Cows, Pigs & Human Dung: Little Swiss Mountain Villages

Thursday, 10 August 2017

Little Swiss Mountain Villages

Anu and the kids, Mürren, Berner Oberland (Bernese Highlands), Switzerland

Another holiday photo post coming up! I guess it’ll be holiday photos till at least the end of this darn project. (By the way, the project was supposed to finish by the end of last month!)

More Swiss mountain villages for you! The Jungfrau region was where we went to after our visit to the Matterhorn. We left car-free Zermatt by train to Täsch to collect our car. We then decided NOT to take the car-train (again) (which is the fastest route) but to drive the long way through the countryside to Lauterbrunnen. (We’re not gonna be stuck in some friggin tunnel under the mountains on a beautiful day like that day, OK?) I was glad we drove! We had one of the best days of our trip picnicking along the way, passing over interesting places like Reckingen-Gluringen and Grimsel Pass.

Our destination was our hotel in the little town of Mürren, another car-free town. It’s car-free because it’s friggin high up on a ledge in the mountains overlooking Lauterbrunnen. Go ahead, check it out on Google Earth!

To get to Mürren, we had to park our car at the multi-storey car park in Lauterbrunnen, take a cable car (yes, you heard correctly, a cable car, but a large one that feels more like a train than a cable car actually – technically called an aerial cableway) up to the train station (Grütschalp) high up above Lauterbrunnen (some 700m above!). Then we had to take a train, and voila, we’re in Mürren!

View from our hotel room, Hotel Blumental, Mürren, Jungfrau Region, Switzerland

In the lobby of Hotel Blumental

Justin, with a Dubai Eye flag, outside Hotel Blumental, Mürren – Dubai Eye is a talk radio station in Dubai which I often tune in to while driving (and in Dubai, you drive a lot!) – They held a competition for the best summer holiday photo, where people had to go around taking photos, with the Dubai Eye flag! No, we didn’t win. Some photo from Kenya won, if I remember correctly…

Yours truly in Mürren

More views of Mürren – the snow-capped peak on the right is the Jungfrau, which gave this region its name, and the conical shaped peak on the left, is the Eiger – these two mountains, together with the Mönch (hidden from view by the mountain in front of it) forms the trio of mountain peaks famous in the Jungfrau region

There’re a lot of things you can do in Mürren like hiking, or if you have a lot of spare cash, going for rides up the mountain, like taking a cable car to Schilthorn peak, where you’ll find Piz Gloria, a revolving restaurant featured in the James Bond film, ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, or taking a train to Jungfraujoch, the highest railway station in Europe. The Schilthorn trip will set you back by about (let’s see, …Googling it), a whopping 82 Swiss Francs (today’s rate), 300+ dirhams per person! And Jungfraujoch, get ready for this, 212 friggin Swiss Francs i.e. 800 dirhams per person, bloody hell! (If your destination is Jungfraujoch, you’d be better off staying in Wengen, on the other side of the deep Lauterbrunnen valley, than Mürren. To get to Jungfraujoch from Mürren, you’ll need to change trains / cable cars 5 times and it takes nearly 3 hours to get there).

We were cheapskates, and besides, the weather ain’t too good (just look at the clouds in the photo), so we decided to just hop onto the small funicular train named Allmendhubel Bahn, to a children’s playground above Mürren. (It’s 13 CHF per person at today’s rate, 50 dirhams, …not too bad for poor people like us!) (I’ll put photos of the playground in another post). And when we were done with that, with still some time to spare, we walked from Mürren down to the next village of Gimmelwald and then took a cable car ride back to Mürren! (You think we’re gonna walk all the way back uphill after all that exercise?) We then had some Chinese food at a restaurant ran by a Singaporean / Malaysian Chinese Couple (yeah, in Mürren!), and then headed down to Lauterbrunnen to get our car to drive to our next destination! Bye, hope to see you again, Mürren!