The morning started out with a late-ish wakeup (that’s about 9AM) and running into everyone in the kitchen for breakfast. Though the day was once again pretty rainy and dreary, we were all determined to make the most of our last day in the most beautiful place on earth.

There were so many options: I could go to Trummelbach. I could go to the top of the mountain to see some of the places where they shot 007. I could go into Interlaken to do some shopping. I could just hike the random trails around the campsite. The list goes on.

Lindsay and Skye were planning to do Trummelbach as well, and after meeting up with one of Simon’s friends, Kirsten, we all decided to go together. Simon and Renae had already gone, so they decided to do the cable car ride up to the top of the mountain and take a 2-3 hour hike down.

The one thing they don’t tell you about Trummelbach: plan to get wet. And, depending on how much it’s rained or how warm it’s been in recent days, plan to get soaked. Luckily for us it had been pretty rainy for the last few days, especially in the afternoons, so even though the skies were blue with a few puffy clouds, we all had our rain gear packed with us.

The “hike” to Trummelbach was about 20 minutes from our campsite. It wasn’t much of a hike though – I’d call it more of a walk, but either way it was beautiful. More cute little Swiss houses and farms and two more waterfalls. The walk was supposed to take about 20 minutes but I think it ended up taking us over 40 because we were dawdling and taking a bunch of photos.

Once we got there it actually didn’t look like much of anything. You take an elevator to the 8th or so level and have two more levels to walk up. This place is really cool. It’s basically the largest (publically accessible) indoor glacier waterfall or something like that. The water is crystal clear and flowing so intensely it carves its way through the rocks and caverns of this cliffside. It’s really cool stuff. (see wikipedia)

So after getting pretty soaked at Trummelbach we headed back to our campsite and split up. Skye and Lindsay were going to the top of the mountain, Kirsten was going to take a nap, and I was kind of undecided. I knew I wanted to get some cool Swiss souvenirs, but I also wanted to go to the top of the mountain. I decided to go the souvenir route and head down to Interlaken where I would also stop at the train station to get a ticket to Munich for the next day.

I packed up my stuff, including my laptop because I was planning to find an Internet cafe in the city and headed out. I didn’t realize that I’d taken so many photos at Trummelbach, so about 5 minutes away from the campsite I noticed that I only had space for one more photo on my CF card. Crap. Luckily I had my laptop with me so I plunked down by one of the waterfalls and started to download my photos.

I’ve been using Picasa during this trip – only because Photoshop and Photo Mechanic are way too expensive to put on my netbook. I don’t particularly like it, but it gets the job done for basic downloading.

A third of the way through the download, I noticed the counter on my camera was moving faster than the counter on the computer. Before I knew it my CF card had been wiped and only 103 photos had made it onto my hard drive. I WAS PISSED. All of my Trummelbach photos. Gone.

I thought about walking back there and just taking all of the photos again, but instead I just got really grumpy. I resigned myself to the fact that the photos were gone and that if I wanted to show someone what Trummelbach looked like, I’m sure SOMEONE will have a photo posted on Flickr. Right? Right. So I walked into Lauterbrunnen, still grumpy but trying to remind myself that it wasn’t the end of the world. At least my paragliding photos were safe.

I had a few purchases in mind for when I got to Interlaken, but I wanted to get an idea of the prices in Lauterbrunnen before I went down so I had a point of comparison. I ended up finding this cute little watch shop on the main road in town and never actually made it to the train station or to Interlaken. I got everything I needed right in there and for the best prices that I’ve seen yet. Win. The lady who owned the shop asked me if I wanted to wear my watch or if I wanted to put it in the box. Considering the luck I’d been having so far that day I opted to keep wearing my now 9-year-old Fossil. My Swiss watch will wait until I get home.

After I’d made all of my purchases there really wasn’t a reason for me to go to Interlaken and the train ticket down there is pretty pricey, so instead I decided to hang out in Lauterbrunnen at the little Internet cafe I’d come to love. Still feeling sorry for myself, I bought an afternoon’s worth of wi-fi and a brownie. I sat down on the porch and pulled out my laptop.

