We arrived in Thun on Monday in the early afternoon. Upon arrival at the train station, there was a certain “familiarity”: we were definitely back in the German part of Switzerland (Zermatt felt more on the “international” part of Switzerland 🙂 ).

After a bit of rest in our fancy hotel room (we got upgraded… to a room with a bathtub next to the bed), we went for dinner to La Barca, where we had very decent pizza, and the appreciated possibility to ask for a smaller pizza which was Just Right, size-wise.

On the way there (and back), we got acquainted with the local surfing activity. I will admit that “river surfing in Thun” was not on the bingo card of things I expected to see during this trip.

It was quite enjoyable to observe for a little while 🙂 we eventually got back to the hotel as it started to rain.

The next morning, Pierre had an initial plan to go running, but the rain wouldn’t recede before 9, so plans were changed and we continued with our day plan instead. We took the bus to the St. Beatus cave, for which I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the cave is very well equipped and, while it doesn’t have huge structures, it has a torrent running through the beginning of the cave and some neat smaller structures.

On the other hand, there were a lot of people, and a lot of noisy teenagers that did make the visit less enjoyable than it could have been; the visit itself is roughly a kilometer long and goes back the same way as the way in (so there’s a lot of awkward crossings in narrow cave tunnels). Still, it was a pretty good cave, all in all. And it has a Grand Tour frame:

For our next stop, we took the bus back along the lake to reach the Beatenburg funicular, followed by the Niederhorn cable car. With that, we reached a local summit with a spectacular view over the Thun lake and the surrounding mountains, including the Jungfrau… and another Grand Tour frame.

We just strolled around the paths at the summit and had some ice cream before going back down to the valley.

Our last stop for the day was the bridge in Sigriswil, mostly because it looked like a cool bridge; it turns out that it was one of the places where the Korean series Crash Landing On You was filmed, and so it sees more tourism than the average bridge. Cool bridge, but expensive to cross (so we crossed it twice − even thrice for Pierre). Pierre decided to run down to Thun, and I took the bus back to the hotel. We went for dinner at Turban, an Indian restaurant where we had very good paneer curries.

After dinner, we strolled around the city, which is pretty (observe: the elevated sidewalk and the two levels of shops!) and had some ice cream along the river.

And the next day is… the last day of our trip, since I’m writing this blog post on the train back home!

But first, some last minute visits. We walked up to the church and then to the castle in Thun and, on a whim, took some tickets mostly to go enjoy the view from the towers; we were pleasantly surprised by the museum in the castle, which was pretty small but was very well presented. The highlight was still the view from the towers − “interesting” stairs but very nice view.

We then took the train to Interlaken. Our plan was to leave our luggage there and to go explore a bit; said plan was almost foiled by the fact that almost all lockers were full! But, we still managed to find two where our luggage could fit (rather than a large where both would have fit in the same box.)

Our first stop was to take the funicular to Harder Kulm − that funicular was *full*. But the view on both lakes as well as the Jungfrau at the top is worth it!

We then went down back to the town, where we walked a bit. As a base for exploration in the region, it’s probably better located than Thun, but Thun felt like a much nicer town. Interlaken does have a significant paragliding activity… and yet another Grand Tour frame. (I’m starting to believe the area may be touristy, not sure.)

Finally, we’re on our way back to Zürich. We’re taking the long way around, via Luzern − the views over the lakes and the mountains are a very nice background to writing this blog post. I’ll still have a lot of pictures to process, but that’ll be the theme of a later post 🙂