Auf Wiedersehen Grindelwald!

This morning, it was time to head to Lucerne and bid a teary goodbye to Grindelwald, which had been our home for the last three days. The tranquility that we had experienced here, in Grindelwald, was incredible, and amazing, perhaps only equalled by what we had experienced at Pangong Tso, way back in August 2011. And we were indeed thankful to Neha for recommending Grindelwald as a must-visit destination.

We packed our bags and completed our breakfast - again it was a teary goodbye to the very yummy but amazingly stinky Grindelwald cheese and local cold cuts.

Neeti and I were petrified at the prospect of lugging our bags downhill to Grindelwald station but the front office manager, Jorge, arranged a complimentary drop for us, which was a very big relief.

Our driver, Tamas, it turned out was a Hungarian, who intently kept looking at us through the drive and halfway through, he asked if we were Indian. It turned out Tamas had worked in an Indian restaurant in London before and knew a good deal of Hindi. At the station, he wished us with "chalo bye" greeting. Indeed the world is shrinking and India is making its presence felt.
Grindelwald station was full of people headed to Jungfrau and today they would have got incredible views of the Jungfrau-Eiger mountain ranges, afterall, it was a bright and sunny, cloud-less morning.

The train journey to Interlaken was rather uneventful. At Interlaken, we shifted from the Berner Oberland Bahn line to the SBB line and thankfully we "did" find ramps at Interlaken station which made lugging around our bags a lot more easier.
The onward train ride to Lucerne (Luzern as the Swiss call it in German) was quite scenic and interesting. As earlier, there were quite a few Chinese tourists on board and their sheer numbers actually made us wonder whether we were really in Europe.
Our journey took us through rolling green meadows with quaint chalets, forests, lakes and mountains in the distance. Our train stopped by at small stations - Brienz, Meiringen, Brünig-Hasliberg, Lungern, Kaiserstuhl, Giswil, Sachseln and Sarnen.

At Giswil, an elderly gentleman boarded the train with his little grandson, who was about 5-6 years old. All through the journey to Lucerne, the elderly gentleman endearingly read out stories to his little grandson!

At Lucerne, as we walked down to our hotel, at the very end of Bundesplatz, we noticed a neat cycle track laid out alongside the road and ample parking spaces for cycles. Probably this would be a good place for us to cycle around and we are looking forward to that.