The Hills are Alive with the Sound of...Cow Bells: Wengen to First, an Alpine Adventure

"Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." - Forrest Gump 

Today we decided to take advantage of our Berner Oberland Passes and had a brilliant day riding the cable cars and trains. It was quite cloudy for most of the day but this made the periods where the mountains broke through the clouds all the more spectacular and special.

The first leg of our journey was a cable car from Wengen to Mannlichen and we were all very excited. It was quite a large cable car taking up to seventy at a time, but there was no queue and hardly any people until the last minute. We had window seats at the front of the carriage, but if we have a chance to ride this one again I would go to the back as this would provide sweeping views down the mountain.

At Mannlichen we were completely clouded in so we missed the view, which I was worried was going to be the story of the day. We then had any easy five minute walk across to the next cable car down to Grindelwald. This one was a lovely small carriage, made comfortably for four people.

My positive mood returned quickly as we had views down the other side of the mountain to Grindelwald. The kids has a great time playing “sweet and sour” with the passengers of the carriages going the other way. They would wave madly and call hello out the window, and the vast majority of people choose to ignore them (“sour”) but then some lovely person would wave back and smile (“ahhh sweet”).

As we sat in our cabin we could hear the sound of cow bells all around us, and we looked and found the sweetest cows. In a stream than ran below us we could see a Marmot dart out and then back into hiding. It was so lovely and peaceful. Then all of a sudden as we descended into Grindalwald out came the mountains for a brief peak and we were very excited to see them.

When we arrived at the next station we walked for ten minutes to Grindalwald Grund station where we planned to take a bus to the FirstBahn station for our next set of cable cars up to First. I asked the ticket lady where to catch the bus and she kindly told me that we had a twenty minute wait for the bus which would take us all the way to the station or we could catch a train in two minutes to Grindalwald Bahnhof which would then involve a ten minute walk through the village and both ways would take the same amount of time. And so we caught the train, which had the advantage of letting us see this lovely village, which seemed much busier and less relaxed than Wengen.

When we were living in England it was my plan to get really fit and when we came to Switzerland we would be able to hike. Well unfortunately due to over exercising in England, too much stressing, and a lot a lot of travelling and eating wheat like it was going out of fashion in France and Germany because you just have to (though I haven’t for the eight years before this holiday) I’m feeling pretty exhausted right now.

Luckily the beautiful Berner Oberland goes very easy on those with exhausted adrenal glands and even without walking more than a few short legs I have been able to really enjoy our time in the mountains. I am writing this looking out from our veranda and the most beautiful view in the world and would love to just sit here and write for a month.

Meanwhile back in Grindalwald we had arrived at the FirstBahn station and enjoyed our ride up to the top, which was completely enveloped in clouds. It didn’t stop people whizzing along on a zip line called the First Flyer, at speeds around 80km/h, but the kids weren’t heavy enough, but never mind we had already seen the wonderful playground at one of the earlier stations, Bort, and we went back there for a wonderful lunch break.

One thing we learnt very quickly about Switzerland it that it is frightfully expensive. For the price we paid for five nights in Wengen we could have stayed thirty three nights in Gutach in the Black Forest. And so we decided on picnics for lunch and home cooking for dinner and this was no struggle as our view from lunch could not have been better even on a cloudy day.

Even though the playground looked marvellous to us the kids didn’t play on it long, preferring hide and seek and playing on the grass. Rob and I even found a spot which wasn’t in view of the restaurant and did some yoga. The fresh air was wonderful.

Luckily the clouds were sitting mostly behind us, up at First, but the Eiger Glacier and Jungfrau came out to provided us with some breath taking views. Emma is incredibly excited about the possibility of seeing snow and so we decided on a different route home that would take us closer to the Eiger Glacier. And so we caught a train to Kleine Scheidegg and again all we saw was cloud.

We had no idea what we were missing until we returned a few days later on our trip to Jungfraujoch and discovered that when the clouds lift you are faced with such an indescribably beautiful visa that if we had missed it would have been a crime.