Europe > Switzerland > Swiss Alps > Interlaken > Articles > The Berner Oberland, Switzerland's playground

In the film 'The Third Man,' Orson Welles famously ad-libbed his summing up of the Swiss; "...they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce...? The cuckoo clock." And alpine tourism, he could have added. In 1863 Mr. Thomas Cook led his first party of tourists to Switzerland. Sixty-two intrepid Victorian flower-pressers, hill walkers and diary keepers arrived in the Berner Oberland prepared for adventure and demanding tea.

In the same period the region was gaining notoriety for its impressive peaks, the Eiger, the Jungfrau and the Wetterhorn amongst them. A disproportionate number of Englishmen, independent in both wealth and interests, had determined on conquering the summits. For the locals, climbing mountains was something you did when looking for lost sheep or hunting ibex; they were happy to guide the eccentric foreigners up into the heights as long as they were well paid. Between providing tea and guiding, the Berner Oberlanders had found a new industry to supplement cheese making, smuggling and cuckoo clock carving.

Last year a friend working in Interlaken became the Thomas Cook in my life. On the telephone she sung hymns to the joys of alpine mountain biking. Her letters were purple prose accounts of long days walking over remote passes and along knife-edged ridges to reach lonely summits. There were whisperings of ibex, gentians and breathtaking views. If I came to visit she would be my guide, and translator in this German speaking slab of Switzerland.

Early tourists bound for the Berner Oberland invariably set off from London by rail. I did the same, settling into the Eurostar at Waterloo with a pile of maps and books, and looking forward to lunch in Paris. We crossed the Swiss border in the early evening. Under the setting sun, rivers and hills squeezed closer and closer, giving ever more 'landscape' per square kilometre. The train shot in and out of tunnels. Toy-town stations, apparently constructed entirely from fretwork and geraniums, flashed past. I disembarked in the dusk at Interlaken.

As Christina led me down Hoheweg - Interlaken's main street - the almost alcoholic intensity of the air filled my lungs. The dark bulk of the mountains ringing the town promised adventure and aching muscles. I recast myself as an Edwardian 'tiger of the hills,' sound of lung and with a clear gaze on the horizon. Perhaps I was behind the times; in the Berner Oberland things had moved on since the days of Alfred Mummery, Edward Whymper and the rest of the tweeded, hob-nailed and Alpenstock hefting climbing fraternity. Hilaire Belloc passing through in the first half of the 20th century had already seen the way things would go. He reported locals as "bawling and howling, with great placards and tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that way to the Strange Cave.'" But he also pointed out one of the great charms of the Swiss Alps, that they are big enough to be able to find peace and solitude by merely walking a few extra miles on a less popular route.

And, truth to say, I enjoyed the atmosphere of Interlaken - part yodelling kitsch, part genteel tearoom, and part adrenaline sports Mecca. Pilgrims to the latter were to be seen at all hours, careering out of town in logo-ed mini-buses with roof racks piled high with kayaks, paragliders, rafts and tangles of ropes. Kitted out for fighting gravity, snow or water, they could tackle anything from ice-climbing to canyoning, from rafting to the famed 180m Schilthorn cable-car bungee-jump.

Christina had something less intensely macho in mind for my first day in the hills - the 'classic' mountain bike loop that took in lakes, waterfalls, a high pass, and close-enough views of all the main peaks. For me she'd borrowed a rickety bicycle from a friendly Afghan kitchen porter.

"It's only 90 kilometres," she assured me, "you'll manage easily." That the Grosse Scheidegg pass we had to cross was some 1,962 metres high was a surprise that she decided to keep for later.

The first 20 kilometres was chocolate-box pretty. We rode between banks of flowers, slalomed around cocks of hay, stopped to drink from ornately carved wooden troughs and waved happily at the other cyclists cruising along the lake side. The Brienzer See was a milky azure, its waters fed by a proportion of the region's 13 glaciers and 72 waterfalls. One of those waterfalls was the Reichenbach, where Sherlock Holmes met his death at the hands of Professor Moriarty in 'The Final Problem.' On this rather tenuous connection the near-by town of Meiringen has established a Sherlock Holmes museum. As well as the Sherlock Holmes Alpine Club, which given that Holmes fell to his death, seemed to be poor branding. I was more intrigued to learn that Meiringen was where a baker called Gasparini invented the Meringue; they’re still sold in the Sherlock Holmes theme cafe.

