Top of Europe

Finishing up from our Switzerland trip...

On the last day of our Interlaken stay, the weather had greatly improved. The hotel had a television channel with cameras at the top of Jungfraujoch and Schilthorn, and both of them actually had a view -- as opposed to the grey screen that had greeted us on previous mornings.

So, we joyfully headed out to the train station and bought our tickets for the Top of Europe. (Jungfraujoch is Europe's highest altitude train station.) The first part of our journey took us up through Wengen (a town much like Murren, perched on a mountain cliff). We didn't have a chance to see any of it except out of the train windows.

We changed trains at a stop called Kleine Scheidegg, an outpost with a few restaurants and shops, which was also the start for some ski runs. At that point, the ski traffic was gone, and only the tourists like us remained for the last part of the journey! The views on the way up were spectacular. (We had picked the wrong side of the train to sit on, but even looking across the aisle it was great.)

The trains had video screens that provided information about the trip and the mountain in several different languages. The English narrator had a delightfully reassuring British accent; you might imagine that when he wasn't talking about Alpine heights, he was the caretaker of a country estate.

The last part of the train journey goes through tunnels in the mountains. The train made two stops inside the mountain for about five minutes each, so that we could see out of the huge observation windows. (One of the stops is the launching point for rescue missions for people trying to climb the north face of the Eiger, one of the more challenging climbs in the Alps.) One of the stops provided an amazing vista across the Alps, and the other provided a great view of one of the glaciers (Eismeer, which translates to Ice Sea). I wish the stops had been just a little longer; they weren't going to leave anyone behind, but it felt a little rushed.

However, when we arrived at the top, we had about a minute and half of seeing the vista before the clouds started to roll in. (Every guidebook warned us that weather on top of the mountains could change quickly!) We decided to go out to the outdoor observation plateau first. Oh my goodness! The wind was intense -- the snow was blowing so hard that it felt like sandpaper on my skin, and it was freezing cold. It reminded me of the scene from the Lord of the Rings where the Fellowship is going through a snowy mountain pass in a storm, and one of the characters says, "Saruman is trying to blow us off the mountain!" Getting blown off the mountain seemed like it wouldn't be impossible! (The weather board inside said that the winds were about 30 MPH.)

I was outside for less than five minutes, I'd estimate, but when I got back inside my fingers were completely numb, and as the feeling started to come back, they hurt like someone was stabbing them. I don't think it's possible to get frostbite that quickly, but I sure wouldn't want to have anything worse. (In good weather, there's a walking path that goes by the glacier -- that was out of the question for us. Too bad!)

Then we went to the Ice Palace, which was kind of cool (heh, no pun intended). The floor, walls, and ceiling were all ice (but it wasn't as slippery as you would think it would be), and they had a bunch of grottoes with different ice sculptures. The idea of it was more exciting than the actual place.

An announcement went out that because of high winds, the last train down would be at 1:30. We had been planning to take that one or the one after it anyhow, but it still felt a bit like our visit was cut short. (And unfortunately, that meant we also didn't get to eat at the restaurant up there, because they stopped seating people! We settled for a salad at the cafe instead.)

I was excited to send postcards to people from the Top of Europe (they have a special postmark and everything!), but realized once we were there that we had neglected to bring any addresses with us. Ooops! So, the only ones who ended up getting postcards were us and our parents.

The highest observation point at Jungfraujoch is a tower called Sphinx. With about twenty minutes before the train, we decided to go up and take a look, even though we knew we wouldn't see much -- the vistas had been replaced with clouds and fog. They had an outdoor deck here, too, and it was much less windy than the plateau had been. So we stayed out for a while, and we were rewarded with some occasionally slight partings of the cloud cover. It was a neat experience to have the grey fog lift and realize that there was a huge mountain right in front of you that had previously been invisible!

Back on the train, we didn't have to get too far down the mountain before the weather was clear again. However, the winds were still high, so the train trip was slower than usual. We got to watch the snowblower clearing the path in front of us! This also led to a somewhat extended stop at Kleine Schidegg (which was gorgeous), and a rather crowded train ride back down to Grindelwald. Even with the weather problems, though, we didn't end up getting back much later than we'd originally planned.

In all, even though it wasn't ideal conditions, we were glad we had made the trip! (And as we've said before about Switzerland, maybe we'll make it back someday in the summer.)