31 July Jungfrau

I had gone with Vikas and his parents to Grindelwald on 4 July, but we hadn’t made it all the way up to the Jungfraujoch. Jungfrau is, I think, the second tallest mountain in Europe. We had left the house at 6am and still did not have enough time to get up to the top since we had to be back for dinner with Marianne and Wälle. I figured that if Analyn and I did it over two days, we’d manage to get to the top.

We had chosen the perfect day – maybe one of the handful of days each year when there are no clouds in the high Alps. We took the train up to Kleine Scheidegg, which is as far as I got a month earlier with Vikas and his family. Then we transferred to another train that took us up, through the Eiger, to Jungfraujoch. Let me ‘splain for a second. Eiger is a huge mountain, recently featured in a film called “North Face” about the Japanese man and two Swiss guides who were the first to climb it about a hundred years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is The North Face. The train, which was probably the offspring of at least one parent who was a funicular, went through the rock face of Eiger, occasionally stopping to let us climb out. Tunnels led us from the tracks to the actual face of Eiger where you could look out through windows at the towns clustered in the valleys below.

Jungfrau, of course, means virgin – probably a reference to the mountain’s snowy peak. But who knows what those old Swiss were really thinking. A joch is a yoke as the train lets out on a bridge, saddle, or yoke between Jungfrau and Mönsch (Monk). The three peaks are near each other in the same range, sibling mountains I guess you’d call them.

After disembarking, the crowds move along cold tunnels to elevators. It’s over 4100 meters, which, I think is well over 12,000 feet. I don’t recall ever having been so high, so I definitely felt a bit woozy. The elevators shot us up another 150m and then we were at the observation platform. If you’re not afraid of heights and are smart enough to have remembered your sunglasses, this is a great place. Unfortunately, I was blinded and clung to the railings.

For the people seeking adventure, there was zip lining, a glacier hike, and an ice cave filled with ice sculptures. They call Jungfraujoch “Top of Europe,” but they might as well call it top of the world. This artificial Alpine peak oasis may be the most international place in the world after Antartica. There were Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Americans, Middle Easterners, Americans and every type of European you could shake an icicle at. And they all wanted Swiss cowbells, plush St. Bernards, and postcards – or maybe a 8 franc half liter of Coke – it helps the world sing in perfect harmony. Anyway, it was a zoo.

Analyn wanted me to take a picture of her hugging Europe. It was a brilliant idea in concept, but a bit hard to execute.

We were due back in San Nazzaro for dinner, so we headed back to the train grudgingly. Little did we realize, however, that half the world also wanted to return down the mountain at the same time. We stood in a pushing crowd for 45 minutes waiting for a train. When we finally got one, it only had standing room. This train, for some reason, took twice as long getting down as the other one had taken going up. After walking around for a couple hours, then in the shoving line, and then trying to stand on a train going down inside a mountain, by the time we got to Kleine Scheidegg, we were pretty pooped. And then we still needed the other train to take us down to Grindelwald. Of course, that was all just a prelude to the three hour drive back home over the Sustenpass. We got back to San Nazzaro too late to properly enjoy Wälle’s amazing melted cheese dinner.