I’m going back to work on Mondays from next Monday, having worked Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday since Christmas, so I celebrated my last long weekend with a quick trip away. Prices for flights and accommodation to/in Iceland remaining obstinately high despite me checking two or three times a day, I resorted to looking at various local-ish airports on Skyscanner to see what was cheapest and came up with a flight from Bournemouth to Geneva. Next came accommodation and having discovered you can search (my archenemy) booking.com by country as well as by city/hotel, I found somewhere suitable – ie, arranged by price, all dormitories knocked straight out as well as anything in Ticino, in villages in the middle of nowhere or literally atop mountains. What I found was a beautiful lodge with a spectacular view in Grindelwald and what I did not take into consideration was that it’s nearly 170fr return by train from Geneva. I could have doubled my accommodation budget, stayed alongside Lac Leman and still saved money. Definitely something to bear in mind. Also, those 170fr is now over £150, whereas if would have been closer to £85 when I lived in Switzerland a decade ago. Thanks, Brexit (and time and inflation and whatnot, to be fair.)
I was planning to get a Swiss pass but when I looked up the prices for the various trains I planned to get, it didn’t meet the price of the pass, meaning I’d lose money on it. Somehow – whether it was my fault or the website’s fault, I’d managed to pick up half the price for the Geneva-Grindelwald train, thinking it was 40-something each way when it’s 80-something each way and if I’d realised that, I’d have realised it was worth getting the pass after all. I’m angry with myself that I made that mistake.
Yes, let’s start with tales of how it all went wrong. It went great. I mean, the plane was delayed both on the way and on the way back, it was nearly 8pm by the time I reached Grindelwald, having spent four hours on three trains looking forward to going to the supermarket to get food when I arrived only to find the supermarket closed an hour before I got there and I had to get up at 5.15am on Monday to get back to Geneva for a lunchtime flight but…
Anyway.
Sunday morning dawned clear and beautiful. I sat down to my much-anticipated and, by now, much-needed “good breakfast” (as advertised and as opposed to the “fantastic breakfast” offered by the hotel two miles north of Adelboden and the “superb breakfast” offered over the pub in Lauterbrunnen) with a beautiful view over the North Wall of the Eiger, which reminds me of the cliff at the end of the world as described by Crowley in Good Omens and blue sky and sunshine. I’d been planning to go into Bern on Saturday because the shops would be open but eating croissants and rolls and orange juice that tasted like sunshine, I realised I would be an idiot to leave the mountain until tomorrow – what if it was cloudy? And it was, incredibly cloudy. I made a good decision on Saturday morning.
I’ve been to Kleine Scheidegg before – I wrote a blog about it pretty recently – but I didn’t realise just how much I’d forgotten about it. It’s about a fifty minute journey from Grindelwald, starting by diving down into the valley to Grindelwald-Grund before it starts the long haul upwards. And upwards and upwards. Sometimes you’re rolling along beside meadows and valleys, sometimes beside a precipice and much of the journey is along the foot of the fearsome Eiger North Wall. A lot of it is in sheds, which I hadn’t realised at all. I know that the Jungfraujoch train (change at Kleine Scheidegg for the Top of Europe highest station in the Europe) is inside the mountain for 80% of the journey but I didn’t know the Kleine Scheidegg train is enclosed for quite a portion of the uppermost part.
Kleine Scheidegg itself is the top of the mountain pass that links Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen the long way round – the easier, cheaper and quicker way is simply to take the train most of the way back to Interlaken and change at Zweilütschinen. On Saturday, that was the only option. Kleine Scheidegg looked pristine perfection but in fact, there was a storm-strength wind blowing up from the west, which meant the train that goes down to Lauterbrunnen was cancelled. The Jungfraujoch trains were weird – at about quarter past eleven, I looked at the departure board and noted that the 11.30 train was going to the Jungfraujoch, the 12.00 train was only going as far as the penultimate station at Eismeer and the 12.30 train was cancelled altogether. If the winds are that strong, why not cancel the next one and see what happens later on, rather than chance the next one but cancel the later ones?
