Day 2 January 7, 2009

Date:  December, 27th 2008

The plan: Drive from Zurich to Interlaken, spend some time in Bern and Thun either on the way there or on the way back.

In the morning we decided to drive to Interlaken, and on the way back stop in Bern and Thun.  The drive to Interlaken was very picturesque, it was a cloudy day so the lake looked more of a grayish shade as opposed to the blue color we are used to in Lake Tahoe.  We started with a quick breakfast at McDonald’s (I know, such an American thing to do), and the coffee was so awesome.  We walked around the city center of Interlaken, did some window shopping.

City Center of Interlaken

Streets and Shops in Interlaken

We then stopped over the tourist information and asked about things to do.  Our original plan was to take the train up to Jungfraujoch, but it was after 1.00 PM and if we left we would get there by 2.00 PM and would have to leave after few hours so we decided against it and decided to drive to Ginderwald and take the cable car up to a peak and spend some time there.

Drive to Ginderwald - I

Drive to Ginderwald - II

The drive to Ginderwald was so pretty, there was snow on both sides of the street and the mountains were covered in snow.  Even with all this snow the roads were very drivable.

We reached Ginderwald parked our car and walked to the cable car.  This cable car went to Mannlichen, and the we had parked our car almost 10 minutes walk away from the entrance to the cable car station.

views as we walked towards cable cars- I

views as we walked towards cable cars - II

Here are some view as we walked towards the cable car station.  The cable car ride was 30 minutes long, and it made couple of stops in between that would get off and then get back on.  We decided to stay on it till the top.  As we were taking the cable car up we could see people skiing beneath us.   The views from the cable cars were breathtaking (I’m running out of adjectives, and I’m just on day 2).

People skiing below the cable cars

When we travel we take a bag of medicines mainly for cold, muscle pain, head ache.  And for this trip we brought a bag of Ricola from US.  Ricola was the sponsor of these cable cars and with each ticket we were given 2-3 Ricolas.  We thought it was so funny that we brought Ricola from US, and the packet says from the Swiss Alps (I know weird, we find things like these funny).

At Mannlichen we got off our cable cars, and we realized that this peak was above clouds.  The feeling in amazing as the sky looks very clear and it was sunny so we did not feel that cold.  We saw mountain peaks above clouds, and no words can do justice to how it looks so here are some pictures.

Views from above - I

Views from above - II

This is a place where one has to be there to enjoy it fully.  The clouds looked like a blanket (I said it looked like cotton candy, I was hungry by then).

Views from above - III

The last cable car ride down was at 4.30PM and we wanted to avoid the crowd and the traffic from the parking lot so we left around 4.00PM and took the cable cars down. The ride was again 30 minutes long and very beautiful. As we were going down we saw a lot more skiers.

Skiers

By the time we got back to the car the temperature had dropped to -13

Temperature

After Ginderwald (I can not believe that I totally forgot that Ginderwald was a Harry Potter character till now, I was googling for Gindewald that is when I saw the Harry Potter reference, sheesh… I feel ashamed to call myself a Harry Potter fan) , we drove back to Interlaken, and then drove to Thun

Castle at Night

View of City Thun from the Castle

We did not do much in Thun, we drove around the City center in Thun, went to a Castle.  By the time we got there the Castle was closed so we walked around the castle, from the castle the view of the city Thun is amazing.

After Thun we drove to Bern, by the time we got to Bern it was very dark (it starts getting dark around 4.30PM) and we were hungry.  So our primary aim was to eat dinner.  From wikitravel I had put together a list of all the places to eat at each of our destination.  So we decided to eat at Beaulieu.  This was a very non-toursitic spot and was highly recommended in wikitravel.  And we were not disappointed, this was the best meal we had during our whole trip.  The food was so flavorful, and the staff were very accomodating to our tourist like questions and tourist like behaviour (we took pictures of our food).

Shrimp Cocktail

Prawns with Rice

After dinner we decided to head back to Zurich, we drove around the Zurich City center and then got back to the hotel.

Our Day 2 was a success,  after day 2 Sherry was very comfortable driving and we realized that renting a GPS was the best decision we made.

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