Day 3 & 4

On Wednesday I changed host family; they live in beautiful, lively house in the Bernese Oberland and I felt at home right away. In the afternoon I went for walk up the hill, all the paths have signposts - its nearly impossible to get lost here! While exploring I found a partially restored cave castle called Rothenfluh. It is the only cave castle of its type in Canton Bern that has preserved wall remains; it was first documented in 1298 and was already a ruin in 1577. It was interesting to see that people managed to build this castle in such an inhospitable environment; building a stairway up the cliff must have been a big challenge without modern tools, not
to mention constructing the castle itself!




Today (Thursday) I visited the Trümmelbach falls. They are the only glacier-waterfalls in europe that are accesible even though they are inside a mountain; they drain from 3 glaciers: Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.  In total there are 10 waterfalls plunging down about 100 meters of the cliff; the rushing water, the erroded rock and the patterns in the stone where all very impressive. The water carries 20'200 tons of boulder detritus per year which contribute to the errosion of the rocks.

In the afternoon I wanted to go to Grimselwelt but when I got to Meiringen I found out that the pass was still closed; so I took the train back to Brienz and crossed the Brienzersee with the ferry.