The Niesenbahn and Spiez

On Sunday, July 19th, after breakfast (our usual Interlaken breakfast of muesli with milk and fruit, orange juice and instant coffee, with half a nussgipfli (a croissant filled with hazelnut paste). Then we went to the station and bought tickets to the Niesen Kulm.

The Niesen (which, oddly, means "Sneeze" in the local dialect) is a prominent mountain in the Interlaken area, but I had never heard of it before. It is the northernmost point of the range that separates the Kander and Simmen valleys. Old (and new) pictures of Unterseen's quaint Old Town show it in the distance,

while it towers over Spiez and the Lake of Thun like a dark pyramid. In fact, the ads for the Niesenbahn funicular call the mountain "the Swiss Pyramid." On the mountain there was a display of copies of artistic representations of the mountain. The painter Paul Klee, himself Swiss, seems to have seen its shape as a sort of mystical abstraction.

We took the train to Spiez, where we boarded a local train in the direction of Brig. The first stop on the line, a few kilometers south of Spiez, is Muelenen, where the train stops only by request. The directions in the train as to how to do this are pretty clear: as soon as the train has left Spiez you can push a button by the door and a green light comes on, then, when the train arrives at Muelenen, it stops and you get off and pass under the tracks and follow the signs to the Niesenbahn.

This is one of the older, slower funiculars around, over a hundred years old, and goes up the mountain in two stages, taking half an hour, running every thirty minutes. In our car was a very gregarious old (at least 80) Swiss man, named Erwin, who cracked everyone up with his imitation of an alphorn and other musical instruments (performing James Bond music, "Caravans," etc.).

At the top, as with all Swiss funiculars, there was a restaurant, where we had lunch on the terrace--again I had bratwurst in onion sauce with roesti--not as good as in Basel.

We walked up to the viewing platform, from which we had a beautiful view, pretty far to the west, east, and north, though there was a little bit of haze.

Along the way were boards telling about the geography, zoology and history of the Niesen. A hotel and restaurant had been built there in the 1850s, when the only way to the top was to walk or be carried up by mule or sedan chair. The building of the funicular in 1910 had no doubt increased the number of visitors.

Looking up the Simmental (the valley of the river Simmen) we couldn't see up to Zweisimmen, where the ancestors of one of Mary Joy's church cantors had come from, or beyond that, not many miles, to Sankt Stefan, where Mary Joy's ancestors had lived before being drawn down to Unterseen for better opportunities.

We went back down to Mulenen (by funicular, not by mule or sedan chair), and since the train back to Spiez ran about every half hour, we took a walk into the tiny, unexciting village and back to the stations. To stop the train, as an illustrated sign pointed out, you would not stand by the tracks and try to wave it down, but would push a button, and the fact that the next train had been notified that you were waiting would be indicated by a red light turning off and a green light turning on.

We had considered going on to Thun by lake ferry, but decided that the schedules wouldn't work out--so instead, we would take the train from Spiez back to Interlaken. This left us with a little time to explore Spiez. It is a very pleasant lake resort, with a small, gardened castle that has art exhibitions.

Walking back to the station from the lakeside was a bit of a climb, and we might have had a little trouble finding our way if we hadn't received a nice, unsolicited offer of help from a couple of local men, who walked with us nearly the whole way.

It started to rain, pretty heavily, while we were on the train. A Chinese woman across from us was taking picture after picture of the lake and the mountains on the other side, through the rain, with her cellphone. The twenty-minute ride from Spiez to Interlaken West is, indeed, the most beautiful short train ride I've ever been on, and gives me a wonderful feeling of homecoming whenever we approach Interlaken for the first time again after a year or years away.

The rain had finished when we met Albert again and walked to dinner at the Cafe de Paris, on the Marktplatz. I don't remember exactly what we had, but it was good, and we spent a pleasant time with Albert.