On Wednesday morning we took a train from Lugano via Arth-Goldau, Luzern and Interlaken Ost to Lauterbrunnen. The views between Luzern and Interlaken were amazing! There were many little lakes which had beautiful turquoise water, surrounded by green mountains and little villages.
Also Lauterbrunnen is a very beautiful little village. It's between mountains and from the village you can see also big mountains which are covered by snow. In the village there's one very beautiful waterfall and all the houses are alpine-style. The atmosphere is very relaxed and unique. We could have spend hours just looking around because no matter which way you looked there was always something interesting/beautiful/special to see!
We arrived there in the afternoon. First we went to check our hotel which was The hotel Hornerpub. Downstairs there was a pub and upstairs the hotel rooms. The staff was super friendly! The room was ok with a nice view.
Lauterbrunnen is famous for the great hiking possibilities. In that area there are famous mountains such as Jungfrau, Eiger and Schilthorn. The highest located train station in Europe is on the top of Jungfrau. Schilthorn is known for the fact that it was a movie set for a James Bond movie since some places were featured in James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service in the 1969.
Since it was already afternoon we left the hotel and went to the train station in which we bought the tickets for the lifts. We wanted to do a little hiking on the Schilthorn side so our plan was to take a lift from Lauterbrunnen to the Grütschalp, then hike from Grütschalp to Mürren and then take a lift to the top of Schilthorn.
The lift to Grütschalp leaves from train station and it takes about 10 minutes. Then it was time to hike! There are at least two different ways to Mürren. We decided to take the mountain view trail which was supposed to be the shorter but harder one. Hiking went well despite the fact that the trail was occasionally quite steep. Sometimes it was surprisingly hard and we could feel our heartbeat rising. Probably it was also because we were quite high and the air was thinner the higher we went.
The views were magnificent! From the hiking trail we saw the three famous mountains: Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger straight in front of us. Besides that there were many smaller mountains which were already green, there were waterfalls and streams on the way and the villages looked cute! We tasted the water from the stream and it was cold and fresh!
The way to the Mürren seemed longer than what we expected and soon we realized that we were on the top of Allmendhubel (1932m). The signposts were so bad! Just a little hint for everybody who is interested in hiking there, try to find a map before hiking. We always followed Mürren-sign and suddenly it wasn't there. Anyway the trail was super beautiful and the views were nice also from Allmendhubel.
When we found Mürren we were told that the last lift to Schilthorn had left already more than an hour ago. We were disappointed because we had paid 50 francs for the lift and basically even if we wouldn't have gone to Allmendhubel it wasn't possible that we could have caught that lift. We took the train back to Grütschalp and from there to Lauterbrunnen. In the train station we went to the info to tell what happened and a friendly woman gave us our money back (Lifts for Mürren-Schilthorn-Mürren). That was so nice from them! In the evening we had a dinner in our hotel Hornerpub. It was the cheapest place in the village and there were a lot of people! The food was fine and the atmosphere was great!
Next morning we woke up early and took a train from Lauterbrunnen via Interlaken Ost and Bern to Geneva. It was the first time for us to visit the French speaking area in Switzerland. It seemed to us that the culture and lifestyle was again very different from the other cities in Switzerland. Geneva was very beautiful and we thought that it was a bit like Lugano but much bigger! Most of our day we spent near the lake eating ice cream and drinking coffee. It was a perfect day in sunny and beautiful Geneva. In the afternoon it was time to go back to the train station and return to Lugano.
Arrivederci!
