The Hills are Alive!

We had two short stops in Switzerland on our trip – the first being a half day stopover in Zurich on our way to Edinburgh, the second a two-night stay in Lauterbrunnen with our Top Deck Tour.

Zurich was beautiful. Totally an unexpected highlight of our trip. Having local tour guides helped – I don’t think we would have found the train to the top of the hill on our own. We will have to go back at some stage and visit again.

Lauterbrunnen was beyond amazing. Absolutely breathtaking. Our accommodation, just out of town, was the kind where we were glad to be there in good weather, and the doors had no locks. Having the Top Deck Cook Tents was an absolute blessing, the food they produced was amazing.

The most tourist-obvious thing we did was take the train up the mountain to Jungfrau. It was expensive (probably the single most expensive thing we did all tour), but worth it, even though the weather was awful. Being that far up the mountain was amazing, and the train technology to do it was incredible. Stopping off for a short wander in Grindelwald on our way back down was lovely but far too brief.

We wish we had had more time in Lauterbrunnen (if only there had been a way to skip Avignon the next day…), because our tour friends who didn’t take the train still had an amazing day, walking to waterfalls, and taking a massive gondola up the mountain on the other side of the valley.

The hardest part of our couple of days in Switzerland was actually dealing with cash, because they don’t have Euros and the exchange rate is really random. Figuring out if something was expensive was really hard! And the last thing we wanted was to have to pull out our credit cards to buy ourselves a chocolate bar (what with the currency conversion fees etc), so we had to get just a little cash to do that time.

We definitely need to go back and spend more time in Switzerland. We met people on our Russian tour who had just come off a “Switzerland by Rail” tour that sounded AMAZING. Totally our cup of tea. We also would be dead keen to stop in at some of these villages that cling to the sides of the mountains, and to do some walking (and some more photography). Going back up Jungfrau in nice weather would be fantastic too.

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