The train ride up to Switzerland was long but gave Ben and me our first glimpses of traditional Alpine wear. The further our train took us into the heart of the Swiss Alps, the more oddly dressed old men we seemed to see: complete with green feathered hats and traditional lederhosen, and smoking wooden pipes tucked between their long, frizzy beards.
The views all around were incredible. Heavy gray clouds lingered overhead for almost the entire time Ben and I were there, but that only made everything more surreal. The mountains are so high that we literally could not see sky—the slopes simply stretched into the clouds. Some of the mountains were barely slopes at all—nearer to cliffs—with small scraps of trees and fertile land clinging to the edge of the precipices and leaning precariously out over the deep abyss.
The terrain of the Alps was also odd in other ways than you would expect. The grass everywhere was almost a luminescent green, with a purity that I had never seen before in my life, and the water in all the rivers was a pale blue. The place seemed clean and natural and free of pollution’s decay. There was no snow, though we could see it speckling the higher peaks near to us; and I thought several times walking through this wonderful terrain about how amazing it would be to visit during winter.
When we got down to the hostel, the place was bustling with activity and clearly very popular; it reminded me of ski lodges back in the States. We stayed there for three nights. During the day, there was little more to do than pack up a picnic lunch and hike around for a few hours—not that that was any sort of problem, with such brilliant scenery around us. We hiked down into the valley right below Gimmelwald once and up and back from Murren a couple of times.
All in all, these days were a refreshing change from the cities we had visited all in a row; the area is the epitome of cozy and quaint (except for the extreme rock climbers and bikers who come to the Alps for other reasons). It gave me nostalgia in a way; it really took me back to my hometown in the Blue Ridge Mountains—just a colder, more hardcore version of it.
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