From Africa To Russia

Wake up early to the sound of the alarm. Actually it doesn’t involve much ‘waking up’, as I have been lying away the whole night in the ninety degree heat listening to the impossibly deafening din of the traffic passing just outside the window. I shower and dress quickly: today is the day of the big trip up into the Alps, a tour I have booked, ‘Jungfraujoch – Top of Europe’. I take the local train up to the station once again, find the spot where the bus will arrive. Sitting on the curb, I am overtaken with lust as a pretty woman in a sundress stands next to me and begins taking her shoes on and off playfully. The bus arrives and we all get on. Once again quite an international cast of characters, a couple of contingents of Indians, a bunch of Japanese, a few American and German stragglers. Our tour guide is a diminutive little Thai fellow named ‘Kid’, who talks to us through a microphone (rather inaudibly) as we head out. We pick up a few people in Luzerne, then head to Interlaken. We get out for a half an hour, I go out into the expansive park there and take a few pictures. I feel like the male ‘Heidi’, standing amidst mountains and fields and sunshine. I am tempted to yodel. Back on the bus, we ride for a bit more and then board a curious yellow train which starts to climb up into the mountains, using some kind of gear and pulley system, I think. The landscape quickly becomes dramatic. We are surrounded by steep-sloped valleys and snow-capped peaks and meadows filled with wildflowers. People throw themselves from side to side of the train, snapping photos desperately. Kid the tour guide is beside himself, he is on fire, he runs this way and that, up and back shouting out instructions on what to take pictures of, where to look next. He is a natural character, and I like him. He appears to very much enjoy his job. I also suspect that Kid is a bit light in his loafers. Every so often, he grabs me and insists that he take a picture of me with my own camera, in different poses, leaning back into Mount Eiger in the distance, giving the thumbs-up as we pass a meadow, etc. We soon disembark this train and hop on another, which climbs steadily and then enters a tunnel. Before we know it, we are at nine thousand feet in elevation, then ten thousand feet. We step out for a moment at an enclosed observation deck to acclimatize. It is cold, and the mountain peaks all around are covered in snow, it is like another world. And then we are at the summit, wading through snow and gazing at Mount Eiger looming to one side, a glacier sliding down a valley to the other. Even in the mist the views are overwhelming, and no amount of picture-taking can capture this, so I give up trying. We stay at the summit for lunch (about $100,000 for a plate of fries), then head back soon after. I have a bit of a nap on the way back. When we return, it is past eight and beginning to grow dark. I head back on the train, then back at the hostel I run into one of the guys I had just seen on the tour, John from Colorado, so we watch the World Cup game together and I drink beer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.