beatenberg and interlaken

last sunday, i took a trip with whitney and karthik (two phd students in the group here) to beatenberg (pronounced bayAHtenberg), a little town near interlaken. it was a really great day trip.

we left in the morning from zurich, and took a train to thun, a city on lake thun. from there we took a bus, which travelled right along the lake, to beatenberg. one of the main attractions in beatenberg is taking a funiclaire and then a cable car up to the closest peak, which is niederhorn. there were amazing views from the top and also lots of hiking trails. it's apparently also a very popular place for paragliding. in general, it seemed like a place were a lot of locals go for the day, not too many tourists around.

after taking in the view from the niederhorn, we hiked down through a forest trail to vornass. the views of the valleys below, from this trail, were really nice even though it was a bit cloudy. from vornass we took the cable car back down to beatenberg and then decided to take a boat from beatenberg to interlaken (the nice thing about swiss transport passes is that once you have a pass, you can travel using any form of transportation - train, tram, boat; so it was great that we could do all this without having to pay extra). the view of the shoreline from the boat was really beautiful and possible even from the little restaurant in the boat where we had coffee and cake!

finally, in interlaken (which is incidentally WAY tourist ridden), we had dinner at a nice italian place (although they charged us for tap water!), walked around a bit, and then took the train back to zurich. pics below...

beatenberg