We left Friday night for Interlaken and arrived around 11pm. We found our hostel, Balmers Herberge, which was an incredible hostel by the way. If you ever go to Interlaken (which I would totally recommend), you have to stay there. It has its own bar/club (basically the only one in the city) and all of the people are really nice (and speak English). We checked out the club Friday night, but we were all pretty tired and were planning a big day for Saturday, so we didn't stay too long. We also met our roommate, a New Zealander named Alex, who was really cool, so we hung out with him a lot all weekend.
We got up Saturday morning pretty early to go book an activity for the day. We were considering paragliding, but the receptionist said it was really windy and that paragliding probably wouldn't be happening that day. Alex had told us he was going canyon jumping that afternoon at 1pm, so we decided to sign up for that. Only three of us decided to go while everyone else just planned on walking around and exploring the city. We had all morning before the canyon jumping, so we walked down the river to a lake, which was gorgeous. I can't even imagine people getting to live there and see that view every day, it's incredible.
We walked back to the hostel in time to get picked up for canyon jumping. There was a group of about 15 or so going, mostly Americans. I met a girl from New York who is studying abroad in Dublin. And there was a group of about 8 from somewhere else up north. It was a 30 minute bus ride to where we were going, and then we had a 15 minute hike up to the jump spot. The hike was pretty rough - very steep, with ice everywhere. Sometimes it was all ice, which was impossible to walk on. But we made it up. And then it hit me that I had signed up to jump off a canyon. But I still had a while before it was my turn, which didn't really help my nerves at all. With canyon jumping, you're attached to a rope by a harness, and you literally just jump off a platform into a canyon. You free fall for about 150 feet, then the rope catches and you swing across the canyon.
About 10 people went before me, so I got to watch the entire process and I was pretty ready to go when it was my turn. One girl knew she wouldn't be able to jump on her own, so she told the guy he was going to have to push her. We didn't know she had told him that, so we just saw him grab her harness and shove her off the platform, which kind of freaked us out. So once you jump off, the free fall is fine for the very beginning. But then you're still falling. My stomach dropped and I could barely breathe. I've jumped off the top of docks into the lake before, which is a pretty long fall, but that was nothing compared to this. And you're jumping straight towards a bunch of rocks. It was the scariest thing I've ever done. The girl studying in Dublin had just been skydiving the day before and she said canyon jumping was scarier. But it was an incredible experience, definitely glad I did it. There are only 3 places in the world where you can canyon jump: Interlaken, New Zealand, and somewhere in Africa. I figured it would be my only chance, so I went for it.
(I can't get the picture to rotate for some reason, but you get the idea)
We got back from canyon jumping around 5pm and met up with the rest of the group. We decided to do a fondue dinner that the hostel was having, but I'm not a big fondue or cheese eater, so I just ordered a burger (which was reallyy good, I miss real burgers). We hit up the hostel's first happy hour before dinner (6-7pm), ate, played some cards, then hit up the second happy hour (9-10pm). We had a pretty big group since we met up with some other GTLers there, and we got in trouble for making too much noise, so we headed down to the club after that. It was a fun night, but we were still in bed by 1am (we did start at 6pm though, so its understandable).
Sunday we got up, ate breakfast, and checked out of the hostel. Most of the group decided to take the noon train back to Metz, but I stayed later with two other people and we took the 4pm train. The three of us took a bus to the other lake that we hadn't seen and had a picnic. It was by far the most scenic picnic I've ever had in my life - 1) sitting by a beautiful lake and 2) the Swiss Alps surrounding it. After that we just walked around for a while, then headed back to the hostel to grab our stuff and go to the train station. We made it back to Metz around 9pm. It was an amazing weekend. Interlaken is definitely one of the coolest and most beautiful places I've been to.
Coming up: I leave in two days for Dublin for St. Patrick's Day and Amsterdam for the weekend!
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