On our first day in Interlaken, I saw an advertisement for the Schilthorn--a peak not far at all from the town, but challenging to get to because of the stark altitude change from Interlaken (at around 1,800 feet) to the top of the mountain (almost 10,000 feet). But it wasn't the height that caught my attention--it was its fame for being an integral part of a 1969 007 movie, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." The movie was almost exclusively filmed at a rotating restaurant that had just been opened on top of the Schilthorn only two years before, and the movie culminates in a fight scene that breaks out in that restaurant and on skis all the way down the slope.
Having grown up watching old James Bond movies at my grandmother's, I immediately went running to Ryan while blurting something along the lines of "RYANRYANRYAN THERE'S A ROTATING RESTAURANT WHERE JAMES BOND WAS--" right as Ryan gave me a very Ryan look and said "Yes yes, surprise, we have a reservation for brunch there." (I actually cried.)
So at the crack of dawn (or so it felt to me--it was sometime before 7 AM when the rest of the world has no business being awake), we headed out to the train station. It took one bus, one train, one lift, another train, and two more lifts to get to the top of the Schilthorn, and the entire journey only grew increasingly nerve-wracking as we watched storm clouds roll in closer and closer to the top. Ryan, who's watching me write this post, just called it his time of "Impending Doom"--he was a ball of anxiety while watching the mist settle and the views of the surrounding Alps completely disappear.
We couldn't have been more lucky: By the time we got to the top of the mountain, we still had a decent view of 75% of the panorama: We could see the Sea of Thun far (far, far) below, and even as we stood there in the -1ºC misery, we watched peak after peak vanish in the coming snowstorm.
And snow it did: While we ate brunch (an all-you-can-eat buffet with plenty of cappuccinos and mimosas), we watched huge flakes fall until the clouds became so thick we could barely see out the rotating windows.
We waited for the storm to subside a little before heading through the 007 museum, which showed photos of the cast and crew on the Schilthorn, and then headed back down to Mürren. From there, we took a lift down to Gimmelwald, which--although out of our way--we'd been told was one of the most beautiful villages in the world. And of course, we arrived when the clouds were so thick that we couldn't see more than 40 feet in front of us. For all we could tell, it was a single strip of road with wooden huts on either side, stretching off into the white distance. We couldn't see past the houses themselves; whether they had huge expanses of backyards or shared a closet-sized patch of grass with their neighbors, we couldn't tell.
It was only when we got to the end of the village (maybe a 2-minute brisk walk, at the most) that the clouds started to clear, and we saw what had actually been lying past the mist the entire time. Behind the row of houses to our left was a sheer drop-off of maybe 1,000 feet (Ryan's estimate, as well as mine)--one second, it was a gently sloping backyard; the next was a plummeting drop to the valley floor far, far below. And only 100 feet farther, the floor rose up again at just as extreme a slant, spotted with waterfall after waterfall until it met the snow-capped peaks far overhead. The view was unlike anything we'd ever seen, and it gave us the sense that we were standing on the edge of the world.
It was then that we totally understood why people considered Gimmelwald to be one of the most beautiful villages in the world.
We took our time strolling back to the lift. We petted goats and cats, peeked around huts, and stopped by three "self-service" shops: The only "stores" in the entire village were these little fridges or cabinets where you could get whatever you needed (alpine cheese, cow's or goat's milk, dried sausages, knit bonnets and gloves, hand-painted wooden dolls) and place your payment in a small box in the same fridge/cabinet. The trust was absolute and awe-inspiring, coming from a country where even your $50 bill is checked to make sure it isn't counterfeit. We paid 1 Franc (about $1.03 USD) for half a liter of fresh cow's milk, which we took straight from a couple's fridge in their basement. It was so delicious, but so filling that that single half-liter--split between the two of us--was our lunch.
We headed down two more lifts to the village of Lauterbrunnen. If we hadn't just left the quietest and most secluded village we'd seen, which felt like it hadn't even heard about the arrival of records or radios (let alone cell phones), Lauterbrunnen would've felt as secluded as we could have hoped for in the middle of the Swiss alps. But given the immediacy of the comparison, the touristy atmosphere hit us over the head with a hammer. We paid a quick visit to Lauterbrunnen's famous waterfall--only one of 72 waterfalls in that particular valley (which made it the inspiration for the Lord of the Rings's Rivendell)--before more rain set in, and then we headed back to Interlaken via a mix of trains and buses. We camped out in Barrel for an antipasti platter, and then called it an early night: we actually curled up in our hotel room with the windows wide open and watched "Ant-Man," packed, and passed out early in preparation for the next morning's early ride to Austria.
