Wengen - or the highest railway station in Europe

Underneath the Eiger

The next day it was time to walk to our next hotel.  That was it for Grindelwald, it was on to Wengen, at 1300m we would be sleeping a bit higher tonight.  But first there was a long days walk ahead of us.  We had noticed the previous day that the morning was pure blue skies but by the time the afternoon had rolled round the clouds were gathering.  So we thought it best to try and get an early start today to try and take advantage of the clear skies and views in the morning.

It was still a long hot morning, starting at 1000m in Grindelwald, we had to get to Kleine Scheidegg at 2061m first.  On the way there we also passed Alpiglen, for those who are interested in the Eiger summits, this is where most people camped before attempting the climb.  And Kleine Scheidegg was where people would watch through telescopes as the climbers died as they tried.  The whole morning was spent walking under the north face of the Eiger.  It's almost impossible to get a sense of scale, it's just so incredibly big.  It is standing another 2000m above you at this point and those sorts of vertical distances just seem so hard to judge.

Our walk the day before

Looking down to Grindelwald

This was probably the hottest I've been through the whole week, it was just this never-ending uphill over 6km climbing 1000m.  We could see across the Grindelwald valley to where we had walked the day before, even catching a glimpse (we think) of our lunch spot.  This was a much easier walk than the day before, and also a lot greener.  It's hard to capture but all the wildflowers were out.  It was not so much meadows that you were walking through, but more carpets of flowers.

The flower explosion

Again there were hardly any other people on the trail.  We kept leapfrogging with one cyclist, he would have to go round the switchbacks and we would take the more direct route along the path.  It seemed like we had reached the gradient where it was quicker to walk.  He would pass us when we would stop for a drink, but then we would overtake him later on.  Though he would have got down the other side of Kleine Scheidegg much faster than us.

The Eiger in blazing sunlight

When you arrive at Kleine Scheidegg it's a bit of a central train station, which is a bit bizarre since nobody lives here.  It's literally just restaurants and some hotels.  But there are 3 lines ending here, so it was all really busy.  We did take the train from here, it was the train up to the Jungfraujoch.  This is the train line that goes through the Eiger, there are 2 viewing stations on the way up and these are where various rescue attempts were launched for people dying on the climb up.  The trip takes an hour up, which is pretty long, but that includes various halts to let trains going the other way go past.  Jungfraujoch is also at 3454m, so there is a fair elevation gain for the little train.

Jungfraujoch

On the other side of Kleine Scheidegg

Again it was a bit of a shock to us, since this is seriously touristy, compared to walking through wildflowers with nobody around.  Being surrounded by so many people who were losing their minds over the snow was a bit of a shock to the system.  I would recommend taking the trip up though, it's expensive but you don't get many chances to get that high, not without a few years of mountaineering practise and a serious amount of gear.  It is a completely different world that high.  And you are right between the Jungfrau and the Monch, they are only about 500m further above you, which at that point doesn't look that high at all.

The unbelievable north face of the Eiger, looking all the way down to the walking paths below

The ice palace with strange sculptures

The stops along the way are amazing too, you get a real sense of how inhospitable the north face of the Eiger is. It's just a sheer drop thousands of metres, it's incredible people even managed to climb it in the first place, or that they now do it in a bit over 2 hours!  The launching of rescue expeditions from this point must have also been something else, since I'm not sure how you even get the first foothold in.  You also get a feel for how the weather conditions are actually different here.  It's hard to appreciate in Grindewald or walking around, since the sun is blazing, and there isn't a cloud in the sky.  But stopping off at this gallery, you can see that it is in total shadow, and what's more there was just a constant fall of rain, though I suppose it was more the melting snow from above.

Those tiny black dots are actually people heading off down the glacier

Dave at Jungfraujoch

I love that when they started constructing this railway all the way back in 1896, they had the forethought to provide these little intermediate gallery points.  And you think at the time the Swiss government is building the highest railway station in Europe, Sydney was struggling to build a few metropolitan lines.

When you get to the final station you can tell there has been a lot of thought put into containing the tourists.  It's not a normal train station with just an open platform.  Instead it feels a bit like a survival dome built on another planet.  They really try to corral you inside.  I can only imagine the troubles if they just let the tourists wander around where ever they wanted up there.  I guess the Swiss guides would probably get a lot of rescue practise in at least.

So they try and have other little attractions for you, rather than getting outside.  There is this weird mural section, which you travel past on escalator, then there is an ice palace, which are these rooms all made of ice, with ice sculptures. There is also a movie and a little on the history of the construction.  An awful lot of people died whilst building it, the labour relations were pretty bad back then.

More flowers on the way to Wengen

Whilst we were up there we actually spotted a couple of teams of people heading off down the valley.  I'm not sure how long it would take them to reach civilisation from that far up, but it looked like it would have been a lot of fun.  Too bad I don't have any snow skills.

