Travelling in the Alps

Hello again!

It´s been a little while since my last post, so naturally a ton of stuff has been happening.

We´ve moved on from Barcelona (which for us was basically four days on the beach), and have since visited Interlaken in Switzerland and Thürigen in Austria.

The train ride from Barcelona to Interlaken was hell (but still enjoyable :). We had 15 hours from departure to arrival, with 4 switchovers on the course of the trip. We planned it so that we´d leave around 10pm at night and arrive in Interlaken the next morning with one sleeper car on the way from 1am to 8am. Of course this train was 2 and a half hours late, so we had to sleep on the concrete train platform waiting for it (so we wouldn´t miss it) and ended up waking up every 15 minutes as high speed trains went blasting by. Fun stuff :)

Interlaken itself is an amazing place. I´m guessing that tourism is the largest industry there (it is a small town of 15000 people) with an emphasis on extreme sports. They have skydiving, paragliding, river rafting and canyoning, among other crazy sports, advertised at every street corner. During our stay we rented bikes to go for a 7 hour ride in the mountains along the Lauderbrunnen valley (going south of Interlaken) and we also tried canyoning. This is a crazy sport in which they get you dressed up in wetsuits and helmets, take you to a canyon with a glacier-fed river (very cold) and guide you down about 3 or 4 hundred meters of vertical drop along the length of the canyon to where it lets out into a lake. Along the way there are places where you have to jump off cliffs about 30-35 feet into small pools, repel down waterfalls and slide down "natural waterslides". These waterslides are crazy -- basically over the years the constant flow of the river has smoothed down the rocks in the canyon forming nice smooth rock faces that direct the flow of the water. These things get to be about 50 or 60 feet long, and are in general pretty damn steep (the water needs to be flowing fast to have any chance of smoothing out the rocks over the years). So the guides sned you flying down the waterslides, you get tossed around like a ragdoll doll and dumped into a small pool at the bottom, often getting a few bumps and bruises on the more difficult slides. I bought some pictures of our canyoning trip and will post them sometime. I´d recommend this for anyone who has any sense of adventure.

One funny thing that happened in Interlaken is the following -- the first day we were there we went looking for some food after we checked into the hostel. Of course it started pouring on us (they usually have afternoon/evening showers), so we had to find a place to sit down and eat. We ended up at the only Chinese restaurant in the town, Mr. Hong´s, and grabbed some eats. The guy who runs the place (Mr. Hong is his name, no surprise there) has hilarious, so we decided to get a picture with him. He ended up sitting us down and chatting with us for awhile and we found out that he was an 8th dan (8th degree blackbelt) in Hapkido. He gave us a small demonstration (slapped us around a bit) and offered a private lesson for another day. We thought this was a great idea so we went back and payed for the instruction. It was basically like paying $30 each to get beaten up for 45 minutes (eg. shots to the stomach, slaps to the face/balls hard enough to force you to sit down for a minute, but not hard enough to actually injure you) but we did learn some things. So if you do go to Interlaken, be sure not to mess with Mr. Hong :)

Also, we signed up for a beach volleyball tournament and ended up playing on the same team as two brothers from California. The "beach" was actually a fine gravel, so any diving resulted in scrapes and cuts, so you learned quickly to stay on your feet. Naturally we were there best team in the tournament :), but by some strange stroke of misfortune, we ended losing in the playoffs.

After Interlaken we spent a day biking around Bern (capital of Switzerland), then took a train out to Bludenz (small town in Austria). There we met my cousin Christina, aunt Nora and a bunch of family and friends who live in a village near Bludenz called Thüringen. We´ve been treated like kings here in terms of the food and accomedations and have done an extensive amount of hiking in the mountains. Yesterday we climbed to the top of a mountain in the area over the course of about 4 hours. The day before we had breakfast in the Alps and did another 2 and a half hours of hiking. We´ve also visited "Schnapps Franz", a guy in the village who spends his spare time making Schnapps (the alcoholic drink), and maintaining a small museum of the history of the town.

I hope evenyone´s summer is going well -- I´m looking forward to sharing more stories when I get back, and hearing about what everyone has been doing. However, another part of me would be content missing the plane in Amsterdam and just spending another year here :)

-- Mike