I skipped straight past the emails and social networking things and went straight for Google: “recover photos from CF card.” I was determined to get my photos back. After a few hours of fiddling around with stuff and trying this and that I finally realized that I might be able to do it if I mounted the CF card as a drive via a USB card reader instead of just plugging the USB directly into my camera. Lucky for me the Internet cafe had a reader and I gave it a shot.

306 photos recovered. THANK GOD. I can’t tell you how happy I was to see my .CR2s loading into the folder completely unharmed. The program I used was called PhotoRec and it is absolute MAGIC, I tell you. So amazing.

So I mentioned in my last post that we were planning to have a BBQ. When I wrote that there were about 5 of us in on the plans. By the time the actual BBQ rolled around there were a dozen of us. We’d all decided that we’d each bring whatever sort of meat we wanted to grill and one person would be in charge of the coal and another would make a salad. We’d pay those people back. I went to the butcher in town and got myself a skewer of marinated chicken. I still have no idea what the marinade was, but it was so nice to have some food that I actually cooked for once.

With my photos recovered, my food purchased, and my friends all around my mood went from crap-tacular to un-crap-tacular in no time. Just in time for the BBQ.

The BBQ was so much fun and the salad, potatoes, and chicken were amazing. It was great that we were all able to get together for our last night in Lauterbrunnen to just hang out and reminisce about the cool stuff we did during our stay. It was the last time some of us would be together since from Lauterbrunnen, people seemed to be going in all sorts of directions from Munich to Nice to Barcelona, etc. I think the BBQ will be one of my favorite memories from the trip.

Though I didn’t get to see and do everything that I wanted to during my 5 days here in Switzerland, I still had the most amazing time. The day we arrived I mentioned that I would be perfectly content to just lie down in one of the fields and stare up at the sky for an entire day and do you know what? If it weren’t raining I probably would have. On my third day here, after paragliding and exploring Interlaken I said that if I had to leave the next day I would be perfectly content with how I spent my time here. And I still am. I’m sad to leave, but I’ll definitely return as soon as possible.

A supermarket.

I don’t know if you understand just how great supermarkets are, especially while you’re backpacking. You see – most places I’ve come across have grocery stores. They’re tiny little stores, generally no larger than a 7-11, and sell a decent selection of the basics. Sometimes you’ll find one a little bigger, but for the most part we’re talking just essentials.

But the thing is – in each an every city I’ve visited so far, it seems that the locals don’t consider VEGETABLES to be essentials. Try finding some lettuce in the grocery store. Good luck. And if you do manage to find yourself a bag salad, odds are it’s going to be really limp and brown. At least that’s been my luck.

So when I came across this giant co-op just across the street from Interlaken Ost, I swear the clouds opened up and the angels started to sing. Even though my train was scheduled to leave in about 10 minutes I made a quick turn right and headed straight for the entrance.

There it was: the produce section. The produce section alone was larger than any grocery store I’ve been to in the last 3+ weeks. There were bananas, strawberries, apples, nectarines, cherries, carrots, celery…well…I could continue but I’m going to hope that you can imagine for yourself the contents of a proper produce section. I was so excited. And REALLY hungry. I hadn’t eaten all day really for fear of getting sick while paragliding. I grabbed a basket and dug in. In a few minutes time I’d stocked up on bananas, strawberries, nectarines, salad, dressing, and a bottle of “multifruit” juice. I could have stopped there, but I was hungry. So I walked into the store a little bit further.

That’s when I came across the yogurt section. Yes, an entire SECTION of yogurt and dairy-like products. I’ve never seen so many types of yogurt and if I’d had a refridgerator at my disposal you could guarantee that my basket would have been filled to the brim, but unfortunately I was only able to get one. The cheapest, of course, but it would do the trick as an accompaniment to my muesli back at the campsite.

I also procured some jelly, a few slices of bread, some fanta, and some chocolate (of course). It was a lot of food, but like I said, I was hungry. And I hadn’t had fresh fruits or veggies in a while. At least it wasn’t an entire basket of bread and cheese. Oh how I’m sick of bread and cheese.

