Thursday was our last full day. Really, it was our last day at all. We’d all be leaving fairly early on Friday morning, having accomplished nothing more than a quick breakfast and the last of our packing.
We met at 9am at the flagpole with our hiking stuff because today we were going to the woodcarver. This is the archetypal Our Chalet day. The woodcarver is a little way outside the village, in a place where it probably doesn’t get much passing traffic and I suspect visitors to Our Chalet and KISC, Kandersteg International Scout Centre on the other side of the mountain, make up more than 95% of its custom.
We took a bus the first little way. We all had guestcards, which give visitors to the village free local bus travel and we went two stops before starting our hike for real. This was another one that was easier than I’d expected and mostly on road. In summer, they made a diversion through the klam, a kind of narrow well-carved gorge that’s more like a cave without a roof, near the woodcarver but it’s closed during winter because it’s dangerously slippery. We paused to look down to where the river bed narrows and tightens but the true beauty of a klam is in its narrow depths. By this point, we were less than ten minutes from the woodcarver, which was open just for us today.
It’s traditional to buy a hand-made wooden badge and have your name burned onto it. I already have one with my name on from a previous visit but I got two made with potential owl names for Brownies – I’m still dithering over whether to be Brown Owl or Snowy Owl – and I had my name put on a woggle. Some of the rest of the group muttered about how they don’t wear neckerchiefs with woggles but I’d noticed that the Our Chalet staff wore theirs as decorations on their staff neckerchiefs which are invariably tied at the bottom with friendship knots.
One of the compulsory challenges of the Our Chalet Challenge was to talk to a Swiss person and the woodcarver – and particularly his wife – is convenient for this. The woodcarver himself doesn’t speak much English and the German spoken in Switzerland is actually hundreds of local dialects so even those of us who have some languages don’t have any Adelbodenerdeutsch.His wife speaks reasonable English – far better than either my French or Norwegian – and she told us about the wood. The name badges are made from linden, which I think means lime wood. The woggles are cherry and the tags, which are made simply from slices of wood, are pine from outside. The rest is Swiss wood but they don’t grow it or cut it themselves, they go to Frutigen, which is the nearest biggish town and the nearest station. The tags have a detailed image of Our Chalet burned into them. A lot of the decoration, whether carved or burned, is done by hand but in the case of something this fiddly, they use a stamp, a brand I guess, because they couldn’t make something that intricate by hand and then sell it for that price. We suspect, since it was January 2nd, that 2019 had been cut out of the tags and 2020 burned into the hole.
As well as the badges and woggles, there’s a lot more complex stuff. There’s hand-carved nativity sets, lots of little wooden animals, especially cows. Dice. Keyrings. Coasters. Candles. Larger sculptures. Jewellery. Not to mention the abundance of carved stuff that surrounds the building and the stuff around Our Chalet – I’m 95% sure the big sign at the end of the drive was done by the woodcarver. It was definitely restored by him. There’s carved things on the wall and in the fireplace and around the door. The two places are virtually part of each other.
When we’d finished with the woodcarver we went off for lunch and for another part of our Challenge – to submerge our feet in a river or lake.We’d pleaded with Ellen, today’s leader, to stop somewhere for us to do that and she’d promised that the lunch stop would be by a river. It was another public barbecue pit but we were only going to use the table. There’s no more beautiful spot for lunch. The greyish glacial river bubbles over a rocky bed far wider than the river itself, surrounded by pine trees and with a snow-and-crag mountain looming behind it all. We made our way through the snow over the uneven rocks down to where the water began, found a useful rock to sit on and took it in turns to strip off boots and socks.
I’m quite comfortable putting my feet in cold water. Matthias Pelz of Grayline Iceland once told me I have “seal feet” after I insisted on ploughing through a river in sandals rather than taking the slippery stepping stones in boots. But to plunge my feet in this water in cold blood was hard. There was ice in the stream. I only had to hold them in there for five seconds and it hurt so much. But as soon as you lift them out, they go hot and that was enough to put them back in when Rosemary teased that “I didn’t see that!”. I bought my boots for the Laugavegur Trail – they needed to be waterproof and because of the waterproof membrane, boots like that tend to be very warm. Add that to the blood rush from the extreme cold and my feet were toasty for the rest of the day. I remarked to Ellen that the summer visitors have that particular challenge a lot easier than us and Ellen explained that we’re doing the winter version and the summer version requires people to submerge their entire body. I stand corrected.
