It remains the best hike I’ve ever done

It’s 5.30 a.m. and the train to Interlaken Ost departs from number 8 at Bern station. We wanted to take the first train to the gateway of the Swiss mountains.

We boarded the train and I was looking for a cup of coffee on board. When we neared the city of Interlaken, the beautiful mountains and lakes of Thun and Spiez appeared through the windows of the train.

Our train was a little bit delayed, and our transfer time was only 5 minutes — an impossible one it seemed. But as we stepped on the platform we saw the train to Grindelwald still waiting for more passengers.

We ran to the right platform (1 that is) and we were able to board the classic yellow Berner Oberland train to Grindelwald Terminal.

Do you know what I love about these trains? You can open the windows and hang out of them — which allows me to take beautiful photos and videos. In an area like that, it’s a gift.

As the train was going pretty fast, I was surprised that I still got a few sharp photos out of it using a very high shutter speed on my camera.

Just look at how the sun shines over the mountains as it was rising for that day.

I was dressed for a warm summer hike: shorts, and a fitness t-shirt. When I checked the temperature for the Eiger Glacier, where we were heading to hike down from, it was set to 5 degrees Celsius/ 41 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s cold!

That mountain is where we’re going, the Eiger Glacier at 2300 meters above sea level.

So then we arrived on top of the Eiger Glacier and were ready to hike down to Grindelwald.

Last year, we did the hike from the same location but just to the mountain town of Alpiglen which only has a restaurant and a railway station for people like us who didn’t want to hike further down.

This year was different.

We doubled the 6km hike to 12km and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest.

The first part of the hike was nice and cool. You can see that the sun isn’t completely set and that wasn’t ideal for photography because it was very dark and I had to adjust for that.

But it was a nice experience seeing all the soft colors cast over the mountains.

All landscape photos are taken using a Canon R8 Mirrorless camera combined with a 24–105mm f/4 lens, which is perfect for travel and landscape photography. I wrote an article about that on my blog recently.

The colors of the sky and the grass brought me back to last year. It felt so relaxing, and calming — that’s what the mountains do to me.

As if I belonged there.

On our way down we stumbled on a couple that got off track and started feeding some sheep. My sister had the brilliant idea to follow them (and get off the track as well). The sheep were cute and after we got back on track I shot this beautiful photo of the two.

I think that’s my best photo ever. At least from this trip, and many more photos will follow — if you’re interested, don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and Threads.

Everything was going well until we almost arrived at the mountain town of Alpiglen — then I slipped away and hurt my leg. It wasn’t super bad but I had blood all over it and it wasn’t nice either.

I cleaned it with the last water I had left in my bottle and we continued walking towards the train station where we could visit a toilet since it’s all mountain road.

Last year, this was the finish — now it was just halfway.

We prepared ourselves by eating something and then getting ready to finish the final part of the hike. We still had around 6 kilometers to go as it started to get greener, less rocks, and more trees/plants.

We had the cows last year, the sheep on some plateau off-track, and then when we were almost down in Grindelwald, this little black cat passed us.

Super cute!

After going to Switzerland for 4 years now every summer, I noticed that there aren’t many cats on the streets. In the Netherlands, wherever you go, there will always be cats.

Not in Switzerland.

Maybe more in the countryside and the mountain villages than in cities, but I haven’t seen many of them.

So this was a blessing.

If you haven’t noticed we love cats.

Another blessing we encountered just after the first one, was a freshwater tap point — it was so good to finally get new cold water. We stood there for about 15 minutes drinking and refilling our bottles before continuing.

And it seemed like such a reward to finally see the town of Grindelwald getting closer.

We crossed the last bridge before entering town again, the Swiss air coming from this river kissed our faces and we immediately felt cooler.

And then after more than 4 hours, we were back where we started. All tired, all warm and sweaty as you can see in the photos above.

But it was all worth it. We enjoyed every second of it.

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