October 2, 2006 - Interlaken, Switzerland

October 2, 2006
Interlaken, Switzerland

Last night we did not sleep well. The people in our room stayed awake talking until the wee hours of the morning. To make matters worse, once they fell asleep they snored! Thus, we stayed in bed until about 9:30. We then redeemed our free breakfast, which consisted of bad cereal and a piece of fruit.

After eating we grabbed our stuff for the day (the hostel has a room lockout from 10:30 – 16:00) and headed to the post office. We each mailed our Oktoberfest beer steins home. It was kind of expensive (50 Swiss Franks) but I think it will be worth it when we get home…

We returned to the post office just after 11:30 and booked a canyoning adventure for the afternoon. After forking over the cash we decided we to get some food before going EXTREME!

We headed for downtown (not very far) and were disappointed to find that all of the restaurants were very expensive. We talked to an annoying guy from Seattle(he was very negative about everything) who convinced us that the cheapest way to eat was to go to the supermarket. We ended up having an awesome lunch!

After lunch we headed back to the hostel to get ready for canyoning. The front desk informed us that we were the only 2 people signed up and the adventure might be canceled. We were very bummed and pooped around the hostel the hostel could be sure. Incredibly, there was a last minute rush and 13 people ended up going on the excursion.

Canyoning was simply awesome! It was one of the coolest things we have done on the trip. The equipment consists of wetsuits (with booties), helmets, lifejackets, and jackets. I sought out the “camel toe” helmet in honor of the guys who told me about canyoning in Nice.

Once we had all suited up we took a van up into the mountains. We then hiked for about 10 minutes along a canyon (with a small creek at the bottom). From there we went down by the water and jumped off a lot of stuff. We also did some repelling and sliding. It was so INCREDIBLE! Some of the jumps were quite hi and we got to do flips and other fun things…I was a little worried about the cold water before starting but it wasn’t bad at all. My only regret was that could only do the half-day instead of the full day (not running right now because of the rain last night).


We returned to our hostel at about 16:30 and decided relax and hang out. For the rest of the night we are going to lounge around the hostel and try to find a cheap dinner. I think we will go to bed early so that we can get up and go see a few sights before catching our train tomorrow.