Waterfalls!!

We have had a wonderful couple of days in Switzerland (in spite of the expense of the place), exploring some lovely small villages and seeing some great sites.

Wengen is a very nice pedestrian-only village which sits on a mountaintop at 1274 meters. To get there, we took a train, then a small ski gondola, followed by a larger ski gondola.

I had never been in a small ski gondola before, and it was very cool, but Steve, forgetting who he had married, made the mistake of telling me the delightful tale of the helicopter that flew too low and clipped a gondola wire sending many people crashing down a mountain to their deaths. Why, why he ever told me that story I will never know.

The ride on the big gondola was the best, though, because it was a cloudy rainy day, and the gondola started very high up in total cloud, and then descended through the layer of cloud to the green valley below. It was very Lord of the Rings.

Today we went to what I think is the most beautiful Swiss town yet, called Lauterbrunnen (this photo as well as the one at the top), which is just Southeast of Wengen. This town is known for its waterfalls, and they really were everywhere. The woman at our hotel suggested we walk to a place called Trummelbach Falls.

I was expecting to walk through the woods into a clearing where a large waterfall fell into a glittering pool and people surrounded it saying oohhh and ahhh.

Boy was I wrong. This place is a major tourist attraction, with bus and carloads of people flocking to it. I can honestly say I have never seen anything quite like it in my life. They talk groups of you up in what feels like a cross between an elevator and a gondola up into the side of a mountain. It was kind of like what I imagined going into a mine shaft would be like.

When you get out of the elevator, you then walk up loads of steps which are essentially cut into the mountain, and the most amazing waterfall I've ever seen cuts through this mountain in incredible ways.

This is no peaceful waterfall; it is crashing, spraying, slate-colored water, twisting, turning and cutting its way the mountain with an immense show of power.

According to the website, the Trummelbach is actually made up of ten glacial waterfalls, and it alone drains the glacier walls of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau mountains with an astounding 20,000 liters of water per second!

I forgot to mention the goats. At one of the train stations, there are goats, just hanging out everywhere. The sit, they stand, they run, the chew things, they try to smoke people's cigarettes, and they poop and pee everywhere. Very un-Swiss.

I believe I also forgot to mention that the transport pass which allows you access to the trains, busses and gondolas in the area cost 500 Swiss Francs for the two of us. That's a lot of Bratwurst!!!