From the woodcarver we walked back into town – not back to the Chalet but to the town opposite. The road runs right down the middle of the valley and it’s quite a steep climb up to Our Chalet to the east or the village to the west. We weren’t walking flat down the road and then climbing up to town. We were climbing up to town all the way from the river – the sort of long, long, relatively gentle uphill climb that kills me. The sort that never ends. Adrian, acting as back marker today, was very patient and waited for me and assured me we were in no hurry but he also tried the “Oh, we’re nearly at the top” reassuring thing when we weren’t, at least twice. I’m glad it took until the last day for the rest of the group to discover how bad I am at walking uphill because I’d been fondly imagining Tuesday’s waterfall hike to be up a mountain and not being in so much pain and so out of breath.
Once we finally made it into Adelboden we had an hour and a half or so to do some shopping, go to a cafe and do the Adelboden scavenger hunt, all of which we achieved, if you count that the instructions on the scavenger hunt are to do “as much as you can in the time”. The seven guests crammed around a table made for three and had 38% hot chocolate – of course in Switzerland they differentiate between at least three creaminesses or otherwise of hot chocolate. I bought the postcard I wanted, the kind that has a big vinyl sticker on it. I wanted one with the local canton shield, which is Bern, but it comes with the town shield so that was even better than I’d hoped because now I had an Adelboden sticker as well as a Bern one for the front cover of my scrapbook.
After that, we ran out of time for the whole of the scavenger hunt but we did three-quarters of it. I stuck my nose in the fountain outside the church and took a really bad blurry selfie of the event. We figured out how to make the cow moo. We identified the shop at the address and the shop with the decorations. No, this blog isn’t out to give you the answers but I will tell you that the scavenger hunt is not laid out in the same order as the village. The Coop is opposite the bus station and the rest of the questions appear to swerve round a lower level of the town to meet up again at the bottom of the road that comes down from the church so don’t do what we did and carry on walking in the hunt for a supermarket when it’s very obvious we’ve run out of main street.
All that was left for the day was to walk back to the Chalet. That means walking down the steep side of the village to Oey, the nearest bus stop, and then walking up the other side. I measured that with my GPS on Friday morning. It’s a little over 2.5km and it’s pretty steep. I counted that as my personal challenge for the Our Chalet Challenge, that I didn’t sit down at the bus stop, cry, shout, swear and otherwise refuse to walk up. It would have been easier to take the bus up towards Engstligenalp, get off at Kreuzgasse and walk back the gentle way we did on Tuesday but hey, I crossed off another chunk of my Challenge.
Our last evening activity was a World Thinking Day night, where we became possibly the first people in the world to do the WAGGGS 2020 WTD activity pack, Living Threads, since World Thinking Day is 22nd February. I think I probably would not choose most of the activities we did when/if I do the pack with my own girls. Too much of it was discussion and too much of it devolved into “we’re not allowed to say Christmas” and “if I move to your country [x] then you [y] if you move to my c ountry” etc. On the bright side, I could see the Chicago girls, who are around eighteen were just as tired of this diatribe as I was and they even broke in, not just with “ok boomer” but also with an explanation of the origin of the phrase. Also, if you complete an activity from each section, you’ve completed the pack and get a badge but we didn’t get the badge. I plan to go to Pax Lodge, another World Centre, for their Thinking Day event and I’d like to do the pack with my Brownies so I’ll get it eventually but it would have been nice to have it included.
And that was our week at Our Chalet done. We were presented with the Our Chalet Challenge badges at the end of the evening. I’ve never been able to find much information about this badge so I’ll do a whole post on the subject, minus the answers and also minus the precise requirements. That’s partly because it changes with the seasons but mostly because it’s just too long. The badge is dark blue with yellow stitching and outline. I’ve seen glimpses of it before in red and white and in light blue and white and maybe those are seasonal variants or maybe every few years, when the stock runs out, they get a new batch in a new colour. I don’t know.
I didn’t pack. I can pack on Friday.