And they were strong. The sun was bright and when the wind stopped, it was hot enough to almost feel like it was burning my legs through black jeans but when it started, it was ferocious. The place was coated thickly with snow and the wind whipped that up and hurled it at your face like a thousand miniature bullets. It hurt! When the wind started up, you turned your back as quickly as you could and got as much skin as you could out of its way – hands in pocket, hunched to try to protect your neck etc. And it was so cold! I took shelter for a little while in the souvenir shop, then I sat on the wooden bleachers up above the station, which was on the east side and so a little more sheltered.
I last went to Kleine Scheidegg in the summer – I’ve not seen it in winter, even if late March is very much coming to the end of ski season. It was still snowy up so high, there were hundreds of skiers and snowboarders, all dressed in bright colours and there were tents and stalls and teepees selling pizza and sausages and beer. It was a party and the bleachers were there to provide seating. It was chilly and the wind was still up but it was so pretty.
I was particularly taken by the Eiger. Down in Grindelwald, you’re struck by the scale of this vertical cliff, this unimaginably big slab of grey rock, so sheer that the snow can’t even cling to it. Up close, it seemed to loom over the big hotel – a base mostly for “anxious relatives” of climbers on the Eiger’s North Wall, according to my guidebook, although I’m sure it also houses skiers who don’t want to trundle up from Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald or Interlaken every day, as well as people who simply enjoy the view and the remoteness. It looks so huge and scary and pyramidal from Kleine Scheidegg. The Jungfrau has a great reputation, thanks to being the biggest and having that train and I know the Eiger is the most famous because of that wall but it seemed the most characterful of the three giants. Of course, it looked most intimidating today because of something you couldn’t see from Grindelwald because the Eiger blocked it from view – a large but soft and fluffy cloud sitting right over the peaks of the Mönch and Jungfrau, which does diminish their awe a little.
Sitting on the bleachers, my attention was drawn to the mountain restaurant on the other side of the top of the piste. It would have food, drink, indoor space and a good view down the northern valley. So I picked my way over, avoiding getting run over by skiers, snowmobiles and the occasional piste-basher. You may know that I’m picky about the sort of snow I walk in and this was the sort that’s just a bit melted in the top layers by the hot sun and the fact that it’s virtually spring. It was slippery. But I made it to the restaurant, quickly deduced that I wasn’t going to be allowed to buy a plate of chips without something else on the plate and settled for a drink as an excuse to sit on the terrace – which is not as sheltered as I was planning on it being. It was freezing! And it’s especially freezing when you’ve got a cold drink in your hand that you have to hold onto to stop the wind knocking it over. It makes me sound like I’ve lived in a lab all my life but I’ve never experienced winds that can knock a glass over like that.
Eventually there comes a point where you can take no more photos of the glorious views or take the cold any longer. I shuffled back to the station, amused myself attempting to take selfies with the Eiger and then got on the train. The train sits there for ten or fifteen minutes between journeys up and down and it blocks the walking route between the station/hotel/restaurant/tent/shop on the south side and the piste/tents/mountain restaurants on the north side. I would probably walk either up or down the length of the train and cross in front or behind it but so many people just casually walk through the train because it has doors open both sides for easy access. I started playing “who’s getting on my train and who’s passing through my train?” while I waited, hoping against hope that no one would come and sit next to me. I am almost aggressively territorial about seats next to and opposite me and you can guarantee becoming my archenemy if you sit next to me if there’s a single seat vacant anywhere on the train.
We trundled back down again. The snow gradually thinned out, the terrain became flatter and grassier (although the grass is flattened and a yellow-grey-green colour from months of burial under snow) and by the time we reached Grindelwald, the only snow left was on the end of the two pistes that come into the village and I wouldn’t want to ski on either of them, given how patchy they were.
It was still relatively early so I went down to Interlaken for the afternoon. But that’s another story.
