Kiwi Roaming

Our previous plans (before we realised we had almost run out of visa days) involved leaving Zürich by train and taking the Bernina Express route through the Alps to Italy, ending up in Milan. We looked at doing this for a day trip only but it would have been a very very long day. After considering a few options for a day on the trains to see other parts of the country we landed on visiting Interlarken and if we had time stopping into Bern or Lucerne on the way back.

Knowing we had a plan to train somewhere Steve extensively investigated ticket options and purchased us two one day tickets – which cover any train travel in Switzerland for 24 hours. They are not cheap but worked out cheaper than stringing together a collection of routes including the trams we would need to take in Zürich. The trains are very comfortable and quite full of passengers on a Saturday in November. Our outbound leg took us to Bern then onto Interlarken. We had plans to go up the cable car near the station but on the spur of the moment followed most of the other travellers and hopped onto the next train to Grindelwald – an excellent decision.

Between Bern and Interlarken the countryside was increasingly covered in snow. The route up to Grindelwald was lined with deep snow, the train there is specific for this route and has fantastic route information inside the carriages, ski storage and has massive windows so you can be in awe of the views. At various stations along the route you can change for other specifically built trains which go on to ski fields – they all have special tracks and controls to get them up the mountain without slipping or stalling in the snow. I found it all fascinating. On our train the British conductor found people without tickets and fined them 90 Swiss Francs on the spot, that’s $180!

Grindelwald – is pretty magical. We had both purchased waterproof shoes (online quite cheaply) during the week leading up to this trip and we had an excellent opportunity to test them out here with both deep powder to navigate and sludge where it’s melted. A very pretty mountainside town with supermarket, cafes, lots of other shops and services to support the hundreds of chalets, hotels, hostels and other accommodation for skiers and mountain climbers. We did note many were still closed as the Winter season doesn’t start for another few weeks. There are mountains towering above no matter where you look which got us talking about going up one (not previously planned).

After a good walk around taking far too many photos and being amused by the clothing choices of many tourists we took a quick visit to the Co-op for lunch foods and hopped back on the train to Interlarken. Here we made another snap decision – we purchased tickets (horrendously expensive) for the Eiger Express to take us up Jungfraujoch.

Eiger Express – this gondola goes from Grindelwald Terminal which is about 15 mins down the mountain from the village (demonstrating how snap the decision was), where there is a really fancy base terminal including cafe’s, tourist shops and ski shops. The gondola ride takes about 15 minutes to travel 6483m and you alight at the top – 2320m – in another fabulous facility. This is the highest we have ever been, it’s the height of Double Cone for instance. From here you can take a specially built train to the almost top of Jungfrau – we did look at the price which was simply eye watering – where there is a hotel. We saw the train far far below us as it returned to Grindelwald full of tourists.

The gondola’s are massive with ski racks and they seat 26 people. From the top skiers can then take ski tows in all directions up slopes, or can ski to their accommodation or just ski back down. They were making snow everywhere so the mountain looked amazing with the snow making haze. There is a walking track but it was closed due to avalanche warnings so we just mucked around outside the gondola station. It was -6C at the terminal when we boarded the gondola and -11C when we got off. Outside the temperature was ok except when we stepped into the wind where our faces froze as the only uncovered skin.

I have to note the gondola goes over a camping ground full of campervans and clearly even from 50m or so above you could clearly see footprints and chimneys operating – so people were staying there!

We learned a lot about clothing for -11C on this trip, we were both wearing two pairs of trousers, one polypropylene leggings and another track pant pair, two pairs of socks, one merino toe socks and the other bulky merino / wool warm socks. On top we both had 3 merino tops, one long sleeve, under our woollen jerseys and I also wore my sleeveless puffer. On top of these layers we both had our winter coats, hats, gloves and a scarf. My eagle eyed mother noticed I was wearing fingerless gloves, this was because my phone is my camera and it’s too hard to operate without them.

It gets dark about 3:30/4pm and the temperature was plummeting so we headed back down the mountain and caught the train back to Zürich decided it wasn’t worth making other stops and opting instead to visit more Christmas markets in the city when we arrived.

An amazing day out. With two spur of the moment decisions panning out to be awesome we were well pleased with our day in the snow and returned to the hotel that night pretty exhausted.