Side Trip: 3.30

It was cloudy and slightly drizzling by the time we got to the station. As usual, Ueli was patiently waiting for us, greeting everyone with a smile and a wave as we trickled out from the station and into the bus. Fortunately, the drizzle stopped as we made our way to Lauterbrunnen, until we were greeted with fair skies and the merest touch of cloud when we pulled into the parking lot for a photo opportunity at Staubbach Falls. It's a sheer cliff of about 300 meters, and as the water tumbles off the edge of the cliff, it fans out into a delicate spray that one author likened to "the tail of the white horse ridden by one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse". When we had our fill of taking pictures of the falls, our attention was drawn by a helicopter ferrying construction materials up the opposite mountainside.

From Staubbach Falls, we were taken to the Trummelbach Falls. Elmar had mentioned in the train, on the way down, that he had taken the liberty of securing a bunch of tickets, and was going to distribute them to the first ten or twelve takers. Of course we had to reimburse him the price of 11 Swiss Francs per ticket, but as I thought later, it was worth the little extra expense. Each ticket was the admission fee to see the falls; everyone else could have their afternoon tea at the family-run rest house at the main entrance to the property.

Trummelbach isn't far from Staubbach - about three kilometers or so. Ueli parked the bus across the street, and then we crossed over to the rest house, where I left my parents to stretch their legs at leisure. There was a walk of a few hundred meters to the entrance up to the falls, and the roar of the water could be heard clearly from the gate. Not surprising, when you consider that there's 22,000 liters/sec flowing from the source, through a narrow crevasse inside the mountain.

All in all, there’s a series of ten cascades. One can take the funicular up to the seventh cascade, stroll along a stepped catwalk to the source, then come down either by funicular or by the catwalk past the sixth-tenth cascades. The funicular is this huge carriage, like one of the boxcar-type cable cars on the mountains, large enough to fit all of us with room to spare. We got a good view of the funicular's mechanism as we were drawn up, and then it was out into the afternoon sun and the start of the catwalk ascent to the source.

Whoa, boyo. Talk about your steep climbs! The roaring of the water is tremendous, like a low-flying jet. All of us made our way slowly along the catwalk - in part to admire the way the water twisted and turned through the rock it had eroded, but more to keep our footing on the spray-drenched surfaces. Sometimes the catwalk took us through dark passages with the bare minimum of illumination - I swear, if anyone had so much as touched my shoulder to warn me to be careful, I would have shrieked to kingdom come.

I took pictures at most of the cascades; I also took one of the stairs one had to climb before reaching the source. Just so I could show people what I had to climb to get to the top of the falls. Unfortunately, the camera refused to snap a picture at the source, but otherwise, what pictures I do have are fantastic! Like most everything else about the highlights on this tour, words fail completely to convey the beauty of these falls. You just had to be there, with the spray on your face, listening to the sound of three glaciers' worth of run-off water pouring down through a crevasse just a few meters wide, pure and clear and crystalline green. A once-in-a-lifetime experience, and well worth the climb and the pounding heart while picking my way along the catwalk.

My original plan was to walk down past the other cascades, but a look at my watch had me antsy to get back down as soon as it could be managed. Waiting for the funicular to come back up was fraught with suspense, but it eventually arrived, and soon I was striding down the path back to the rest house. I paused and took at look back in the lowering sun and suddenly realized that there were only three more days left before the tour's end - soon I'd be going home, back to the familiar routine.

And how I would miss all this, the bracing mountain air and the green fields and the long walks every day! :)

I rejoined my parents at the rest house, where there had been a small floor show going on; someone was yodeling beautifully when I came up. Once I found the parents, there were stories to tell about what I'd seen, and I shared as best I could, the photos that I'd taken (though admittedly a 2.5 inch screen hardly does them justice).

In due course, we were boarding the bus, back to Interlaken and the Beau Rivage. With another departure ahead of us, the parents and I opted to eat in the room, so I popped down and crossed the street to that Mr. Burger, where I ordered sandwiches and Coke. The hamburgers, being freshly made, were great - but the weather news we caught on CNN while having dinner had me frantically sending a text to my husband, home alone with only the cats for company.

A typhoon with center winds of 197 kph was scheduled for a direct hit over Manila. Oh, NO. The last time a strong typhoon went directly over the city (and our home), it was *only* 160 kph at the center. I quickly gave a run-down of instructions on how to operate the generator via SMS, and Ramon promised me hourly updates for as long he could manage it.

It's going to be a LONG day tomorrow...