Switzerland - Interlaken (Part 2) 🇨🇭

We decided to walk from the RV park into Interlaken and try to walk to Lake Brienz along the river. Interlaken is a bit of a confusing town. Along the water it has some beautiful Victorian area buildings most of which has been converted to hotels. However, much of the city is modern and lacking a lot of character. I think we made the right choice to think of Interlaken as the place where we’d rest our heads but with the intent to seek adventure in the surrounding mountains and lakes.

Expensive Clean Underwear

Our hope and intent was to do some laundry in Interlaken. While walking through town, we sought out a laundromat we’d found on Google. Although we could wash our clothes back at the RV park there were a lot of people waiting to use the washers and dryers and we thought a laundromat would speed up the process.

We found the laundromat in the center of Interlaken and about blew a gasket when we saw the price. To wash and dry a single load of laundry (self-service), we would need to pay 25 Swiss Francs (~$29.50). Given we had a good 2 to 3 loads of laundry to do, the RV park was starting to look like a lot better option. With a little patience and waiting, it ended up costing us about $20 for 2 loads, which was a bargain.

Walking to Lake Brienz

The hike along the river was beautiful. We were fortunate to be able to make the majority of the hike in the shade of huge trees along both sides of the river.

As we walked along the river we passed the vehicular to Harder Kulm. This is a viewpoint (with a nice restaurant) high above Interlaken with views of both Lake Brienz and Lake Thun. We were a bit lift / venicular’d out and maybe a bit tired of the cost of lift tickets which can be expensive. In hindsight, we should have purchased a Switzerland pass as I’m sure we would have gotten our value out of it with all of the trains and lifts we ended up taking. Regardless, the vehicular was pretty impressive as it looked like the side of the mountain was pretty much straight up.

As we walked further down the river, we found ourselves at a railroad bridge and we decided to cross it to get views of a steamboat that was making it’s way up the river towards the lake.

While on the bridge we met this nice old man who stayed and talked to us for about 15 minutes. Come to find out he was just out on an adventure from Thun. He had taken the train to the far side of Lake Brienz and was walking back to Interlaken where he planned to catch the train home. We talked about all sorts of things including what it was like to get healthcare in Switzerland to taxes to politics, etc. It was very clear that he was very proud of his town of Thun and encouraged us to try to visit.

While we were talking the steam powered ferry boat passed beneath us. Our new friend told us that she just celebrated her 110’th birthday. From the looks of it, she’s still going strong.

After we said farewell to our new friend from Thun we walked a bit further to take in views of Lake Brienz. We arrived to find a small marina and a small pebble beach. The Swiss agreed that it was really hot and many of them were cooling off in the crystal clear waters, several with their dogs. We sat there for a while, took in the amazing views and enjoyed the cool breezes. We really have to get better about packing our swimsuits on these little outings.

After that we headed back to Interlaken where we learned how to use yet another transit system to catch a bus back to our RV park.

Overall, a great day which probably would have been a bit better had we taken a nice cool swim!