Welcome back to the last of this long-overdue miniseries on my county trip to Switzerland in the summer of 2014! Today is our last real day. We’ve still got a two-day drive home, which I won’t tell you about because it’s boring (in summary: we sat in a minibus for two days. One old lady complained about feeling travel sick. I had a two-day panic attack in the back corner of the bus. I took no photos the entire journey, fairly obviously.)
If you want to follow the story so far, I’ve talked about: Anita’s B&B, Monday in the Lauterbrunnen Valley, Tuesday at Our Chalet, Wednesday in Neuchâtel and Thursday at Reichenbach Falls and on the Brienzersee.
Friday was a light day for our driver. I’m still kind of bitter and bemused over how much we paid for the minibus compared to how much use we actually got out of it. This was a pay-for-your-own-transport-even-though-we’ve-already-paid-£400-each-for-Bill day. I daresay half the group opted to stay at home rather than tangle with foreign trains. I know some people went shopping in Interlaken. I have no fears when it comes to the Swiss public transport system, so I decided to go to St Beatus Caves. They’re on the north shore of the Thunersee and I vaguely remember Bill dropped me off since it’s only 20 minutes away. That’s probably how the Interlaken group got there too. To be fair, I think Bill himself was a bit surprised how little use we made of him. He had the caravan outside the B&B and I imagine spending his days off sitting in there on his own wasn’t very exciting when he could be sitting in a cafe with a view waiting for us to do our thing.
If I haven’t mentioned it later, I was a caver in my university days and I’m still drawn to showcaves. I’ll absolutely do the “oh, they’re not like real caves” in my “the book is better than the film” voice but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to go and visit them every single time. Yes, showcaves are the kind that are open to tourists, the kind that have electric lights rigged up, concrete paths laid and handrails. We spent a week caving in Ireland in 2004. On our day off, we went to the local showcave because cavers are absolute cave nerds.
I don’t think I knew about St Beatus caves when I was a student living in Switzerland. I think I only made it to the Oberland region twice and although I knew the likes of Kleine Scheidegg and the Schynige Platte fairly well, there’s plenty around Interlaken I’ve never seen, most notably the Harder Kulm funicular. I don’t have any plans to go and fill my Switzerland gaps but given that you can often get cheap flights to Geneva, I seem to pop off there more often than I think I do and I daresay I’ll end up there sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Anyway. The caves. Swiss tourist attractions are not always helpfully laid out right on the edge of the road with a car park and cafe. In this case, there was a steep zigzagging climb up the mountain to the entrance. It’s not just any entrance. Cave entrances are usually a hole in the rock and in the case of showcaves, enlarged holes in the rock that don’t look too terrifying to paying customers. This place has a kind of castle entrance grafted onto it, with turrets and galleries. I guess it’s the Augustinian monastery that was later established there because I can’t really see any other reason for building a fake decorative frontage. St Beatus was a monk or a hermit probably from Scotland or Ireland who came in the second century to what is now Switzerland as a missionary, to convert the Helvetii tribe, who were the locals at the time. Fun fact, they’re the reason Switzerland’s county code is .ch. Switzerland’s Latin name is the Confoederatio Helvetica from that tribe and occasionally it’s used when Switzerland doesn’t want to give any of its four official languages any prominence over the other three.
When he’d finished all his converting, it seems St Beatus took to the caves as a hermit, fought a dragon and was buried – by whom, I have no idea, since he was hermitting at the time – somewhere in the vicinity of the cave entrace. He’s a saint with his own feast day but given that the first records of his life seem to have been written eight hundred years after he died, I’m not entirely convinced he ever existed. But then I’m a sceptical atheist and my general outlook on ancient religious figures is that if they did exist, they probably weren’t what people thought they were. That’s by the by. This is about the caves, not the cave’s legend.
It’s a good climb up to the caves. My elderly guidebook says “Note that a visit involves a full 2km walk through the caves” but doesn’t mention the climb. Then, because it’s a showcave, you can only go in as part of a tour with a guide. The first part involves models, maybe of the Helvetii tribe, going about their life in the cave. The next scene is presumably St Beatus, who seems to have made himself quite a comfortable little home. Look, he has a fireplace and an actual bed. I’d live quite happily here.
Beyond that, you get into the real cave. Not real real. It’s all electric lights and pathways and whatnot (it’s only a real cave if the light is attached to your head and you’re wearing an oversuit with tears in all the hard-used areas) but it’s got formations and puddles and interesting discoloured lumpy bits of rock. If not for the lights, a lot of this could look like areas in the top part of OFD, the parts I’ve mostly only seen on their virtual cave tour. This is the bit I’m interested in and although I’m no cave expert, I can still see things in there that the average above-grounder just wouldn’t notice and I’ll take photos of things that just look like bits of rock to you. They are just bits of rock but they’re bits of rock that are interesting!
