Eurotrip Day 9: Millan
Highlight of the day
Cathedral Duomo
Add comment May 22nd, 2005
Archive for May, 2005
Eurotrip Day 8: Zermatt
Highlight of the day
Take train to Gornagrat Obvervatory (best view of Zermatt)
Add comment May 21st, 2005
Eurotrip Day 7: Lugano
Highlight of the day
Cable car Mt. S. Salvatore
Drive along Nufenen Pass
Lake Lugano
1 comment May 20th, 2005
Eurotrip Day 6: Luzern - Zurich
Highlight of the day:
Boat cruise on lake Luzern. 23 CHF
Today we are going to pass Luzern, always No.1 or No.2 tourist city in the entire coutry. It lies in the center of Swizerland and surrounded by snow mountains and lake Luzern. To get there from interlake is very straightforward and relatively easy (only 60km apart), but we just simply cannot keep our schedule because we have to stop so frequent along the way. There is no tunnel and we have come across the mountain via some steep mountain road, but the scene is very well worth the effort. You can see the cloud just sitting next to you, and the color of the nature - green, blue, white are very well balanced. There are several lakes along the way, pay attention to the lake reflection if you want to take pictures. We have to stop and stop, and finally it tooks us 2 hours to finish this “long” 60KM drive.
Once we get to the town of Luzern, we were immediately attracted by the lake scenes, the lake is star-shaped and luzern sits at one end of the star, and take a boat tour on the lake really gives you a quick overview of the region, it is our first boat cruise during this trip and we love it. We’d love it more if there is less foggy and cloudy, and then we will get a full 360 view of the Alps from the lake. The lake cruise takes about 1.5 hour and you can have lunch/dinner on the boat. As soon as we returned from the boat, we started touring the town, the lake side restaurant should be very romantic. Out of many bridges in Luzern, the most famous/beautiful, the landmark of the city is “Chapel Bridge”. It was built around 13th century, and part of it get burned and is now renovated, along this area you will find zillions of photo opportunity.
Around 3pm, we are done with Luzern and headed for Zurich., the biggest town of Switzerland. As expected, there is nothing unusal about this city, and we take a very brief two three walking tour along the river and Lake Zurich, had our dinner at a pretty interesting German style restaurant, which is reasonablely good.
We skipped two of the most awesome excusion trip possible from Luzern, Mt Rigi and Mt Piltus, because of the heavy clouds, and we prob can see nothing even we get to the peaks. In fact, the boat stopped at the station where cable car can lead you to Mt Rigi. That is definitely on our to-do list for our next Swiss trip!
Add comment May 19th, 2005
Eurotrip Day 5: Lauterbrunnen Valley (Murren, Wengen)
Highlight of the day
Trümmelbach waterfalls (10CHF)
Lauterbrunnen means “many fountains”. It is situated in the most impressive glaciated valley of the Alps, it took only 10 mins drive from interlaken, because of the weather is not so good, we didn’t walk too much outside and only stopped by the famous POI such as Trümmelbach waterfalls.
Trümmelbach waterfalls is very spectacular, 10 falls in total can be seen inside the mountain (because it is very dark, hard to take photos), (average 1 CHF per fall, which is a good deal), quote the official guide: “The Trümmelbach Falls are the only glacial falls in the world which have been made accessible deep inside the mountain: a magnificent example of natural beauty.” In deed, the water came from melting snow of Mt Eiger/Monch/Joungfrau was really strong, when we were inside, we almost had to shout to each other in order to be heard.
Our original plan is to take cable car to visit Murren, but again, blaming the bad weather, it was really cloudy and we asked several tourists just returned from the cable car to/from Murren, and they said it was waste of money to climb at that moment - they saw nothing up there. We have take that as the pitty of the trip.
Add comment May 18th, 2005
Eurotrip Day 4: Jungfrau - Top of the Europe
Highlight of the day
Jungfraujoch-Top of Europe.
The Jungfrau region means internationally renowned holiday locations such as Interlaken, Grindelwald, Wengen and Mürren. Of all the places, the most striking view is from Sphinx of Jungfrau (3571m), you can only get there by cog wheel train, which takes 45 mins from Grindelwald. When you get there, what is around you is an amazing view of Great Aletsch Glacier, Mt. Jungfrau, Mt. Monch and Mt Eiger. The fact that this place is on the UNESCO World Natural Heritage list really means something. The peak of the surrounding moutains look so big, so close and so clear. Warning, you must wear a lot of clothing to keep you warm up there. Although this train ticket cost 157CHF (round trip), it is prob well worth the money. You have to experience this at least once in your life time.
You can get out of the closed observatory and have some fresh air (unfortunately, not everyone can do that at this altitude, Dadi felt realy bad even before we reach to the observatory). The snow is very, very thick, even in May, I am sure this place will be like a heaven in Winter ski/snowboard. Maybe we will come back in winter.
What is interesting is Asian visitors counts more than 1/2 of the headcounts in the train going up, mostly from India, China (include Taiwan/HongKong), Japan and Korea. Be prepared, some of them really are really loudy!
Add comment May 17th, 2005
Eurotrip Day 3: Bern - Thun - Interlaken
Highlight of the day:
climbing to the top of Cathedral
Bell tower
Bern is a very small city, so small that you cannot believe it is the swiss capital city. We took half of a day to walk around the city. The city was built in 1191 and most part of original city is still there today, that is why it is on the list of UNESCO. To view the city, we climbed up to the top of the cathedral (3 CHF), it turned out the effort is well worth it. The view is simply amazing, you can view the entire city (since it is small) and surrounding mountains.
The weather is so bad (it rained!!) after we got to the ground from the cathedral. We have to do window shopping for the most part because all the stores close on Sunday! We really had no choice but take lunch at a fast food place - hope that is the only time we eat fast food during the trip!
After lunch, we left Bern and headed to the town of Thun, the northern tip of Lake Thun. Supposedly we should take a boat tour around the lake and the scene should be nearly perfect, but the weather still sucked that we have to forfeit our cruise plan and just briefly walked around the town. The town is small and has a castle, we didn’t visit the castle since the weather is so bad. By the evening, we arrived at Interlaken.
The only pleasant surprise is the place where we booked to stay for 3 nights, it is a family hotel near the lake Borienz. The Michel (not Michael) family is very nice to us and the room has near perfect view of the mountain, step in the balcony, the mountain is just in front of you, so close that makes me feel I can touch the snow at the peak.. And believe it or not, it has free internet (DSL) and it is very fast! The room is so comfy that Chuck fell asleep in the couch of the living room!
Well, that is not end of the day yet, our dinner is really amazing - for some reason, mami wanted to eat Chinese food and that brought us to a place - Mr. Hong! That experience is simply unforgetable, we ordered three different style Fried Rice, but after they are ready and presented by the Chef Mr. Hong, these three dishes look exactly the same to us!
5 comments May 16th, 2005
Eurotrip Day 2: Geneva - Lausane - Montraux
Highlight of the day:
Chaetau de Chillon
One nice thing about a red-eye europe flight is that it won’t waste your precious best part of the day time, when we arrive at Geneva, it is 9:05am, is the right time to start the journey, yay!! but things are not so smooth at the beginning because airline will always tend to mess up your happy life: mami and Chuck’s luggage get delayed for two hours.
Add comment May 15th, 2005