Gondola's, Hiking and Waterfalls!

Friday, September 3, 2010
Still feeling quite crappy today but it was our last day in Switzerland so we wanted to make the most of it. We got up to have our free breakfast and it was really, really good. Fresh bread, cereal, milk, mountain cheese, fruit etc. It was great! We then both wanted to just go back to bed but instead we got a trail map and planned our day. First we took a gondola up to Mannlichen which was a fun first experience for me and although Heather had taken one before, enjoyed the view for sure. We then hiked a train along the mountain, it was quite tame which was nice and arrived at our destination. From there we took the train to Lauterbrunnen and then caught the local bus up to Tremelbachfalles. It is a glacier waterfall just North of Interlaken. We had heard really good things about it and wanted to check it out. It was a total of 11 waterfall chutes but wasn’t really all that exciting. It was neat to see but definitely didn’t exceed our expectations. We then caught a bus back to Lauterbrunnen to catch a train down to Interlaken. While we were there we forgot to go to the chocolate show that one of the restaurants in town holds. So we made it there for 6, just in time for the last showing. Again, not as exciting as we thought, it was fun because we got to try our hand at being a choclatier. Swiss chocolate is definitely delicious and we got a voucher for the chocolate store. From there, Heather wanted to get a Swiss army knife so we found a store that sold a lot of knives and the biggest selection of cookoo clocks in town. Haha, it was pretty funny actually! She got one and even got her name engraved in it. A true Swiss souvenir! We were pretty hungry by now so we just picked the closest restaurant to where we were and ordered the meat fondue. I don’t think it was very authentic. It was run by Asians and the fondue came with French fries. An interesting experience nonetheless. We then had to make it back to the train station so we could catch a train back to Grindelwald before the trains stopped running and we’d be stuck. We caught the 2105 train but it didn’t got all the way to where we needed to get off, so we had a 20 minute walk in the dark ahead of us. The conductor was really good though and showed us the path we needed to take. It ended up being fine but just a bit sketchy in thought. We were ‘pooped’ and wanted nothing more than a good nights sleep. When we arrived back at our hostel, we found out that we had roommates. Bah! We had enjoyed the room to ourselves and now we had to share...not cool! To make things worse, this girl comes in just as we are going to bed and it’s another roommate...at 11pm. She stood in front of Heather’s bed, doing god knows what for like 20 minutes while Heather waited to get into her bed. It was really brutal. I don’t think it helped that we were tired and grumpy.