Tuesday So called 22 october 2013

I think I am starting to smell like a swiss cheese… Seriously every day I am sure I have eaten cheese and it is now starting to come out in unsavoury ways. Tonight for dinner we had rye bread grilled with salami and swiss cheese… arghhhh so much cheese… the house stinks so despite is being rather later in the evening and the heater is probably on (although set to 16 degrees) I have the windows wide open. Note to self Swiss cheese grilled does NOT smell tasty more like old socks similar to the fondue I smelt the other night.. So the question is do we do the all you can eat Fondue tomorrow night? hmm have to think about that, even Rosti was mostly cheese based!

Also my constitution is a little bit uh hum delicate, so we had a late start today, its a very nice toilet we have! :) So no complaints from that corner. Anyway it let me learn how to use Drupal as a tool rather than just posting away like a mad thing and I now have lovely images to go with my endless warbling on about wonderful views.

So we got out the door late, the weather once again was suppose to be cloudy and showery.. It wasn't the day was autumn glory seriously it was amazing. Wilderswil is apparently often overlooked in favour of the higher alps so I decided that we would simply walk to two ruined castles today. The first was up the valley a bit Rothenfluh Ruins and the second Unspunnen castle down the valley - easy right - might even have time to head into Interlaken by foot or grab some geocaches.

So we set out along the river and headed to the first ruin, I'd read that the short path up was awful. Well it wasn't it was steep and rocky but was also rather short. So the story of Rothenfluh goes something like, there was a rich iron vein, so they built a castle on the cliff face, the only one in Switzerland, it was three stories high although the top story was really only for sleeping. It had two rooms an outer chamber possibly open to the sky and an inner with the three floors and walls about a meter thick. To get there you climbed up through the forrest on a steep track and then onto a steel staircase bolted onto the cliff face. It was also the first geocache of the day. So far we were one to a good start to our walk.

To end the story, the lords got rich on the Iron and of course the 'castle' couldn't really be taken so they lived there quite happily for a couple hundred years but eventually the last two brothers got into a fight with one killing the other. He then went into exile and didn't leave an heir. The castle hideously placed up a cliff fell into disrepair around the 1600. However in the 1900 the Swiss army and the local council set about saving the last little bits - hence the lovely steel stair case.

The next ruin was only about 2 km away but took us about five hours to get there!

Yes five hours, Mcvittiee dark chocolate biscuits saved us again, as of course we didn't pack a real lunch did we!

Anyway the path from Rothenfluh, led across the hill side coming rapidly upon a bridge crossing a ravine, wasn't that deep but a bit daunting. We kept on the path and soon joined into another more major path which was an exercise path.. yes high on this hill the swiss run around doing exercise.. we didn't well not yet anyway. Checking the trusty iPad we realised we were close to another cache and spent about 15 minutes walking up another hill only to discover the cache we thought was up definitely at that look out was actually on the other side of the river.

We crossed the river on a little covered bridge and noted we were at the old mill- interesting spot after floods in the late 90's they closed the 'swimming pool' made it a frog habitat and turned the gardens into an experiment- heavily fertilised monocultured area v's native alpine grasses without fertilising. Being typical swiss they noted that the spot had too much shade to really show the difference properly. Anyway we proceeded to spend 20 minutes searching for the cache.. it has to be there and it was. A sanctioned cache it had been built onto the building and we were searching like usual looking for all the spots it could be hidden rather than a fairly obvious shelf!

Another interesting thing at the old mill was the bee house. We took lots of photo's bigger than a garden shed. The bees though looked black! They didn't bother us too much unlike the european wasps which are everywhere!! Getting back on the path - initially we were following the Burgenweg (castle Path) but as we left we saw a path called Weg Der Liebe, which was the name of another cache, so we started up the path thinking that the cache would be at a view point. An hour later and we were still hauling uphill, picking the last of the raspberries (sadly very few) and blackberries as we went. The Weg Der Liebe is a meditation route with some guided sayings in German and English on boards as you go. - It was non denomination and kinda cool.. http://www.weg-der-liebe.ch/ - it really did take the three hours especially as we were going backwards, that slog uphill rewarded us with impressive views down the valley to Lake Brienze and Interlaken. The downhill section was actually easier than that first uphill and we were rather thankful. We did complete all the stations backwards starting at seven, the cache was at station number 1! and was the most cleverly hidden cache I'd seen in fact I wouldn't have seen it except it was slightly out of place, but it looked just like a rock, well it was a rock, screwed to a container embedded in the bank!

By now we had been walking five hours but we had more in us as we hadn't arrived at the second ruin yet! and there were two more caches we could pick up! So off we trotted in the warm afternoon. It was oddly warm to be honest, we had both set out with a couple layers and rain coats (it was meant to rain remember!) Even now with the window open to let out the stinky cheese smell its not cold.

Anyway, we reached the next castle as the light was starting to bleed out of the day. We also failed to find the last cache, as we searched the ruins a couple runners arrived tagged to door and one stopped for a brief chat - He let us know that the warm breeze was the result of the high and low pressure systems colliding and that it meant BAD weather, his advice was to get out of the area tomorrow and find a nice museum to go to.

With that advice on board and now having been walking for six hour including hunting for caches it was time to head back to our home for the week. And now I'm back to dinner stinky cheese. Tasted ok and with a hot shower Pj's on I have caught up on my blogs minus the lake district walks! Hey whats a five day hole right?

So tomorrow we are off to Bern in the morning after 0900 as I have discovered yet again that iKaruS is a night owl. getting him moving is difficult even on holidays!