Day 4
- When: July 14, 2024
- Where: Wengen
I’ll start off by trying to answer a question a friend posed to me last evening:
Why Switzerland? Weren’t you just there?
Good question. There are many places in the world, and this is my third visit in 5 years. The quick answer is that it’s probably a few things. The parts of Switzerland I’ve been to are relatively clean, safe, and organized. It has mountains (I grew up in Florida). I like practicing the tiny bit of German I know. The trains and trams are easy. At this point I’m comfortable with getting around Switzerland, so there’s less travel friction to deal with than, say, India or Japan. I foresee a future post that explores this question more in a more general way. Or, put another way, I think I’m seeking a certain lifestyle that isn’t necessarily Swiss but that the Swiss happen to practice.
On to today’s activities:
This is what I woke up to at 5:58am:
This was from my balcony. Insane. I pondered the mountains until 7:30, then headed down for breakfast. It was brief, though: the weather forecast only showed sun for the morning, with clouds in the afternoon, so I had to get moving. I did a repeat of the Panorama trail from Mannlichen to Kleine Scheidegg that me and dad did last year, taking the cable car up at 8:30, making sure to use my Swiss Half Fare card (more on this later).
At the top of Mannlichen:
Midway:
The weather was clear and I had ridiculous views for the hike down. Once I made it to the Kleine Scheidegg train station I debated hiking down further. The train has a few smaller stops it makes on its way to the main station at Wengen. It would’ve been a 3100ft elevation drop to go all the way to Wengen. The quad buster! I took the train instead.
I grabbed another to-go salad from the Coop market next to the train station and hiked it back up to my hotel. My lunch view was outstanding:
For the afternoon I set out to explore Mürren, which lies on the opposite ridge of the Lauterbrunnen valley from Wengen. For my trip last year I had planned to stay at either Wengen or Mürren and it was basically a coin flip that I chose Wengen. Having traveled to Mürren today, I can say I 100% made the right choice.
To get to Mürren, you have to take a cable car up to a stop called Grütschalp and then transfer to a train to take you the rest of the way to Mürren. That cable car kind of sucks. Yes, it’s a fast way to get up the mountain, but the station looks kind of dingy, the staff aren’t doing what they’re supposed to for crowd control, and then in the cable car itself we were packed like sardines. And then you get to repeat the process, including the poor crowd control, on the way down. Possibly with luggage.
Mürren itself is closer to the end of the valley, so the views are pretty spectacular. But the town is long and thin and didn’t feel much like a cohesive town to me. Perhaps Wengen has spoiled me. There are a few hikes that you can take from Mürren but I again decided not to overdo it. I opted for a casual 2.8 mile hike from Mürren back down to Grütschalp that runs along the train tracks for much of the way. When it does veer into the woods, it’s amazing. Beautiful alpine trees, waterfalls, and the tinkle of cowbells in the distance.
I was glad I didn’t try for anything more ambitious, as the muscles on the front of my shins (Tibialis Anterior) were really feeling the burn toward the end. I ended up savoring the brief uphill bits of this climb, as it used different muscles! With the hike over I took the cursed cable back down to Lauterbrunnen. I walked along the main drag of Lauterbrunnen for a little bit but I wasn’t feeling it. It has a similar long + thin arrangement as Mürren and, to me, feels more like a waypoint to other places than a destination itself. So back up to Wengen and my hotel.
That’s mostly it for today. I had an OK dinner in Wengen at Pasta and More, a schnitzel that was a little tough but got the job done. To let dinner settle, I did the same stroll around the back of town as the previous night.