So from here it was just quite a bit of walking for a couple of hours. Sorry Rowan but there is gonna be quite a few photos in this update!
When we got to the top we found another cafe, at 1880m. Kinda hilarious. I think you could also stay there. Look up "Windegghutte, Gadmen" on google maps.
I didn't feel like coffee so I decided to go for a huss up to a repeater tower thing on the ridge. It was a bit more of a climb than I though but I think it was worth it. Unfortunately, now that I was on the ridge I could see the next peak, and the one after that, and the one after that, all the way up to the to a peak much higher than the one I was on, despite the urge to keep climbing I thought they might be expecting me back at the cafe in the next 15min, not 8 hours. We carried along the track mostly downhill to a swing bridge which was pretty impressive. It was 100m above the river and 170m long. More photos:
From here (and from the ridge I had climbed up to) we had some amazing views of the mountain range with glaciers in it. I think the peaks we could see were around 3000m and the range behind it went up to about 3600m. Hopefully I will get a chance to come back someday to have a crack at a few of them! So many people thought, we were there on a Wednesday and there was heaps of people on the track, hopefully there would be less up the serious mountains. It was a pretty easy walk back down to the cables car where we had a disagreement about cable car courtesy but luckily Grant had not left without Bea and I when we got to the bottom so that was good.
We then went to the Aareschlucht gorge (limestone). There was a walkway all the way through it that was cantilevered from the side of the gorge and included a series of tunneled section too. I don't really know why I didn't take any photos but it was not too different to the other gorges I have been in anyway. On the way back we found that the tunnels had quite a good echo in them so we started making ghost noises (isn't that what everyone does?) We were quite subtle about it and it was pretty funny to watch the confused looks on peoples faces. We had only just left the tunnels when a massive asian tour group was just entering. Grant, Bea and I exchanged look, and without saying anything turned around and made another pass through the tunnels to make ghost noises. We are so awesome.
On the way home we decided to take the senic route which was a good option. We wound our way up to a pass at about 2200m. On the way home we passed by Luzern which is apparently a bit like Queenstown. It looked similar too with a Lake and mountains that rose straight up from the sides of the lake to the high peaks. The mountains in Switzerland are pretty damned awesome.
Unfortunately the drive home after we left the mountains was quite long. We were held up on the motorway for a while with some roadworks and when we decided to exit to try our luck on the secondary roads we hit serious traffic. We were pretty surprised as it was just normal commuting traffic but it was 7:30pm! Lame for them.
We had a pretty quick dinner and a shower before meeting an old school friend of Grants. He had been working in Germany and Switzerland for about 15 years but still had one of the strongest kiwi accents I have heard. I bought a beer for 9 franks whichI didn't even bother to convert to NZD in my head because I know it would have been about a million dollars, crikey!
Some very tired teddies crawled in to bed about midnight.
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