Interlaken, Rafting and Shopping

A quick look back on yesterday really quickly. The whole reason that local Swiss couple was even on the train in the first place was because they had taken a train ride on a historic train on the day of the train route’s 100 year anniversary on a vintage train. After looking at the prices for the cable car ride, remember this was the cheapest one, we decided that paying 120 Swiss Francs each was a little much for a ride to the top of a mountain and back.

 

 

So we got up the next morning and ate breakfast and waited in the lobby to go on our 4 hour white water adventure. They gave us wet suits, the water can be as low as 6°C, life jackets and helmets and loaded us into the van for our half hour ride to the drop off point. After the standard quick tutorial on how to paddle, how to hold on, and how to put weight onto one side to prevent band-aiding on a rock. We dropped right into the river, and after 60 feet or so we hit our first of a few class III rapids. All in all we were expecting a lot more intense rafting experience than we ended up getting. The river moved so fast that we barely had to paddle between rapids and there were 8 people in the raft so we would paddle 2-3 times per command and that was it. Near the end though, after the last of the big rapids, we all got a chance to give steering the raft a try since at best it was a fairly flat but class I area of the river. It was a little trickier than it looked and took a little bit to get the hang of, probably because our instruction was good, but not great.

After we got done with rafting, we headed into town to get some groceries, eating out in Switzerland is prohibitively expensive (20+ Francs per person in most cases). We also walked around town and went shopping a bit for things we wanted to bring back and found some ice cream and a good view from a park.

We got back to the hostel and hung out for a bit enjoying some more chatting with other travelers and figuring out where we were going to go hiking the next day. In the end we decided on going to Lauterbrunnen and hiking to Trümmelbachfälle.