Bernese Oberland

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.

Oh, to be in England, now that April's there! The mists are on the Oberland, the funfra's snows look faint and far.

The word of the Lord by night to the watching pilgrims came.

Fear, a forgotten form, Death, a dream of the eyes, We were atoms in God's great storm That raged through the angry skies.

For this trip, we used a combination of travel passes to cover the four-week duration of our vacation.

We started with a 72-hour Zurich card for the time we were in Zurich, then used a 15-day Swiss travel pass, followed by a 10-day Berner Oberland pass.

And for the last day of our trip, when we had to travel back to Zurich airport, I'd purchased Saver day passes for both of us.

I won't go into all the details of why I chose these passes today because I'll cover that when I share my full itinerary in a couple of weeks time.

Rabbi, we're on a base in the middle of the one third of the way down.

It's Yedua, Pompidisa was a place, Rabbi, like we in Oberland looked at the Romanesche.

in Pompidou was looked at as a place full of tricksters now we understand the Dubai chocolate already and the prices Pompidou was known as a place they were a lot of hunky-panky they were doing and they were not very straight.

We're not allowed to generalize, but the reason I'm generalizing it, because the Gemara brings a number of times when the Gemara mentions things about and more often than not, it's where it happened.

And that was because I was in Switzerland for the autumn holiday with my son.

We were in Kandersteg, in the Berner Oberland and high up in the Swiss Alps.

Mountains, I'm talking about lakes, snow on the peaks and views so spectacular you forget to take the photo.

Well, that's real quality time together, well deserved and I'm still a bit full of it.

Nikko with its temples.

Loch Lomond, Lake Tahoe, Windermere, Tintagel by the Cornish Sea, the Yellowstone and the Canyon of the Colorado, the Crater Lake of Oregon, Sorrento with its Vesuvius, Honolulu with its Pelee, the Yosemite, Banff with its Selkirks, Prince Frederick's Sound with its green fjords, Chamonix with its Mont Blanc, Bern with its Oberland, Zermatt with its Matterhorn, Simla with the great silent wonder of the snows.

Even now as I write, says Whimper, the master mountain climber, they rise before me an endless series of pictures magnificent in effect, in form, and color.

I see great peaks with clouded tops seeming to mount upward forever and ever.

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.

O to be in England now that April's there.

The mists are on the Oberland, the Fungfras snows look faint and far.

The word of the Lord by night to the watching pilgrims came.

Oxford is so familiar to numbers of English people, apart from its permanent residents, that I have ventured to write of it without stopping to describe its geography, and I have purposely confined myself to the city and its precincts in order to show how rich in bird life an English town may be.

The Alps, too, are known to thousands, and the walk I have described in chapter 3, if the reader should be unacquainted with it, may easily be followed by reference to the excellent maps of the Oberland in the guidebooks of Baal or Baedeker.

The chapters about the Midland village, which lies in ordinary English country, will explain their own geography.

One word about the title and the arrangement of the chapters.

Professor Fatio of Geneva, one of the most distinguished of European naturalists, has given much time and pains to the birds of the Alpine world, and published many valuable papers on the subject, the results of which have been embodied in Mr. Dresser's Birds of Europe.

But what with the all-engrossing passion for climbing and the natural indisposition of the young Englishman to loiter in that exhilarating air, it has come to pass that the Anglo-Saxon race has for long past invaded and occupied these mountains for three months in each year without discovering how remarkable the region is in the movements and characteristics of its animal life.

I myself have been fortunate in having as a companion an old friend, a native of the Oberland, who has all his life been attentive to the plants and animals of his beloved mountains.

Johann Anderegg will be frequently mentioned in this chapter, and I will at once explain who he is.

I mean, lowlands, for example, we are at 500 meters.

And then we used to go skiing to this small family resort in the Emmental Valley or near the Bernese Oberland.

I mean, 1,200, 400 of height and there's no snow as well.

And these small family resorts are really struggling to survive.

So again, I would recommend the Sermat area.

It's really nice.

The Bernese Oberland.

But the huge area people are sometimes missing is the area of Graubinden or Grissons.

So there are regional passes you can get.

There's like a Bernese Oberland pass.

There's a Jungfrau pass.

Um, we didn't buy any of the regional passes because a lot of the places that they had in their itinerary we didn't go to, and so it wouldn't have made...

Not a Triple Crowner, not a record holder.

A 66-year-old Swiss gentleman named Mark on a mountain pass in the Bernese Oberland in the mid-1990s.

Is there one story in particular or one aspect that you want to share with us before we go?

[sighs] Okay, you asked me of the books and, uh, and some of the long trails and stuff like that.

This was like the mid-'90s, it was like 30 years ago.

From the border with, uh, Liechtenstein, a little place called Sargans, to Montreux on the border with France.

And, um, anyway, it was in the Bernese Oberland region of that hike that I, um, [microphone rustling] was on this mountain pass one day, and there was this old gentleman.

Well, he [chuckles] I should say, he, he's almost, uh, I'm almost aged now as what he was then.