You know, sometimes you have nothing to do for a weekend, and other times it's a non-stop festival of fun! Last weekend we had fondue and cocktails (and hangovers), a glorious afternoon's walking in the mountains and a very exciting visit to a very impressive geological feature. I was too tired yesterday to do anything except recover from the excitement.
Fondue and cocktails
Friday night was a cheese-soup-fest with some friends. The fondue was greatly enhanced by the addition of caipirinhas to the mix, as indeed were our hangovers. In Switzerland you can actually buy a pack of fondue mix which you then just whack into the fondue and start dipping (once it's melted down a bit of course). Very civilised. Lots of wine and some beer was also consumed by yours truly, so much of the latter part of the evening is a little bit blurry...
Kandersteg and Oeschinensee
So it was in a somewhat hungover state that we drove down to the Alps on Saturday, arriving at about half twelve in Kandersteg. It was, frankly a bizarre journey through three different weather systems; fine but pretty cold in Basel, then once we came out of a tunnel into Schwiezer Mittelland it was a horrible grey heavy sky, which didn't bode well for the proposed day's siteseeing (I was suggesting a detour into Bern instead) and then we came out of another tunnel into the Berner Oberland and it was a glorious sunny day! It was lovely; there we were all kitted out with multiple layers, waterproofs, hats and gloves and we were down to shorts and a tee-shirt within seconds of getting out of the car.
A short cable car ride up into the mountains later, we set off on a very gentle downhill walk, very well-paved, towards Oeschinensee, along with most of the rest of the local population. There were a million barbecues running, people fishing on the lake, even some lunatics paddling in it! A very very pretty sight as you can see from the picture above. Not as favourite for me as Bachalpsee, but pretty lovely nonetheless. We had sandwiches and a snooze and then wandered around the lake, where there's a lot of wood-carvings carved from felled trees and roots; it's really quite good fun. Another snooze at the far side of the lake and we were ready to walk back down the mountain to Kandersteg, which was actually pretty darned steep but only took about an hour and then we wandered around Kandersteg for a bit, stopping for a beer at once place. New Beer! Egger. Very nice. and then onto another little place by the river where we had a very large pork schnitzel, chips and what we think was boiled fennel, but we could be wrong. The beer in this place was called Gurten beer, which I didn't like nearly so much as the Egger. Home and chill on the sofa.
Rheinfalls!
Now I've been wanting to visit the Rheinfalls since we arrived. According to Wikipedia it's the largest plain waterfall in Europe, whatever that means. It's 120m wide and 23m high and the flow is between 250 cubic metres per second in the winter and 600 in the summer, so I guess it was closer to the lower end when we visited. But still so loud! We had a very pleasant drive to get there, along the Rhine for the most part. At Koblenz, we went over the confluence of the Rhine and the Aare, which are both pretty big rivers, so that was interesting. We went on one of the tourist boats out to the big rock in the middle of the falls and stayed there for a while taking it all in. There's something very primal about waterfalls, I don't know what it is, but they're very ... watchable? I don't know, it's kind of like a bonfire in as much as you can stare at it for ages and ages and it's almost hypnotic. Or does that make me sound like a pyro?
Anyway, so we walked around and over the falls (there's a footbridge just upriver) and took look at them from the castle there, Schloss Laufen, where they've built all kinds of special viewing points practically in the waterfalls but they charge you to get to them and we figured it wasn't really worth it, then we got another tourist boat back to the west side, which is where the car was parked. I was all for getting something to eat at the snackbar there (and by something I mean kalbsbratwurst and chips) but Claire convinced me to wait til we got home. Roast Pork. Hmmmm.
That's it for this post. We've got Switzerland vs. Wales at Joggli tonight and we're talking about heading down to Geneva at the weekend, so I'll have another very exciting post for you very soon!
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