A rougher path than the morning - with the clouds building

The trip from Kleine Scheidegg onto Wengen was a bit of fun, as soon as you leave the train at Kleine you are again completely alone, the trail was a bit wilder in the afternoon as well.  The clouds really started building at this point.  This was the only day we got rained on, at one point it was actually hail, that was a pretty bizarre experience.  It wasn't cold and we were at maybe 1400m, so not high, and the rain suddenly went to little hailstones, before turning to bigger ones and really hammering down.  Luckily it only lasted about 5 minutes, and that my raincoat is quite thick. 

Total walk 18.5km, total ascent 1100m, total descent 850m.

How Swiss is this!

Grindewald and First to Shineger Platte

View of the Eiger from the start of the walk

We spent a week in the Swiss Alps on a pure walking holiday.  The idea being that you walk between hotels whilst your bags are transferred for you via train.  Meaning you never have to carry a heavy pack on your back and can just enjoy the scenery.  That didn't mean the days were easy, I didn't truly appreciate how steep these mountains were.  A 1 in 10 gradient would be considered a gentle slope in these parts.  And since most days involved some sort of 1000m ascent followed by a similar descent at the end of the day, it got kind of tough during the middle portion.

The wonderful Swiss infrastructure

We went over the snow covered pass up ahead

We spent two nights in Grindelwald, which is this little village at the base of the Eiger.  I've never been somewhere where you would have been majorly out of place if you weren't in outdoors gear.  Nor a town where 95% of the shops were selling hiking gear.  Normally I'm the one looking massively out of place, covered in mud and wearing hiking boots.  And whilst there wasn't much mud around, there were an awful lot of hiking boots.  There were also a lot of big tour buses, this was definitely the most touristy spot we stayed at.  And I have to say I've never been somewhere with such large concentrations of both tour buses and hiking gear.  I always thought they were the antithesis of each other.

Bachalpsee, easy part done

Our first taste of snow heading up from Bachalpsee

The trip there from Zurich airport was unbelievable smooth.  I thought we had been booked on some pretty tight connections with the trains, it was 3 trains in the end to Grindewald.  In most cases it was something like a 6 minute change.  You would never attempt that in the UK, I would think at least a 20 minute buffer is required here.  But the trains were seriously like clockwork.  Perhaps that's why they need such good watches, it's to keep the trains on their precision timing, accurate to the millisecond!

The lunch spot at Faulhorn ahead - hot soup at 2681m!

Our first afternoon in Grindelwald was spent admiring the view and having beers in the shadow of the Eiger, you can't get much better than that.  I was all inspired to read the White Spider again, but then it got a bit too scary for me, so I read Into Thin Air instead.  They are both really good books though, and if you have ever wanted to climb Everest read Into Thin Air first, it's really put me off that mountain.  And when you summit a mountain do you think you have to get back alive in order to claim it?  In The White Spider there were a lot of attempts made on the north face of the Eiger, and not a great success rate and I always wonder if you die on the way down can you really claim it?

The Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau, don't think you can get a better view than that! Unbelievable

Our first proper day of walking was a loop from Grindelwald, up to First and then across to Schynige Platte with a rack railway down and train to Grindelwald.  I have to say the infrastructure in Switzerland is amazing.  Not only are the trains accurate to within a second, but you can get so high up the mountains without walking a step.  It means you can live in the valleys where there are still trees, and cows can survive but go walking in the mountains in the afternoons.  It also saved my knees from a pounding on many occasions, which was much appreciated.

Looking down to Lake Brienz in the distance - it's at 560m elevation, we are at 2600m, that's quite a fall!

More photos at Bachalpsee

The trip to First was in a cable car, and not just a ski lift where it's just a little seat with a bar that comes down, but a proper capsule with automatically closing doors and walls all around you.  It certainly helped to overcome my cable car fear.  I hate the feeling when they go over the poles, and it feels like it's deciding whether it wants to stay on the cable or plummet hundreds of metres.  Grindelwald is only at 1000m, but First was at 2100m, now that's a cable car ride.  So without walking a step we were already nearly at the height of Australia's highest mountain.  There are going to be a lot of mentions of elevations over the next few posts, apologies if that isn't interesting to you.

From the cable car we came across our first and only experience of tour groups in the mountains. There were a whole bunch of elderly people doing a variety of rather strange stretching routines, I'm not 100% sure why you need to be stretching your triceps before a walk in the mountains.  It was then an easy walk up to Bachalpsee, this alpine lake.  Along the way you just had constant mountain vistas all around.  The part to Bachalpsee was definitely the easiest part. And I think it was also where most people turned round.

The afternoon clouds gathering

We kept going, and this is where it started to get snowy.  It was unusual to spend so much time walking in the snow, growing up in the tropics and all.  It was really a function of the surroundings, which way the slope was facing or the mountain structure as to whether the snow would gather.  Much more than elevation.  We were at 2500m at some points and the path was total dirt, with hardly any snow, but then further on at 2300m and you would be in metres of snow.