I checked out and headed back to the train station, eager to start picking away at my purchases. I settled on a nectarine to hold me over until I got back to the camp. It was a good day. Paragliding, fruits, vegetables, and Switzerland. It’s the simple things.

Back at the camp site I ate my salad and yogurt and hung around with some friends, planning our evening. There’s a bar at the campsite called the Bomb Shelter (it is an actual bomb shelter) and it was going to open that night for the first time during our stay. This place is legendary. When you mention to other travelers that you’re going to Lauterbrunnen and staying at Camping Jungfrau they all talk about the Bomb Shelter.

The evening turned out to be epic.

Starting out with a few mixed drinks in the sitting room before the Bomb Shelter opened, and then off to the actual Bomb Shelter. The place was PACKED and really, really, REALLY warm. The Contiki buses had arrived earlier in the day (which is why the Bomb Shelter was opened) and everyone in it was already pretty messy. The music was good though and we were having a lot of fun.

At one point, in the middle of a song, they turned off the music and the bartender pointed to the TV. He put on Billie Jean and everyone went back to dancing, confused as to why he didn’t just let the other song finish. We went over to the TV to see what was going on.

Michael Jackson died. Well, sort of. For a while there reports were mixed. “BREAKING: tmz.com reports Michael Jackson has died of a cardiac arrest” then another flash: “BREAKING: LATimes reports Michael Jackson is in a coma following a cardiac arrest,” etc. etc. etc.

Everyone around the TV was shocked. And confused. And generally unsure about how to react. Some people just stared and looked devastated, others cried, and others were too drunk to really process what was going on around them, but it was surreal. A few more Michael Jackson songs came on and though the TV was still running, everyone went back to trying to enjoy the evening, checking the TV periodically to see if anything else had developed.

For the rest of the evening and the next day, you’d hear people just say “Michael Jackson died??!” in the most confused of tones. How are you supposed to react to the death of someone who was basically an icon of your childhood, who you’ve never met, but for some reason you feel a great saddness over? I don’t think anyone’s quite figured it out just yet.

Despite the sad news of the evening, we did have a lot of fun. Lots of dancing, singing, laughing, and photos. Sometime around 1:30 in the morning (I think?) we decided to call it quits and headed back for our cabins. Renae and I were STARVING and thought it a good idea to chow down on the bread, jam, peanut butter, and nutella we had saved in our room. I should mention here that we also had 2 roommates who had come to the Bomb Shelter with us but who decided to leave early and go to sleep.

It was SO HOT in our room. Remember the heater I mentioned a while ago? The one that toasted my bread? It was on and you could really cook something in our room it was so warm. So we opened up the windows.

Our cabin is in a pretty central spot and lots of people were walking by and waving as we sat at the table next to the windows trying to cool down and devoured our bread. At one point these two people we didn’t know came up to the window. The girl asked if she lived in our cabin. We informed her that no, she did not. She inquired about our food and we said that if she could provide some nutella (we’d finished ours) that we would provide the bread. The two walked away and we didn’t expect to see them again.

But they came back. A knock at the door and nutella in hand. We couldn’t send them away, so we invited them in to our tiny cabin and we continued on with our picnic. More people would stop at the window to chat. It was a lot of fun.

Until one of our roommates woke up. It was about 2-2:30AM at this point and she got out of bed, put on a jacket and said “You know, revenge can be a real bitch at 6:30 in the morning.” Apparently we’d pissed her off.

That was our cue to pack up and go to bed. We sent our new friends home and were asleep before our roommate returned. She continued to hold her grudge in the morning and though we tried to pretend to be asleep we could hear to intentionally slamming doors and making all sorts of noise just out of spite. They caught the bus at 8, but we couldn’t get back to sleep.

I’d been having some internet withdrawal so I decided to head into town to this internet cafe I’d found and park it there for the morning. I brought my muesli with me, bought a yogurt from the mini co-op in town and set up shop on the front porch, overlooking the mountains. It was a bit chilly, but if I were in Ithaca I would have considered it a warm day, so I tried to treat it as such.

I think my latest tweet sums it up the best:
“sitting on the patio of a cafe in switz. with my yogurt, muesli, and laptop looking at the alps only a stone’s throw away. this is the life.”

