*Wednesday – July 16: Day 5 in Switzerland: When we woke up this morning it was another beautiful day and we weren’t sure what we were going to do today. We were thinking of going to the Schilthorn (Piz Gloria), but we heard that it’s another very busy tourist attraction and that Schynige Platte is also very beautiful but less busy. So, I read up on it a little on the internet that was available to us at the apartment and it seemed like a wonderful place to visit. We would have to get on the train from Wilderswil. Today we would use another free day, so we saved ourselves another $70 CHF per person for this trip. We drove to the Wilderswil visitor centre to get some information. The lady gave us a nice folder for Schynige Platte and said that it was a very good choice to go up there. We parked our car at the Wilderswil train station where we took the cogwheel train up to Schynige Platte. During the train trip we had beautiful views of the surrounding mountains, the Thunersee and the Brienzersee, the surrounding scenery and more. It was really beautiful! Once we got up to the top of Schynige Platte at an elevation of 1,967m/6,490ft we could choose from several hiking tails. First we visited the Alpen Garten where you could find over 500 different species of wildflowers and plants that are found in the Swiss Alps. Some of these flowers and plants are so pretty. I really enjoyed seeing Edelweiss in real life growing here. It’s such a pretty flower with fuzzy flower petals.
Some photos of the train ride and the views from the top and Alpen Garten
After visiting the Alpen Garten we found ourselves a nice picnic bench in the sun with amazing views over the mountains and we had our lunch. We packed our own sandwiches, some fruit, drinks and a couple of snacks. Wow, it’s amazing how this mountain air helps with the appetite…my sandwich never tasted this good, haha! It was quite warm and I think it must have been around 25 C up here. After lunch and relaxing for a while we decided to do one more hike which would follow a panoramic trail. This hike took us about an hour and a bit with beautiful scenery, tons of wildflowers and amazing mountain views. We walked for about a good hour and then we slowly returned to the train station. My mom was getting tired as well, but she truly enjoyed it up here. We took the train back down and after leaving Wilderswil we drove through Interlaken where we stopped for a little shopping. After we got back to the apartment we made dinner which tasted really good after another day of being in the fresh mountain air. My mom was tired now and just wanted to watch some tv. Michael and I decided we wanted to go back to Beatenberg to take the gondola to the Niederhorn as we would have some time to spent there now.
Some views from Shynige Platte during our hike along the Panorama Trail
We drove to Beatenberg again which was about 15 minutes driving and parked at the Niederhorn gondola station. We got on one of these fancy funiculars as they call them and surprisingly we went downhill instead of uphill…Haha we took the wrong transportation and were on the funicular to Beatenbucht at the bottom of the mountain. So, we went all the way back up to Beatenberg with the funicular and finally we got onto the right gondola. We were on our way to the Niederhorn. We got out of the gondola when it stopped and walked around for a little. We kind of thought that it didn’t look like much at this place, then we noticed that the gondola was going even further up. Darn, we got off too early…but it was too late to go all the way up as the time was close to the last gondola ride down. Haha, we had such a good laugh at ourselves...Oh well, we’ll try and get up here on another day if we can as we still have a free day left! We did enjoy some of the views from this little trip anyway.
Some views of our little trip to the Niederhorn
Please see my next post "My life in Canada (July 2008)...Part 5" for the rest of the story!
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