Friday, May 1, 2009

01-05-2009 (Week 16) - Interlaken

Switzerland is the most beautiful country I've seen in the world. It could be that Interlaken isn't a fair representation of the country because it has a formation known as a saddle point, where there's two lakes on either side of the town and on the adjascent sides there are mountains. But oh what a beautiful place it was.

Besides being beautiful, Interlaken is the adenture capital of the world. And we certainly took advantage of it. We hit the ground running Saturday morning with the first canyoning adventure of the season. This involves sliding down rock formation, repelling down semi-cliffs, jumping off waterfalls, and trust falling backwards into pools of water. If your schlotty, it also involves getting head butted in the face. Although the water was freezing the rush kept us warm long enough until it was over. Our biggest jump was 8 meters (approx. 24 feet) and what i really liked about guides was that they didn't give you any time to think about what you were doing. You looked down at the pool, and you heard 3, 2, 1, ... and if you hadn't jumpe by then, they were pushing you, so you most certainly jumped, and loved every second of it.

But we didn't stop there. Later that day we went out hang gliding. I can't really explain the feeling of hang gliding other than saying it was absolutely breath taking, but I can speak for how long we waited to run off the side of the mountain. We waited hours until the conditions were just right. And in our case, the best conditions were no wind at all. So we had to run fast. And if you didn't know it, runing tandem with someone else when you're right leg lined up in the middle of their legs isn't the easiest thing ever. But we managed ok, and to make sure it work out, once we had liftoff he guided the glider real low to the ground (low enough that if i tried to stand then there wasn't enough room), to pick up some speed. It was exhilirating but a little bit scary as well. Also scary was when he did some stalls in mid air. Imagine coming to a complete stop when you're hundreds of feet up in the air. That's what a stall is...and you can kinda view it on the video if you watch closely.

That night we hit up the same club we did Friday night (except saturday night Slattery didn't get punched because he wasn't there, although me and Doherty almost got beat up by a bunch of Australian guys who claimed they were locals...drunkin idiots is more like it. We hit up the only restaurant open at 2 am (a local vending machine), and visited some back to the future private club that we somehow convinced the guy to let us in. Oh yeah, and at the end of the night, we ended up cornering a sheep in a tree, and Doherty slapped it in the face while I slapped it's ass. All and all, a very successful night.

Finally the next day we went river rafting (not very rapid at all), and called all adventures over with. However, we did manage a drive to Lichtenstein where there was a health festival going on. After that we drove through Austria and called it a weekend.

I would love to go back to Interlaken, so if you're ever up for it, let me know...

pictures




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