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My watch died overnight. Guess I can only find out what time it is by being nice to Jacky. It wasn’t raining when we got up...

Hiking tour in Switzerland [2]

Dave Hood
2004-02-22 18:16:20

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pass. Interesting that the kleine pass is a hundred meters higher than the große. We met a mob of noisy teen-age hikers just as we reached Kleine Scheidegg pass. Glad they were going the other way.

There’s quite a collection of hotels, restaurants, and train stations at the pass. Lots of people around. Japanese tourists, none of them hikers. It was just noon; we found a large empty table in one of the restaurants. A couple guys sat down with us; Jacky asked them not to smoke, and they moved to another table as soon as one came free.

We both ordered Röstizza. This is the restaurant’s own invention: pizza toppings on Rösti (hash browns), all of it baked crisp. Not bad, but they should have omitted the salt, dry-fried the potatoes to reduce the fat, and sprinkled raw bell pepper over it when it came out of the oven to make it crunchy. Still, we ate it all and didn’t complain.

Shared the table with a British couple who had come up today the easy way – by rail. They told us the section between Wengen and Lauterbrunnen was very steep.

Good people watching. A really fat railroad guy came into the restaurant, pants sagging halfway to his knees. But his J C Penney undershorts were still all the way up around his waist, shirt tucked neatly inside.

While we were eating, the weather was clearing up, but we only got a glimpse of Eiger through the clouds.

As far as Wengen, the descent wasn’t bad at all, and we made surprisingly good time. I was disappointed in the weather, since we were just across from these three great mountains and any number of big active glaciers, and there was absolutely nothing to see. Damn!

Nothing to see in that direction, anyway. We were hiking below a wall to our right, quite pretty, waterfalls every few hundred meters, cows in their high alpine pastures.

And not all the worthwhile sights are large. Some really pretty little fungi, ...