Lauterbrunnen

And one thing I wanna point out too is that there's several different ways to get up to Jungfrau.

You can go from Interlaken, you can f- go from Lauterbrunnen, you can go from Grindelwald.

You could take the gondola from Grindelwald as well.

So there are several different ways to get up here.

Okay, got it.

Yes.

So for us, we decided that because this day we were gonna pair this with going to Lauterbrunnen, we were gonna leave from the Lauterbrunnen station.

We did have the option to leave from Interlaken as well, since that's where we were staying, but we didn't wanna have to get back to Interlaken and then drive the car to Lauterbrunnen, which is where we were gonna end up anyways, so we just drove initially from Lauterbrunnen.

Now, back to those elves.

This week's episode comes to you from Tolkien's Valley of Rivendell, or to give it its proper name, the Lauterbrunnen Valley here in Switzerland.

It's a place I know very well.

I've been visiting it for, oh, more than 20 years, and it's probably the place where I spend more time than anywhere else apart from my home in Zurich.

Remembering the first farmer.

Both those poems were by Vikram Kolmannskog.

And I was at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the art museum in Zurich, the other day, and I saw a picture of a place not far from the Lauterbrunnen Valley on the lake, Brienz.

A picture of a particular tree which I must have walked past several times.

I just like to call it my second home.

I went to this little town called Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland.

It was snowy, beautiful, picturesque, you know.

I, I drove a camper van-

All that and more.

Greetings from Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

Welcome back to the Thrifty Traveler podcast.

[upbeat music] Welcoming us back this week was Sherry in Switzerland.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley is one of the most magical places on Earth, Kyle.

My wife and I spent a week in Mürren several years ago.

It was our first trip abroad together.

We can't look at all of us in Alberta, across Canada, right? Or in other countries, the UK, England, British Isles, Scotland, Ireland, other countries in the European Union, even to Switzerland and what they're doing.

When I was out in Switzerland in July, I was told by locals who had grown up in Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen that the number one excuse me, the number one trade for suicides in Switzerland are farmers because they are so heavily regulated with red tape.

Could you imagine that? The number one suicide rate in Switzerland is farmers.

That's what I was told by some of the locals.

so okay cool yeah so that definitely that and then a lot of brennan in switzerland for

the germans out there yeah it's got this town with these beautiful cascading waterfalls look it up if you're listening to the podcast Look up Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland.

It is, it looks like something out of a fairy tale book.

Yeah.

There is a positive spell to all this Alpine comedy.

No new arrival will feel inclined to return at once to hotel conventionalities, with a soft purple mist shrouding the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the distant Jungfrau lying pallid and wan in the moonlight.

He will gaze about him in wonder at the snow-crowned peaks that hem in the little Bodeli plain where Interlaken snuggles, and will feel how wonderful it is that the boisterous Luchine and its fellow torrents could ever have filled this alluvial barrier between the deep lakes that fought them inch by inch.

He will think of the enchanted regions of the Bernese Oberland that lie just before him, and of the contrasting beauty of the inland seas that stretch away on either hand.

Prostrate Interlaken lies supine before it, gazing appealingly through its innumerable windows across the open Hohenmatten over the beeches and firs of the protruding shoulder of the Rügen and up on the dodging narrow Lütschine valley to the remote and sympathetic Jungfrau.

The scene is ready for the curtain when you have dotted the mountain's slopes with chalets.

Or perhaps if the stranger is fanciful he will conceive the Alpine ravens thinking it some enormous eagle swooping toward the Lauterbrunnen Valley, with clustered houses for an attenuated body and two lakes for powerful blue wings beating out and back.

Or again he may be reminded by this group of huge hotels of some fleet of old-time ships of the line that started down the valley to bombard the Jungfrau.

My name is Angela, and I work as a market manager at Jungfrau Region Tourism.

In simple terms, Jungfrau Region Tourism is the destination organization for Grindelwald, Wengen, Mürren, Lauterbrunnen, and the Haslital.

Together with our local partners, we promote the region as a whole and inspire guests from around the world to discover it.

In my role, I'm responsible for the Australian and New Zealand markets, where my aim is to spark people's curiosity about the Jungfrau Region and inspire them to come and experience it for themselves.

Now, I just want to say before we get started, we're going to talk about how to get to the different mountains and, and the different modes of transport, but they're easily accessible from anywhere within the Jungfrau Region.

But we're going to use Interlaken today as the, the hub for where the starting point is.

So if anyone listening is staying in Wengen or they're staying in Lauterbrunnen or Grindelwald, for instance, know that you can reach these, all these mountain excursions from those locations.

Uh, but just for ease of information, today we're going to use Interlaken as the hub.

...

in, um, somewhere near, uh, Lauterbrunnen, and then basically rented bikes.

Um, well, we rented bikes at the bottom, took the gondola up, and then we rode across the ridge line to the end of the valley, and then down-

So cool

And why was that? Can you think of any of them?

One of them, I'd just gone, it was in Lauterbrunnen, and I'd just done this really long, hot, hard tarmac descent.

And the tarmac was the stuff that really, really was soul-destroying and hurt my body.

And I'd come down and I was hot and like...