Europe Trip

Lauterbrunnen was a welcome respite from the continual run of cities I had so far travelled to. This was a late change in my plans, as I had had my fill of museums and traffic clogged streets and tourist shops. It was wonderful to escape all that and head into the mountains. Truly beautiful scenery.

Lauterbrunnen is situated on the very edge of the Alps, in central Switzerland. It's a very small town in Lauterbrunnen valley, a sort of last-stop before you get to the mountains proper. Because the valley walls are so high, the sun didn't warm up the ground till about lunchtime, so before then it was pretty cold!

But it was very idyllic. Bright sunshine, green fields, waterfalls, meadows with cows that had bells around their necks constantly clanging...

One of the days there (stayed 3 nights) I spent climbing a mountain, the Schilthorn. Well, I walked up part of it, then got the cable car for the majority of the journey. At the top there's a restaurant, where they filmed the George Lazenby Bond film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Of course, this is impossible to pass up as a tourist attraction, so there are all sorts of James Bond dishes on the menu. But it actually rotates too, giving unbelievably good views.

Views are even better outside of course...

I got loads of lovely photos of the mountains, but this is a great one I think. It was quite cloudy when I went up, and the gloom of the clouds in the distance made it seem much more atmospheric and foreboding. All I could see was mountain after mountain after mountain... You had to be there, really.