10 Days in search of Fondues, Heidi and Keg Parties – Part 5

Day 4 - We hit the rails with our Swiss Pass, check out a Bear Place and go to see the Young Girl, maybe this is will be Heidi.

After a peaceful sleep with no Alp Horn music coming from my travelling companion Craig, we both met for breakfast and finalised our plans for the day.

David at the Pretzel Shop at Zurich Stadelhorfen.

After breakfast. we gathered our worldly possessions, mine in the backpack. We walked the 8 minutes to Zurich Stadelhorfen. We waited for the train and as always the train was on time, as was our connecting train at Zurich HB which took us to Bern and the Bears.

Our first experience with the Swiss Rail pass and we had completed all the details on our ticket. The conductor asked for the tickets and we must have got the answers correct as we remained on the train. We were soon in Bern and at the station we found luggage room and the largest locker we could find. 

It was huge as it swallowed all our bags for a cost of SFR5.00.

With our possessions safely locked away we started our exploration. Our first discovery was a coffee house where we experimented by eating and drinking Swiss Chocolate. Our batteries recharged, we went looking for the ‘history on show’. Over the cobblestone paths and roads, dodging trams, buses, taxis and delivery vans, we found the city’s famous clock, it didn’t just tell the time, it put on  a little show at different times of the day. We fluked our arrive time as we watched the trumpeter play and characters moved in different parts of the clock. We then found Einstein’s house down the road.  

Along the way were fountains in the middle of the road definitely something we don’t have back home.

We walked through an arcade and into a square where Bern’s late-Gothic Münster (Cathedral) with its feathery spire was located, its the highest in Switzerland, unfortunately there was a lot of reconstruction being done so any photos would do it no justice. The reconstruction work continued inside. It was still truly amazing.

We then continued the journey partially crossing the bridge then back into the city and on to the Parliament buildings. Along the way we found a statue of the Bear.

I found a Bear in Bern!!

Heading back for the railway station the low body battery warnings started so we stopped for lunch in the Plaza. We ate a traditional Rösti to blend in again with the locals but I think our accents and lack of German language were the giveaways, that hadn’t been a problem the night before!

Returning to the station, we gathered our luggage and await our train to Interlaken.

For some strange reason I thought we should disembark at Interlaken Ost (Interlaken has 2 stations, Interlaken Ost and Interlaken West) so we had a lovely walk back to our hotel for the next 2 nights, the Chalet Oberland.

Along the way we made our first sighting of the Young Girl! Not Heidi but the Jungfrau.

Settled into our room, I crashed so Craig took the opportunity to go ‘out on the town’ to places I still do not know of.

Next time, Day 5 we again hit the different rail lines with our Swiss Pass, visit part of the Tops of Switzerland and wonder if Heidi left the village to work in an American franchise. We also discover we are not the only tourists!