Interlaken Days 1 & 2

I arrived in Interlaken yesterday, and it was a very nice day. I caught a train from Bern at 10:00 and arrived in Interlaken at about 11. It took awhile to find the hostel, but it's a very nice place. As I mentioned before, there's free internet, but there are also great views and friendly staff! Yesterday, the reception guy gave me about 10 different hikes I could do. I decided to try one called Harder Klum. It's a pretty steep hike, and it should have taken about two hours to get to the top. Well about 40 minutes into it, the trail is closed off, and I wasn't allowed to pass through. I thought about hopping the rope, but decided that I didn't want to end up in a Swiss prison, so I just went back down. It was a bit disappointing, especially when it started raining, and it didn't stop until this morning. But I thought to myself, you know what? I'm in Interlaken, and I'm going hiking! So I set out in the rain (more of a drizzle really), and I used my map to go to the lake that's on the west side (Interlaken literally means "between lakes"). I walked around the lake and came to the river that would lead back to the city. I noticed on the map that there were these ruins on my way back, so I decided to check it out. It turned out to be a castle that had been built in the 1200's. It didn't look like much anymore, but you could still go up these stairs and onto the top that overlooked the field it was in. It was about 9:00 when I went here, so the stairs were really dark, and I was waiting to either hit something, or have the gangsters that are so prevalent in Interlaken (yeah right) attack me or something. Anyway, after that I went back to the hostel. I'm in a 4-bedroom hostel, and I was the first to check in. When I came back at about 9:30, I was still the only one in there, so I thought I had the whole place to myself. Well, at about 11:15, 3 people from Singapore came in and ruined my fun. The bathrooms in this hostel are actually in the rooms, so it's more like a hotel. I was really looking forward to having my own bathroom, but as fate would have it, that didn't happen. Oh well.

Today, I met up with Kirk, and we decided to go to First (pronounced Feersht) and hike up a mountain we saw on the map. We asked the attendant there which way to go, and he said the trail there was closed! We were sorely disappointed, but there were many other trails there that we were able to hike on. There was still snow where we were at, and great views of the Swiss Alps from up there. We ended up going off the trail to get to the top of this ridge we could see. This involved what Kirk liked to call "scrambling" which is like a mix of hiking and rock climbing. It was pretty fun, but then we had to figure out how to get back down. It took about 20 minutes to get up to the ridge, but about an hour to get back down. There were several times when we slid a bit, and our hearts jumped through our throats, but everything turned out alright. At the end of getting off the ridge, we actually did some sledding down the mountain, only without the sleds. We just decided to sled down on our butts, and we got going pretty fast. The only bad thing was that I was in basketball shorts, so I had to hold the legs up so I did get snow in my butt. It was a blast though. We got down alright, and we have another day of hiking planned for tomorrow that will bring us up to a place where they shot a James Bond film. That should be pretty cool. Then tomorrow night, I'm taking a night train to Rome. When I bought my ticket, the guy said that there would be a strike going on, but I should be alirght, and I might experience some delays. I said that delays would be fine, and he said, "No! Delays are not fine!" He seemed adament about this, so I just said, "Oh ok!" Anyway, I'm pretty sure Italy is less expensive than Switzerland, so that should be good. I'll post when I get there. I miss you all a lot!