Our climb to the Grosse Scheidegg was grindingly slow. But mercifully broken by a rum-coffee break at the Roselaui Hotel. As we sat on the broad veranda we had a grandstand view of dark clouds pouring in like molten lead over the lip of the Kleine Wetthorn. Poorly dressed for being rained on, and running out of light, we inched our way up to the pass. The road over the Grosse Scheidegg is closed to private cars, and so crossed only by the passenger-carrying post buses and by walkers and cyclists. Lord Byron passed this way in 1816, going in the opposite direction. He managed to sink his horse in a bog, but still found time to poetically compare the glacier above to 'a frozen hurricane.' By dint of hard riding and a brisk row up the lake he was in Interlaken for a late supper. Something we were trying to get back for ourselves.

We topped the pass as the first drops of rain fell, and then beat the storm in a reckless 20 kilometres downhill dash. The road ribboned down the steepest slopes in switchbacks so convoluted that I continually met Christina almost head-on but with my eyes level with her pedals. We swept through the town of Grindelwald, the telescopes on its terraces trained on the north face of the Eiger ready for climber action or death-defying rescues, and freewheeled along the bank of the Lutschine river. An eerie mist rose from its waters and freezing currents of air pooled under the dank trees. The cuckoo clocks were just striking nine as we swung our bowed legs off bikes in Interlaken.

Hobbling the streets of the town the next morning, I noticed that even the most improbable shops - dry cleaners say, or butchers - had small displays of local produce for sale. Just in case a passing tourist might suddenly decide to impulse buy a poker-worked Alpenstock, a set of cowbells in diminishing sizes, or a Heidi doll in dirndl and plaits. Actually most of the real-life Heidis were dressed in lycra and swooping past on in-line skates en route to the lake to swim. Down at the Thuner See the water was as clear and cold as glacial ice. There was the flickering of fish around the swimmers, prompting Christina to quote a local saying; "A fish must swim three times - in the water, in the pan and in the belly." Every half an hour or so huge ferries would speed past, hop-scotching along the coast to Thun or turning into the narrow Schiff-Kanal that ran to the heart of Interlaken.

Only a few hours after my swim I was able to track the course of the lake's two ferries from a spy-satellites-view. Though I was going to save bungee jumping, canyoning and the rest of the wild stuff for when I wasn't playing at being an Edwardian vicar, I had decided that paragliding was a must. Though Switzerland is only a fifth the size of the UK, the Swiss add to the available area by using every metre of their considerable numbers of bumpy bits. Climbers, skiers, farmers taking their cattle up to the summer pastures, walkers - all use the hyper-third-dimension provided by the mountain slopes to the full. Paragliding is the ultimate Swiss sport as it uses the under-utilized emptiness in between the bumpy bits. So, it's not surprising that Heinz Rubi runs the biggest tandem paragliding operation in the world.

As he drove me to the launch field, 1,300 metres up in Beatenberg, Heinz ticked off figures.

"I do maybe 600 tandem flights a year, and I must have flown three and a half thousand flights altogether. The company has done about 33,000 commercial flights, and so far...no accidents." At the launch site we tied ourselves into the sit-harness, and began running down the slope as if tangoing on a steep roof. Suddenly we were doing the 'cartoon character running over the cliff' bit, where the canopy rose up, filled and pulled us off the ground whilst our legs kept cycling in mid-air. Then we were just flying. Two humans, a few hanks of string and a glorified duvet-cover soaring through the air like a Disney pterodactyl. Heinz was shouting explanations in my ear.

"We're going to put in a sharp turn, so we can see what those buzzards are doing...maybe we can pick up the same updraught they're in." We swung past a restaurant terrace perched on the edge of the hill, looking in on the diners with that bent-necked curiosity you see sometimes in a passing seagull. Then we drifted towards the lake, looking down on sunbathers and swimmers, and the ferries. And finally we hit the ground, running a few paces until the chute collapsed behind us.