After a few hours of sorting out where I’m going next (Munich) and how I would get there (train), I decided to head back to the campsite to take a nap. It was a cold and rainy day, I was feeling slightly off from the night before (I think it was the 4-5 slices of nutella and jam on bread, because I felt fine otherwise) and I hadn’t slept well in the last few nights thanks to 1) a snoring roommate, 2) being nervous about paragliding, and 3) being nervous that the other roommate would kill us in the middle of the night for waking her.

I woke up just before 5PM absolutely famished. It was POURING out. I’m talking buckets and buckets of rain falling from the sky. Those of you familiar with my love of thunderstorms will understand my excitement when the first claps of thunder came rolling through the valley. I’ve never heard thunder so loud, but it was echoing off of the mountains on either side of us. So cool. Then we had a couple bits of lightning and even more rain. If it were slightly warmer I probably would have run out and frolicked for old times sake, but it was pretty chilly and the last thing I want is a cold right now. I settled for the drops that hit me between my cabin and the kitchen.

Dinner time was dinner time – the usual antics. We all got together to hang out, chat about our days and how uneventful they were (we’d all been to the Bomb Shelter the night before). Renae and I actually had the most productive day of all. Most of our other friends didn’t wake up or leave their cabins until after 4PM. We’d already gotten up, showered, gone into town, had breakfast, read, sorted out online things, and took a 4-5 hour nap in that time. Go us.

After dinner we all went back to our own cabins to stay warm and dry and just relax. It was the kind of day where you wish you had your favorite pair of sweatpants, a nice blanket, a comfy couch, a hot chocolate, and either a book or a movie, or both, and you just snuggle up and lounge around all day. But we didn’t have any of that, so we had to settle for hostel sheets, itchy wool blankets, and books.

I finished reading The Last Lecture which turned out to be a really good book and then went to bed.

Big plans for my last day in Switzerland, but it turns out that today has decided to be cold and rainy too. I don’t know if I’ll make it to Trummelbach Falls, but I’ll go for a walk, maybe head back into Interlaken to pick up some final souvenirs, and then we’re all getting together for a BBQ.

Today I ran off the side of a mountain. The technical term is paragliding, but I think that term is far too tame. You’re basically running off the side of a mountain util the ground falls out from under you and the float your way over mountains and trees and the city of Interlaken held up by nothing more than a bunch of strings and a few yards of fabric.

I’m not much of a dare devil. I even gave up skateboarding after about 3 hours because I was scared of falling and breaking my arm or something, but for some reason when they showed a video of paragliding on the Bus as one of the many options for activities in Lauterbrunnen, paragliding piqued my interest and without really putting much thought into it I signed up and paid. The panic didn’t really set in until this morning.

I was nervous all morning. Not “oh my god I’m going to die” nervous, more like nervous about the unknown. Will I get sick? Will I flip out about about being so high? Will I be able to stick the landing or will I tumble and flip until I’m wrapped up in the parachute like a burrito? That sort of thing.

Like an idiot I booked my flight for 12:15PM, so I had the ENTIRE morning to just let my mind ponder the what ifs. I should have just gotten it over and done with at the 8:30AM flight, but I did NOT want to be up that early! I started reading The Last Lecture – a book that my neighbors at home gave me just before I left for the airport. I was hoping it would put me in the “you only live once” mindset that I knew I would need to actually go through with it. I also found myself thinking back to RYLA in 2004 and had various moments running through my head like the trust falls and the ropes course. It still sometimes surprises me when, even 5 years down the road, I find myself thinking back to RYLA and using it to help me make decisions or for motivation. Some things just stick with you.

I was picked up from the campsite with some other people I’ve become friends with who were going white water rafting for the day. I was the only one going paragliding. Yay?

For some reason or other the shuttle from the campsite was so much earlier than than the actual flight so I had a lot of time to kill in Interlaken. I walked up and down the main strip of shops for over an hour trying to distract myself by looking for post cards and a magnet for my Gram.

At around 1:45PM I went back to the meeting point where they had me put on a pair of hiking boots and ditched my backpack in a locker. They let me bring my point and shoot and we hopped in the van to go up the mountain.

