As usual woke earlier than everybody else, except the Japanese. This morning Theresia and her team must have forgotten about breakfast for all of us, until the Japanese couple alerted them. For us we went on a pre-breakfast walk to check out the train-schedules to work our plans for the day to reach Lauterbrunnen as early as possible. As we had missed the 0739 train as breakfast was not ready, we took the 0839 train.
Timing to the Swiss is most important. And at the train station you can plan the whole journey from start to finish and be able to tell what the connections are at which station, what platform at what time. It is good to ask for the complete journey’s itinerary before a journey is started. Today’ trip will take us through 4 trains at same number of towns/villages. Trains range from the Glacier Express type of train with picture windows, to the long-range inter-city-express, to nostalgic rickety trains which could have been in service since the great war.
The trains presented some small concerns. Being strange to the Swiss range of trains, we had problems with the doors. They had to be push-button or sensor-touch type, but we were not familiar. In trying to catch the ICE train, we were almost stalled by a door that refused to open. We pushed all sorts of buttons around the door and on the door but nothing worked. Finally bold enough to push a green button on a “Emergency-like” kind of panel with Swiss-German instructions, I took the courage to push that button. The door opened.
We left Zermatt at 0839 and arrived at Lauterbrunnen at 1125 as scheduled, a time-duration of 2 Std 46 min. (It was much later that we find out that Std means “Hr” in English).
The train ride from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen was indescribably scenic with magnificent views of snow capped mountains, sheer steep cliffs, plunging waterfalls and beautiful mountain flowers and we were met with the stunning view of Lauterbrunnen with its immense U-shaped valley of sheer steep cliff and plunging waterfalls and snow capped mountains.
Immediately upon arrival at Lauterbrunnen, we headed for the hotel after collecting brochures from the tourist info office, on the kinds of walks we could take during our stay. The staff at Hotel Staubbach was friendly, helpful and accomodating. They made our stay at Lauterbrunnen pleasant and memorable. And I like their personnel touch - it was the only hotel that sent us a warm welcome email and after our stay, a warm thank you email. The view of Staubbach Falls from our hotel was great. As we were early and our room wasn't ready yet, we just took the stuff needed for the adventures of the afternoon and left the rest of our lugguage for moving into the room later in the day.
We headed out to Murren in double quick-time, hoping to catch the mountain train, tram, gondola and cable car ride up to the Schilthorn Summit to catch the view as weather can be really unpredictable in the high mountains. The ride up was again a scenic ride.
The day has been clear but up in the mountains, there were too much cloud cover for best viewing pleasure. We had to make do with each revelation of the passing clouds to see snippets of the 360 degrees view of mountains, peaks, glaciers, cascades and meadowed valleys.
We had our lunch at the Piz Gloria revolving restaurant.
A little disappointed after the magnificence of clear-blue skies and white luminous snow-capped peaks of Rothorn Paradise and Sunnegga Paradise hike at Zermatt, we headed back to Murren and hope to take in the flavours of the pretty town with lots of colour and gentle elegance. Murren is indeed the prettiest village I have ever seen. The car-free village allows us to stroll through the village admiring the quaint houses and beautiful gardens and the surrounding snow-capped mountains.
We were trying to decide which hiking trail to take and we finally, picked out the flower trail from Murren-Winteregg-Grutschalp (1.5 Std). It is an easy walk crossing forests and meadows of mountain blooms and allows great views of the Lauterbrunnen Valley and its terraces as well as splendid panorama of the Bernese Alps.
From Grutschalp, we took a train back to Lauterbrunnen. Evening was a quiet dinner of bread, cheese, fruits and wine that was not opened because we were too full.
(Tip for the traveller: Get the Swiss Rail Pass for tourists. It is a great money saver, as it pays for practically all of your rides on the buses, trams, trolleys, trains, funicular trams, cable cars and gondola rides. And this is most useful in Lauterbrunnen.)
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