Back in town the weekly Tuesday flea-market was in full swing. Most of the produce seemed to be decommissioned military gear. In the Middle Ages 'Switzers' were famed as fighting men, even mercenaries, and Switzerland still protects its independence and neutrality zealously. Every able-bodied man is a soldier with a gun, ammunition and uniform under his bed, and a couple of weeks of training camp to look forward to each year. Old kit is theirs to sell off, and for less than ten pounds I bought a leather and canvas rucksack the better to carry food, drink and wet-weather gear on the walk Christina was planning for the next day.

I could have learnt more about Swiss military history by going to the 'William Tell Show' that evening. For the last 87 years a cast of 250 plus horses and dogs have enacted shooting apples off a lad's head with a crossbow and generally vanquishing the Austrian tyrants of 700 years ago. But, Christina being Austrian, it seemed more tactful to go out for dinner and track down bottles of a rare local Spies wine - the 'blue Burgundy.'

We set off on the post-bus to Habkern at an early hour in the morning. Perhaps too early - I, for one, didn't feel entirely prepared for the slightly surreal air of Habkern village. A woman walked two frisky goats along the street like poodles, every one of numerous water-hydrants had been painted to resemble a little uniformed man, and the lawn of an otherwise unremarkable wooden chalet had filled with so many garden gnomes that they seemed to have vetoed the usual gnomish occupations of fishing, baring their buttocks or sitting on toad-stools and instead had decided to take up line-dancing.

The objective of our walk was the 1,950 metre Niederhorn above the Guggisgrat Gemmenalp. An 'alp' is a summer pasture, and we climbed rapidly up into a world of gentle mannered Simmental cattle grazing the rich grass. We were further lulled into peace by the hypnotic clonking of their bells and the heady perfumes of alpine flowers. There was the occasional chatter of magpies or jays, and once the bobbing flight of a greater spotted woodpecker. As we came out of a stand of pines, Christina gave a little cry and dropped to the ground; she had found a patch of blueberries.

"Don't eat the ones that look just like the blueberries but don't taste the same," she warned me in one of the least useful, even if most important, bits of advice I’ve ever been given, "because they're poisonous." A few steps later I found a cluster of wild strawberries, and then a tangle of wild raspberries. We tie-dyed our tongues and lips purple and crimson with them, before setting ourselves to the slopes again. Hitting the ridge we found a steep path leading up the north slope. It cut back through a crack in the rock and then, suddenly, we were on the summit - though dwarfed still by the distant, snow covered Jungfrau, Eigher and other 'big peaks.'

There was quite a cluster of people on the Niederhorn. They had come up on the cable car from the lake side and were now on their way downhill. We had come from the opposite direction, slogging against the grain.

"Much better for us," Christina laughed when I pointed this out to her, "we got more of the mountains to ourselves and had a bit more exercise." Despite her shorts and tee shirt she seemed dauntingly Edwardian and thick-skirtish.

One group of walkers had taken out sandwiches and was immediately surrounded by a flutter of alpine choughs. With their yellow beaks and black plumage they looked like tiny and irritated waiters who, despite hard work, didn't expect to get tipped much. I'd been hoping to see more of the region's wildlife. A marmot or two, perhaps, or a far-off chamois. But now, so close to the cable car terminal and with more and more people tramping the path, I’d given up hope.

And then we rounded a corner and there was a male ibex nibbling on a tuft of grass, throwing his horns back every now and then as if troubled by a gigantic and very heavy quiff. In theory these animals were amongst the rarest and most timid of the Alpine fauna, but in this case the theory didn't seem to have much basis in reality. The ibex positively encouraged me to crawl around taking photographs, and ran through his full portfolio of 'quietly grazing,' 'alert for danger' and 'silhouetted against the sky' poses. He then sauntered over to a cliff edge, and whistled up a friend. The two of them did some gravity defying gymnastics, involving tiny ledges, nonchalant leaps and balancing on pebbles, and then disappeared from view. Presumably to pick up a cheque from the local tourist board.

I sat on a rock looking across the wrinkled landscape, eyes following the wild jumble of mountains and valleys. Idly, I wondered just how big Switzerland would be if it was properly ironed. Much, much bigger, but also much less interesting and with far less ibex and cuckoo clocks.

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