Switzerland 2014: Anita’s B&B

For reasons that might become clearer later in the month, I was looking at my old Switzerland posts the other day and discovered that all the photos had broken in the first two posts from our county trip in 2014. So rather than just repair the photos, I thought I’d rewrite them altogether because it’s always great to bring past trips back into the present and look at them all over again.

Backstory: this was a county Girlguiding trip of the kind where one person sends out an email that says “I’m taking some people to Switzerland. Email me and send me a deposit if you want to be one of them” and I thought that sounded good so I went! Switzerland is a popular destination for this sort of thing. Not only is it beautiful, there’s plenty to do and it’s so varied and most importantly, it’s home to one of the WAGGGS World Centres. We have one right here in London but that’s almost too easy to get to, so we tend to go off to Switzerland to get our world Guiding fix. Not that trips often stay at Our Chalet – it’s often too expensive so we stay elsewhere and go to Our Chalet just for a visit. Well, that’s what this entire post is about!

A group photo on the back steps of Our Chalet. We're all wearing variants of either adult leader or Trefoil Guild uniform, so we're all in shades of blue, white and red.

I think there were twelve of us – I think we had a husband with us and we definitely had a driver, although whether he counted in the twelve, I wasn’t sure. There are ten of us in one group photo and eleven in another, so somewhere around twelve or thirteen in total, I think. I’d just turned 29 at the time and the organiser’s daughter was 24. Next youngest after me was 52 and the others were all in their 60s and 70s – a lot more Trefoil Guild members than active Girlguiding volunteers, although I’ve recently seen one of the names listed as a Division Commissioner in my county. There are downsides to travelling as a twenty-something in a predominantly pensioner-age group, so I learned: some of them do not always want to walk far and you have to keep stopping for cups of tea and pieces of cake. I am not a great believer in stopping for tea and cakes, I’m more of a believer in stopping to take in the view or take photos and I had a lot to learn about spending a lot of time in close proximity to other people – I’m generally a solo traveller who’s not particularly used to being surrounded by people who don’t want to do exactly what I want to do.

Anyway, this was August 2014 and we’d booked an entire chalet in Grindelwald. The lady who booked the trip wasn’t sure if it slept 12 or 14 but we all agreed that it sounded fine. Then we spent two days in a minibus together driving down!

A large silver Mercedes minibus parked in a car park while people in international neckerchiefs mill around.

It wasn’t particularly late when we arrived on Saturday afternoon but we’d been on the go for at least six hours, more likely eight, and I suspect everyone was a bit grumpy. We met the agent and she showed us to the chalet and – there’s no other way of putting this – mutiny broke out. This is the chalet in question.

A small hill rising up from the road with a few chalets dotted on it and an almost invisible light rail line running about halfway up it. Our chalet is the on towards the left, not facing the camera, directly above the corner of the concrete car parking bay.

No, not the one front and centre, the one to the left facing away from the camera with the flagpole running right up the middle of it. Yes, there are a few steps up to it and then you have to cross the railway line. This is no high-speed or commuter line – this is the mountain railway that runs from Grindelwald round to the likes of Lauterbrunnen and Murren and up to the Jungfraujoch. It doesn’t run that often and at least in town, it absolutely crawls. The minibus would be parked approximately where I’m standing as I take the photo so you’d have to carry your luggage a little way and two-thirds of the group just lost their minds over it. The words “ridiculous” and “totally unreasonable” were thrown around. “I’m not walking all that way.” Someone even said – in August, in Switzerland – “it’s not as if it’s high season, surely there’s another chalet available”. Yes, there are going to be dozens of chalets for 12-14 available for exclusive hire for a week on ten minutes’ notice, that’s not going to be a problem in the Berner Oberland in August!

The poor agent stood there looking like we were actually kicking her. The group argued, whined, complained, waved their arms at this insurmountable summit and at last, after nearly two hours, poor Anita said “Well… I run a B&B… I suppose you could… stay… there?”. No questions were asked. The entire group went “Yes, we want to stay with you!” and that’s what we did!