We get to the top of the mountain and it’s just sort of a patch of grass where they laid out all of the parachutes (there were 5 of us jumping I think), gave us shell jackets to put on (thank god! it was cold up there!) and hooked us into our harnesses.

I was the third one to go off, which was good. The only thing was that a cross-wind hit just as we (we being me and Tom, the pilot I was attached to) started to run. It pushed us off to the side so we had to have two running starts instead of one and had to pull a quick turn to avoid the treetops, but after that we were good to go.

It. Was. Amazing. Not just the feeling of flying, but the view and the scenery and the fresh air. Absolutely spectacular. We circled around for a while over the forest and a small hillside town and then Tom said “ok let’s go back up” and he tugged on something and all of a sudden the trees became reallllllly tiny below us.

I was, of course, snapping away with my camera and trying to capture as much as possible. I even shot a few quick videos. We did some loops, some sharp turns, some general floating around and some dips VERY close to the trees. After a gut check (literally – Tom wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get sick from the twists and turns. I was feeling fine.) we did some crazy drop where we were basically free-falling for a tiny bit, kind of like when an airplane drops down a bit and you’re lifted off of your seat. That was, by far, the scariest part. Well, that and when Tommy decided to do some “look no hands!” moves.

The flight was 20 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to find any place that’ll beat paragliding in the Alps. It was definitely one of, if not the coolest experiences of my life. I’m so glad I got up the guts to do it!

I’m not much of an outdoorsy person – I don’t like bugs or animals, I’m not really all that into white water rafting or rock climbing and I don’t particularly enjoy completely “roughing it,” but I learned in my last few years at Cornell that I really enjoy just throwing on my camera and taking a walk through nature. Not trailblazing or anything like that, but just a slow wander around some trails, through some trees, maybe along the water, just relaxing and getting away from all of the busy-ness of life. I took these walks once a week or so, even in the dead of winter. I ran into deer, I walked through knee-deep snow, and puddle-jumped when it all melted away, but I loved my walks.

It turns out that I’m not a huge fan of cities, something that really surprised me considering that I’m not a nature girl by any stretch of the imagination. I prefer “structured nature” – you know, where all of the trails have been marked, the paths have been carved out, and the scenery still every bit as wonderful.

That’s exactly where I am right now.

The campsite we’re staying in is called Camping Jungfrau. It’s in a town called Lauterbrunnen which is right next to Interlaken. Like Siena and Orvieto in Italy, it’s everything you expect a small Swiss town to be. A sloping, bright green hillside sprinkled with adorable houses with brown roofs, shuttered windows and colorfully-flowered window boxes, backdropped by the most beautiful tree-lined and snow-capped mountains you’ve ever seen. I would move to this little valley in the Swiss Alps in a heartbeat.

In the 18 hours since I arrived, for the entire 10 or so hours where I wasn’t sleeping I’m pretty sure that I looked like a tourist on his or her first visit to NYC – you know the look: camera around the neck, head tilted upwards looking at the skyscrapers, running into things because you’re not looking at what’s in front of you as you walk, just what’s above you. Replace the Empire State Building with some snow-capped mountains and that just about sums up my time here so far.

After dinner in the campsite’s restaurant (I had the Lauterbrunner Rosti, which is a local dish made up of shredded potatoes and onions (like a latke or hashbrowns) with swiss cheese melted on top, bacon on top of that, and a sunny side up egg on top of that.) and then we went to this local pub with some of the BusAbout guides. We were promised Swiss line dancing, but apparently that sort of thing doesn’t happen on Tuesday nights. Drat. I was in bed early and up around 7AM, quite surprisingly. I guess nature can do that to you.

This morning, Renae, one of my roommates and yet another Aussie on the BusAbout circuit and I went for a walk into town to see what we could do about breakfast. I’d already had some bananas and nutella on pseudo-toast (I say pseudo-toast because the heater in our room is so warm that I actually used it to toast my bread. It wasn’t browned, but it was toasted!), but I was still kind of hungry and wanted to see what I would be able to find for dinner later. I also needed to look into getting a pair of proper shoes since all I have with me are tevas and a pair of keen mary janes, neither of which are well-suited for hiking or pretty much anything else you do when you’re hanging out in the Swiss Alps.

