Switzerland

We left for Switzerland around 5 Thursday night. We got to Interlaken around 10 on Thursday night, we had this great hostel which is the oldest private hostel in Switzerland called Balmers. We had canyoning planned for Friday at 8AM so we just went to bed but the other people in our room had other plans for us and came back at 2 and kept us up FOREVER Needless to say we woke up tired and cranky Friday morning but SUUUUPER excited for canyoning. Canyoning was CRAZY fun. You take about an hour bus ride up to the start where it is a 20 minute hike to the canyon. They go over all the guidelines with you which pretty much scares the crap out of you, they pretty much say do exactly as I tell you on each jump, and one little mistake could kill you. The first jump was the biggest, you take a 65 foot drop off a waterfall!! After that the fun started because after you jumped the largest jump of the day everything else seemed easy enough. One of the hardest of the day was a 5 foot jump to a slide where you slid down. Another was a slide called the corkscrew which literally flips you over and if you don’t put your arms just right it breaks your nose (I avoided the broken nose and took a nasty bruise on my arm). After awhile you started to have fun with it doing some twists and turns on the way down (being 6’3” prevented me from doing some of the flips like the other people) about ½ way down we got to do a 183 foot rappel (rope assisted descent) over a waterfall. This was truly amazing because you were in freefall for about 100 feet until they started to brake you from the top. We spent a little over 4 hours going down the canyon and it was truly amazing. At the end they gave us some beer, bread and cheese, just what the doctor ordered! After the drive back we walked back to the hostel with a guy from UNC and U of M (GO BLUE!) changed and went down to the main square in the town (after eating a couple of tasty kebabs of course). The weekend we were there, there was the Nissan Outdoor games which consisted of every awesome sport that I dream of doing! When we got to the main square they had a bouldering (rock climbing short technical courses without ropes) contest and warm up runs for the mountain bike jumping competition. This was really impressive because these guys weren’t just doing a little bar-spin, they were doing backflips, 360’s on full blown mountain bikes (not that little trick bike you had when you were 10). I pretty much stood in amazement until my friends pried me away so we could see the airshow. On the schedule it showed there was an airshow but we had no idea what to expect. Well it starts out with two base jumpers jumping out of a helicopter and starting LITTLE ROCKETS ON THEIR FEET!!! They shot across the sky like little bullets doing little tricks!! This was incredible! There were also paragliders doing flips and spins as well. It was crazy. After that we went back to the hostel to watch a rugby game… or so we thought, it ended up being Saturday night not Friday… but it took us an hour to figure that out. So we went into the lounge of our hostel. Now this be noted, apparently our hostel was the place in town, not just for tourists either, locals even came there to party, there was a bar down in the basement and a lounge on the ground floor. We all grabbed a few beers down at the bar then came up to the lounge where somebody was rockin out on the piano and we all sang along until they kicked us out at 11 and we went off to bed because canyoning kind of killed us. The next morning we “slept in” until about 8 and literally went off to the races. We decided to watch the whitewater kayaking in the morning and this was a great decision. We got right up next to the kayakers as they paddled between the rocks and over a nice “little” waterfall(in comparison to canyoning it was small). After we had seen enough around noon we decided to catch our shuttle bus back into town, which was a 6 mile drive away. Well little did we know that the last bus left at 11:30 and no more were coming until 1:30 and at this point we were starving and wanted some tasty food. So somebody told us there was a train station just a little ways (it ended up being about 2.5 km) down the road. So we hiked to the train station and caught the next train back. All in all we got back about 30 minutes faster than if we would have taken the bus… Lunch was tasty again (more kebabs) and we went and sat next to the lake and took a little nap. After our naps we went to go watch some more mountain bike jumping before the rugby game. We hung out and watched mountain biking for awhile and then headed back to the hostel bar to check out the rugby game. They created a new happy hour for the rugby game so of course we had to indulge, for about 1 US you could have a pint! Tasty! The game was great because it was the Aussies vs the kiwis (Australians vs new Zealanders) and the bar was 50/50 split between the two and it was just one big party. After dinner we were in the mood for some kebabs so off we went and then after kebabs we went back to the main square for the video competition of the outdoor games, they were amazing! After that there was a little party with lots of drunk outdoor people so I had a blast! Since there is a countrywide noise curfew we had to shut down at 12 and we asked one of the trashed locals (note at this point I was truly 100% sober) where the party was going to? His response “ BALMERS, the party is at BALMERS MATE” So we went back to Balmers and we stayed in the bar for a bit, then piano for a bit then off to bed by 1. We got up the next morning at a glorious 7:30 am to catch a train up into the swiss alps to do some hiking. It took one transfer to get all the way to where we were going but the view was spectacular!! We really enjoyed the hiking and atmosphere in our little swiss town. After a few hours of climbing up the mountain we headed back down to Interlaken for our departure from that amazing city. The city must have been just as sad to see us go as we were to see it go because it started to pour just after our departure from the station. The train back was uneventful and we got our last kebab of the trip in Strasbourg.
It is necessary to add a few foodie points about Interlaken: 1. Yes I had lots of Kebabs but this is because they were the best kebabs I have had in all of Europe. 2. The water in interlaken was to die for! They had ‘water fountains’ that were what we could just a fountain and they were all over and this was straight from the mountain springs and 100% safe to drink!