Anita's B&B, a large chalet with outbuildings, set on the lowest green slopes of a very rocky mountainside, broken up by clumps of dark green pines.

Holiday B&B Anita is down in Lütschental, about a third of the way up the valley after turning left on the way up from Interlaken. It’s certainly an incredibly peaceful location with amazing views up the valley. The little request stop station was within easy enough walking distance – not that we used it much because we had our own driver and our own minibus. More importantly, we could park right outside the house and there were no steps.

The dining room, a large room with a low wooden ceiling and wood-panelled walls, dominated by a long table, set with pretty plates. There's a microwave and a breakfast buffet table laid out at the other end and shelves full of interesting knick-knacks everywhere.

Looking at it on bnb.ch today, it says it sleeps 8. Admittedly, driver Bill slept in the caravan outside and the room I ended up in isn’t among the photos, so maybe she opened up her own personal spare rooms to us or perhaps she just had rooms available then that she doesn’t let out anymore. We had one, maybe two bathrooms to share between the lot of us, a large communal lounge/dining room and the run of the kitchen. Honestly, the website is right. It wasn’t made for twelve and we knew that at the time. Anything to avoid a two-minute uphill walk.

A room for four - an Austrian double (two single mattresses and duvets on a double base) under a wooden half-upstairs with two mattresses laid over the glass floor. Great room for parents and kids; not so much for four unrelated adults.

The room-sharing was another controversy. For the first night, we just piled in anywhere but for the second, we got organised. I ended up with a room for at least three all to myself because I wasn’t desperate to spend the entire week sharing a thin mattress on a glass-bottomed platform three feet above another double bed and I don’t think there was any other layout that made the slightest bit of sense, although I suppose the other occupant of that double bed could have come in too.

A Jack Russell leaping into the air after a handful of water that looks like it's bubbling in slow-motion.

Anita had animals – a Jack Russell called Torolf who took to me and me only out of our group, so I had many hours of fun splashing him with water from the barrel and watching him leap and snap at it! – and a couple of horses. I spent so long chatting to the horses every time I went in and out of the B&B that on the last evening, Anita took me out to the stable for a horse-whispering lesson.

Torolf the Jack Russell leaning out of the big wooden windows and enjoying the view down the valley, where mountain after mountain comes down from both sides, getting barer and bluer into the distance while the foreground is lush and green.

In many ways, Anita’s B&B was a far better place to stay than our original location up at Grindelwald. It was textbook Heidi-land (sorry, Swiss – I know how much you hate her), it was lush and green and quiet, the mountains loomed as cliffs directly above us, we saw deer in the garden and the station was a flat walk away instead of a hike uphill to the middle of Grindelwald. As I said, we had our own bus but according to the law, our driver required a day off which meant we had to get ourselves around. I’m pretty sure some of the ladies just stayed at home. Some went up the Jungfraujoch (and came back with altitude sickness, which struck during dinner that evening…) and I went off to Neuchatel and Yverdon-les-Bains. I also went up to Grindelwald to swim at the sports centre at least once, possibly twice. Taking the little mountain train 18 minutes up the valley in a country I used to live in earned me a proper serious “Oh, good for you!” for the rest of the group – every now and then I get a reminder that other people simply don’t do things on their own and that was one.

Grindelwald in the evening. The town looks dark but it's not really - the sky is still quite light but the mountains surrounding the town block out a lot of the light. The photo is on the station platform with a navy and yellow train standing there on my left.

At the end of the week, we gave Anita a present and a card to thank her for all the trouble she’d taken for us, we printed our group photo from Our Chalet and we gave her a Girlguiding UK friendship badge – it’s the sort of thing you take on international trips and I’d been carrying a handful around all week in case we met anyone at Our Chalet I could give one too. And more importantly, we gave her her house back!