Exploring Thun

Today was chillier and more dreary than yesterday, so we decided to stick with indoor activities. I had to put on pants and a jacket! Definitely a big change from the weather in Italy. We checked the webcams on top of some of the mountains in the area, and they were all super cloudy and visibility was basically zero. We’re hoping tomorrow we’ll have better luck and that we can go up to Schilthorn and/or Harder Kulm to really see the Alps up close!

We decided to go in the opposite direction today from yesterday. We took a train to a nearby city, Thun. They had a couple of castles and some caves we wanted to check out. Our first stop was the Oberhofen Castle. It’s a beautiful building! We enjoyed checking out all the rooms, and it was a lot more interactive than we expected. By this point, we’ve been in a few castles! They showed what the castle looked like in its heyday and had some neat things you could interact with. The museum path even led us through a “secret” passage in the castle! Really, it was a servants passage, but the door was very hidden and it was neat walking out of it and realizing. The grounds were also very nice!

After we finished up at Oberhofen, we hopped on the bus and took it to St. Beatus Caves. The story behind these caves is pretty interesting. These are one of the 10 largest caves in Switzerland, and about 14km (8.6 in American) have been explored/charted, but only about 1 km is available for visitors to explore. We could see waterfalls inside the caves, along with grottos, gorges, stalactites and stalagmites! It was also about 40 degrees inside. Brr! The caves are named after a guy who is thought to be a legendary monk or hermit, and he’s revered as a saint. At some point in his life, he made a home out of the caves that are now known as St. Beatus Caves, and I guess tradition says that he fought a dragon at the caves, and lived there until his death. He’s also known as the first Apostle of Switzerland.

By the time we finished exploring the caves, it was getting close to 5pm, and we still wanted to check out one more castle, Thun Castle, a 12th century castle. It closes at 5pm, and I was not confident we’d make it in time because we were beholden to the bus schedule and traffic… but Kiley said let’s try!! So try we did, and we made it there with about 15 minutes left. We had to hustle up a loooooong staircase and I’m sure the woman at the ticket desk thought we were crazy for even trying to get in at 4:45. With a warning of “this closes at 5pm”, she gave us our tickets and let us go inside. We did a kamikaze visit, skipping some stuff, taking photos of informational text to read later, and going straight up to the top to see the castle turrets. We said to each other, “we’ll YouTube this later!” So not our best museum visit… but we got to see at least some of it! It’s quite a small castle/museum and would probably have only taken us half a hour if we were taking our time anyway. I did like that they had some modern art installations throughout the castle, though!

When we finished at this castle, the rain was finally coming down really good. We donned our rain jackets and set off to find some dinner. We ended up going to an Italian place (because I guess we didn’t have enough Italian food in the last week… 😜). After dinner, it was still raining and cold, so we decided to just head back to Interlaken and relax for the rest of the evening. We’re hanging out in the lobby/breakfast area in the hostel. This hostel is pretty decent, I’d stay here again. The rooms are no frills, but the beds are comfortable and the rooms are clean.

Wish us good luck with the weather… we’re really hoping the fog and clouds clear out so we can go up some mountains!!

As always, more later…