So this weekend was the much-anticipated IAESTE Ski Weekend.
After finishing work on Friday, I went to Karla’s Goodbye Apero for a little while and then had to get a train to Les Diablerets. The journey takes 3 hours and 40 minutes, and after each subsequent train change there were more and more IAESTE peeps. At about 10 we finally got to our destination, and upon arriving to the chalet we got some Glühwein, or rather Vin Chaud because we were in the French-speaking part.
This Saturday I went to Technorama in Winterthur on an IAESTE event. It was sort of like the Swiss version of Questacon. Check out the video below for some of the random things that I filmed.
The Lightning display was a fairly big let-down for the most part (it went for about 30mins but the only cool bits were in that video). But the Tesla coils were definitely worth the wait.
The hiking weekend began with the steepest bus ride in Europe. It really was quite steep in places, made the bus ride up to the Remarkables in New Zealand tame in comparison. Because it was only one lane the bus driver was constantly hitting the horn to let cars know we were coming round the corner. The swiss post buses have a REALLY loud and long horn tune.
And then began the hiking.
I have been very busy lately with assignments, German lessons and traveling, so haven’t had time to update this in a while. On the weekend before last, I went to the Jura region, which is in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.
First up, we went to the underground mills in Le Locle. They were used in the 1800s to make flour, and used the water that flowed through the cave to turn the mill.
Saturday I got the train to Visp to begin the IAESTE Zermatt Weekend, which very unusally for a swiss train arrived about 5 mins late. From Visp we went on a cog train up to Zermatt, which was a lovely town at the foot of the Matterhorn.
We got a cable car up to the top of the Klein Matterhorn which must be an epic ski resort in winter because they had runs open in the middle of Summer and there was a fair few people up there skiing.
This weekend I went on an IAESTE trip to Lichtenstein. It was a hard decision this weekend whether or not to go to Lichtenstein or stay and go the the street parade in Zurich on Saturday night. In the end I’m glad I went away for the weekend, although the street parade would still have been a sight to see, but I had a great time in Lichtenstein. As we waited for the train to Sargans on Saturday morning, we even saw a few people that were in dressed in costumes for that night.
On Monday afternoon I did the 007 Bungee Jump off the Verzasca Dam.
We caught a train to Tenero then hiked up towards the Dam. When I first saw it way in the background I thought - that is huge. But once we got close the nerves dissapeared and I was just excited mostly.
We had to wait for a fair while before we could do our jump because there was a film crew filming for a German travel show.
We caught a train from Zurich to Airolo, which took a few hours. Along the way we played Chinese Whist (what we just called hearts at Ergon) whilst going though the Swiss Alps. Some of the views were pretty cool, but there was lots of tunnels, and tunnels are boring.
In Airolo we got rental bikes and started a 40km (something like that) bike ride to Biasca. It was mostly downhill through the Swiss Alps but was still tiring by the end.
Whitewater rafting was really fun, but I must say it would have to be better in Australia purely because the river we rafted down consisted of 4 degree glacial water.
After wet-suiting up, we caught a bus up into the mountains where we were told about all the safety rules and told what to do for each of the commands from our guide. Our guide “Dougie” was from NZ and quite a funny lad.