The snow in earnest

I'm glad it was a Sunday and there were quite a few people out walking about, since it was a bit dicey in some parts. It was reassuring to know that if anything went wrong there were other people around with the ability to speak German and mobile phones.

We had lunch at Faulhorn, which at 2681m was the highest point of the day, and already higher than Kossie.  In fact over the week I think we ended up higher than the highest point in Oz on three days.

I like how the Swiss decided that rather than putting the hut at the junction of tracks, at maybe 2500m, they went all the way to the top of the mountain.  And when I say hut, it was much more than that, more of a settlement, with a restaurant and terrace, really quite civilised.  We were still rather early in the season, so the restaurant was closed, but the kitchen was still making hot soup.  It was more of a stew really, nice and thick and warm.

It was at that point that we find out that the rest of the route is officially closed.  But the guys at the hut said it wasn't so bad, and that we should be fine.  And in the end we were fine, but there was one really scary point.  Basically the next 3kms or so were all completely covered in snow.  And when you are following contours it's much more scary than if you are going uphill, since to one side of you is just an incredibly sharp drop, hundreds of metres below.  Most of the time it wasn't so bad, you could see that you would slide for awhile but then come to rest in a valley.  But at one point we had to go round the end of a ridge, and the land just dropped away, that was white knuckle stuff, I did not enjoy that at all.  The sad part was that the views would have been great, but I could not look.  It was head down and just make sure you were firm in every footstep.

And yet another - it was a pretty spot

What made it easier was that quite a few people had been through before us, so there was always an obvious path to follow.  But I would have hated to be the first person cutting the trail at some points.  It was also lucky that the snow was generally pretty soft, it wasn't the ice fields that we've had before, where you can't get any grip with your boots.  But it was still a good introduction to walking in the alps.

The terrain on the last section, quite different from the snow covered portion

The last 2kms of the walk were a bit of a grind.  We were out of the snow, but the trail hadn't been maintained (probably because it was still closed), so now it was just eroded dirt slopes.  It was still as steep as before, but this time there wouldn't be any snow to cushion your fall.  The density of other walkers really dropped off at this point.  I'm not sure where they all disappeared to since there didn't seem to be many ways off the mountains.  Maybe they got lost in the snow.

There aren't many photos from this section, since I was seriously flagging at this point.  After slogging along all day, with intermittent fears of death, we ended up at Schynige Platte at 2100m and is a rack railway trip from Interlaken.  So there were serious amounts of people there.  It was a bit of a shock to the system after a day basically spent alone.  Everyone else looked so fresh and clean, and I felt gritty from the sweat and dirt.  And then we all had to pack into the railway cars to get back down.  I feel for those people stuck in our car, I hope we didn't smell too bad.  But if this was a taste of walks to come, we were in for a serious treat.

The days walk - 18kms, 600m elevation gain, 600m descent.

Punchdrunk - The Drowned Man

We went to see Punchdrunk's latest show last weekend.  Punchdrunk is this 'immersive' theatre group.  Their last show was a take on Macbeth in New York, and was quite popular with celebrities, so you know they've made it now.  Once people find out Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom like your shows you'll never struggle with selling tickets again.  This latest show was in the old Royal Mail sorting warehouse next to Paddington Station.  The idea behind their shows is that the audience is free to roam around the space, coming across performers almost by chance.  It's an interesting idea for a show, that your journey around the theatre guides your experience, rather than the experience being very much dictated by the company on the stage.  And they had put so much work into the set.  It was 4 floors in this warehouse and the rooms were amazing, the level of detail that had gone into everything.  It is almost worth it just to see that!  I was kind of hoping for a bit of a video game experience, it did feel like it could be a little like something like Fallout, where you wander around trying to find people to give you a bit more of a clue on the story.

It felt like they didn't quite hit it, it could have been amazing, but I think the space was just too enormous for how many performers there were.  So 4 floors and each floor was huge, in fact it was so big, it turns out there was another whole floor we didn't even find.  Not only was the space enormous, but there were only 34 performers, and really the density was much lower than that, as there generally needed to be at least 2 together to perform any scenes.  So pretty low performer density there, and there were also something like 600 people at the show.

In the end I think we only saw 5 scenes over the 3 hours we were in there.  The final scene is one where finally the guides start ushering you around, and they move you all into one big room where everyone comes on stage for the finale.  And I swear there were at least 5 people that I didn't even see during the 3 hours I was wandering around.  I'm guessing they were all on the floor that I missed.

They are a contemporary dance group as well, and whilst I don't mind contemporary dance, especially performed by people as good as this, I just wish I had managed to see more of it.  Without the dialogue it becomes a bit harder to piece together the character interactions, and with only 5 scenes to go off it was pretty much impossible.  Sure people say that with punch drunk you get out what you put in, but the putting in seems to involve stampeding after any performer you glimpse, with elbows flying.  And I'm not quite prepared to work that hard for my theatre.

And for those who may have seen it already, what the hell was going on in the attic?