When I’d finished with the cave, and that sweet smell of wet limestone that’s the scent of perfume to me, I walked back down the zigzag path down the side of the mountain to the road. How best to get back to Interlaken? Getting back to the B&B was no problem from Interlaken, you just need to make sure you’re in the Grindelwald half of the mountain train, but getting from this bit of mountain north of the lake to Interlaken in the first place was a problem. Buses run along here but it’s not the friendliest road to walk along to the nearest bus stop. Maybe that’s why I never visited when I lived here. I took a few buses but mostly I travelled by train and these caves aren’t accessible by train.
So I strolled along the narrow winding road in the direction of the nearest bus stop, or what I assumed would be the nearest bus stop. It’s funny, this was 2014. I’d had a smartphone for four and a half years by this point. Did I not have mobile data or was this the era of unexpected £3000 bills for using your data on holiday? Why was I making this up as I went along and trying to guess where the nearest bus stop was? Google Maps says there’s a bus stop right outside the caves, which makes absolute sense, and the image was taken in August 2013. Did I just miss it? Because I distinctly remember walking along that road. Not only that, I must have walked the best part of a kilometre, including a 150m tunnel because I returned to Interlaken by boat and that’s how far the nearest boat stop is.
Well, transport issues aside, I made it to the boat stop – please forgive me for calling it that, I can’t think for the life of me what you call it. I like a boat trip. I know I literally only had one yesterday but it seemed the easiest way back and certainly the pleasantest and I could do it all on my own. I started solo travelling out of necessity – my first trip was to Finland in November 2008 on three week’ notice and I was never going to find someone to come with me under those circumstances – but this trip really demonstrated that I’d learned to genuinely prefer solo travel. Bickering old ladies, people refusing to go up mountains because “there’s nothing up there”, days broken up by a need to stop for tea and cakes, drivers who aren’t allowed to drive. Give me my very own boat trip any day over a boat trip with eleven other people.
And it was pleasant! It was a bit on the grey and damp side but the water was an amazing colour and I love to watch the bright red pistons thrash and the wheels turn and splash in almost absolute silence on the other side of the glass. If you’re ever in central Switzerland, do take a break from those spectacular mountains to do a trip around one of the lakes on the paddle steamer. There’s a reason all those coach companies offer “Lakes and Mountains” trips – the lakes are absolutely worth taking half a day out of the mountains for!
I think we must have chugged into the boat stop at Interlaken West and the next thing my photos say I did was get on the train at Interlaken Ost. It’s entirely likely I got on the next train to run through the village because if I walked, I would surely have taken photos of my stroll. But having done a cave and a lake, I decided I had enough time to finish off my day with a mountain and I got on the little train that goes up to the Schynige Platte. This turned out to not be the brightest idea I’d had all week.
The train wound its way through the town and across the plain and then made its way up the mountain and that was all well and good. It’s a very scenic trip – on the right day. This wasn’t the right day. I’d barely alighted at the top before the heavens opened. I hadn’t come prepared for rain. I had a t-shirt and my famous county fleece but all I had in the way of waterproofs was my windshirt, and that thing is waterproof in the same way as a tent. What I mean by that is that if you touch the inside, the water leaks straight through the fabric and you can’t wear a windshirt without touching it, so in some ways, it was less waterproof than not wearing it at all. I took shelter on the train platform for a while and when it let up enough, I ran to the little hotel where I sat in the window with a cup of hot chocolate to wait for the storm to blow over.
It was wet, it was cloudy and I had to pack ready to go home in the morning. I spent all of ten minutes appreciating the fresh mountain air and then I returned to the train where I stripped off my wet outer layers and took some random badly-lit selfies. And that was it. I did have a lesson in horse whispering when I got back to the B&B, and that was fun, but we were done with Switzerland. The rest of my group had done some shopping and cafe visits in Interlaken and we packed up most of our stuff ready to shove it, Tetris-style, into the minibus in the morning.
As trips to Switzerland go, I think I maybe got more out of it than I might on my own. My dad is very much of the opinion than you should make the most of being on holiday but over the years, I’ve started to adopt the idea that I’m on holiday and if I want to be lazy, I can do that. Left to myself, I probably wouldn’t have done half the things we did. That said, I went a little above and beyond in that I did all the planned activities and then packed my two empty days with interesting things too. If you’ve got five days in the Oberland, it’s a pretty good itinerary. I’d swap my day in Neuchatel and Yverdon for a trip up to Kleine Scheidegg but we did caves and waterfalls and mountains and boats and villages and our Girlguiding-specific day out and that’s a pretty good programme of activities.
And that, seven and a half years later, is that trip finally written up! It’s only recently occurred to me how much Switzerland content I have, between living there for a year and at least three trips back since then and it’s good to start recording some of it.