I found a nice pair of hiking sneakers in an outdoors shop in town for 99 Swiss Francs. They’re pretty standard hiking sneakers and they get the job done. Another thing to carry, but hey, I wasn’t about to miss out on hiking up to a waterfall just because I didn’t think to pack decent shoes. They ended up being quite comfy after I walked in them for about 10 minutes.

I also procured a good sized bag of muesli and a yogurt for a snack. I’d never really had muesli before but if I can find it when I get home I think it’s going to replace my Just Bunches as my yogurt topping of choice.

ANNNYWAYYY… so back to the campsite to eat. I caught up on blog posts (finally) and then Renae went off to hike Trummelbach Falls with a friend. I wasn’t really up for Trummelbach just yet – partly because I wanted to break my shoes in on something less intense and partly because I wanted to figure out where I’m going after Lauterbrunnen – so instead I hung around and chatted with Natalie online.

I’d heard about a trail near the campsite where you basically hike up the side of the mountain to the waterfall and I thought I’d check that out. I really don’t like hiking with other people for some reason. I’d much rather go at my own pace and not feel guilty about stopping every 5 seconds to take a photo. I strapped my camera on and off I went. I stopped about 1/2 way through the trail to call my mom (I’ve been trying to check in via phone about once a week and thought it would be entertaining to call from the side of the mountain) and then made my way to the top. The trail stopped more suddenly than I was expecting and the wind was blowing the waterfall in the other direction, but it was still a gorgeous walk, and only mildly petrifying. I’m not afraid of heights for the most part, but the rocks were pretty slippery and though they tried to carve some steps into them it wasn’t really all that helpful. I was gripping onto the handrails for dear life, especially on the way down.

Luckily right when I got to the top, a guy and his son also reached the end. Normally I would turn the camera around on myself, but given that I wanted to hold onto the railing and not really move once I was balanced, I handed the camera over to the guy, gestured to the mountain behind me, and smiled. As soon as I can get an internet connection that photo is going to be my new facebook default. It’s not the best photo ever, but I’m proud of the fact that I managed to hike up there by myself without chickening out and come on – it’s the Swiss Alps! (I know I keep saying that, but really, this place is AMAZING).

After that I went back to my room, had lunch with Renae and another Aussie named Simon (yay for MORE Nutella) and then chatted with Simon about geeky things for an hour or so (he used to work for a web dev house in Australia).

A bunch of us got together for dinner and I FINALLY got a salad. This place thankfully has a kitchen so we’ve been able to make “proper” meals. Well, as proper as you can get using only foods that don’t need to be refrigerated. Dinner took a couple of hours between all of the cooking (Simon did most of that), talking, eating, talking, cleaning up, etc. and instead of heading back into our cabins for the night we all decided to hike up to the waterfall (this would be my second time).

Thing is – by this point it’s getting dark out. They don’t turn on the lights in the tunnel that covers one part of the trail and it is DARK. They shine some flood lights up at the waterfall itself which is helpful, but for a while you’re just walking in complete darkness. Normally I would break out my iPhone, fire up the flashlight app and walk through with no problem. But I’m in Europe and my iPhone is basically only useful as an iPod and the occasional alarm clock, so it generally stays in my room. I had to improvise. Luckily I had my camera, which has a decent flash on it. Sweet.

The falls were so different at night. Not only was it falling straight down this time thanks to the lack of wind, but the view was completely different. The mountains I could see earlier in the day were almost fogged over, save for a few bits where the snow was actually orange thanks to the sun setting. The lights in the little towns and villages below were just starting to come on and there was a nice mist from the water slightly clouding our view. Amazing.

We made it out of the tunnel and down the trail.

The one downfall of Switzerland is that the Internet is really expensive in the cafes and at the campsite. Apart from that I don’t see how anyone could NOT like this place. I love it so much I just extended my stay from 3 nights to 5. It’s that great.

Tomorrow, though, will be another adventure entirely. Read on