Switzerland: Exploring, Traveling and Takeaways
Interlaken, Switzerland 2016
In January of 2016 I took a bus from Rome to Interlaken with more time than money. I left the umbrella pines and Roman winter as I watched Italy slowly hand me over to tall ranges and flat plains.
By the time I was in the Alps the road was doing switchbacks. The villages had wooden balconies. Somewhere past Milan the light went thin and blue-white. I put my face against the glass and slept badly for the rest of it. I was alone, which means you end up with whoever else is around. We arrived and the valley floor was flat and green with a lake at each end and maybe two kilometers of town in the middle.
The lakes are different colors. Thun, to the west, is a deep blue that behaves like water. Brienz, to the east, is a milky turquoise that does not. I assumed it was the light until somebody told me the meltwater feeding Brienz comes off glaciers carrying rock flour and silt ground so fine by the ice that it never sinks. It just hangs there and throws the light back.
I stayed on the east side, near Brienz and the turquoise lake was my morning walk.
Cold enough that I could see my breath alongside the mist lying flat on the surface of the water and the far shore coming through it in pieces. Bare trees along the edge, sharp against the pale blue. Snow all the way down the flanks of the mountains and the valley grass still green underneath it.
There was a small dark sailboat moored just off the shore that I passed most mornings, sitting in water so clear and so blue it almost looked like it was floating.
The mountains layered near ridges dark and solid, the far ones dissolved into successively paler blue until the last of them were barely there.
In town, the main boulevard is the Höheweg, and it runs the length of the valley between the two train stations, hotels and shops down one side and the enormous open green of the Höhematte down the other. The Höhematte stays empty on purpose. It has been protected from development since the nineteenth century, which is why a town this size still has a meadow at its center with an unobstructed view south to the Jungfrau.
It is also where the paragliders land. You notice the colored wings coming down over the rooftops in slow spirals.
All afternoon. Interlaken is one of the greatest paragliding towns on earth for reasons that become obvious the moment you look up: you have height on all sides, you have a wide flat field to land in, and you have the entire Bernese Oberland to look at on the way down.
There is a moment right at the launch where you are running downhill toward nothing and then the ground drops away and the running becomes irrelevant and you are just sitting, suspended.
The food was melted cheese and chocolate all day. Arriving at the table still bubbling in the pan, and the goopiness it makes when you lift the bread and for dessert chocolate from windows adorned like jewelry.
Interlaken is a town people pass through on the way to the famous peaks.
In my photos every single one of them is water in liquid or solid form and a quiet street early in the morning. Interlaken is a town people pass through on the way to the famous peaks.
Aloreign is the creative work of Alondra: an Indigenous American and Mexican photographer, writer, and therapist based in San Diego.
This is my create space for photography, writing, and everything that doesn’t fit nearly into one category. I’d love to connect.