Trip to Heaven – Part 2

By 7.30 am the Airbus A720 took off from T5 and gained altitude steadily. I felt asleep as soon as I enjoyed the take off. After about 1 hour time I was awaked by my friend to have my breakfast. I usually won’t have anything in flight except cookies. I just had coffee and slept for another 30 mins before we got a announcement about landing. It was a short fly to Zurich, about 1 hour and 50 mins. We had a safe landing in Zurich at around 9.20 am local time.

We took an underground train to reach the immigration area which is one station away from the landing area. We cleared the immigration without any problem and were out of Zurich airport soon as we don’t have any bags checked in. As per the itinerary we went to the Zurich railway station which is just opposite to the airport immigration point and took a Swiss rail pass for 4 days. In Swiss all the places are accessible via train and cheapest way to get along is to get a Rail pass. You can go anywhere in Swiss using this rail pass and some places you may be asked get tickets additional to your rail pass however you will get 25 to 50 % concession on those tickets.

It will work out very cheaply if you get a group rail pass for 4, 8 or 22 days accordingly to your travel plan rather than getting tickets for individual journeys. Our plan for day one is to visit Rhine falls which is the Switzerland’s largest waterfall and then travel to Interlaken where we booked our hotel for 3 days. We took a train from Zurich airport to a place called “Winterthur” and from there to Rhine falls.

We were amused to see the quality of the trains in Swiss. There are 2 decks and a restaurant in almost all trains. Cleanliness is the other name to Switzerland. One more important thing to mention about Swiss train service is their punctuality. All the trains start dot on time and will reach the destination (all the stations in between) on time without a delay of even half a minute. If your station is expected to arrive at 6.52 pm then you can get down from the train @ 6.52 pm without even seeing the station name (Provided your watch is set to local time correctly).

Coming back to the waterfall, we heard the roaring sound of the falls once we got down from the train and we started walking towards the falls. It was really a wonderful sight of seeing one of the biggest waterfalls in Europe and we all thoroughly enjoyed the scenic view of that place. We took a boat ride in that falls and had nice time in Rhine falls. The climate was too good on that particular day. It was bright and sunny so we had a great view of the falls and entire place around the falls.

After having spent more than 3 hours in the falls we decide to head towards the hotel which was 2 hours travel from Zurich. We came all the way to Zurich airport and then took a train to central railway station. We got all the connections trains as planned and reached Interlaken by 6 in the evening. We got down one station before our actual destination (thanks to the female who gave us wrong direction and special thanks to Umesh who wished to explore Swiss by walking all the way to the hotel) and walked more than 3 miles to reach the hotel by 7 pm in the evening.

We checked in and refreshed ourselves before rushing to the dinner table. After a good dinner we planned for the next day sight seeing places and hit the bed by 11 pm. We decided to catch the 6.05 am train to visit Jungfrau next day.

To be continued…