Beyond Interlaken.
A private tour of the Lauterbrunnen valley, from Zurich and back in a day.
The Bernese Oberland day is Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald with a private driver from Zurich, out and back inside about ten and a half hours. Seventy-two waterfalls stand in that one valley, and the day is built around the ones you can walk to rather than the coach stops above Interlaken. The summit railway is optional, and most of the hours are spent below it.
- Duration
- About ten and a half hours, Zurich to Zurich.
- Pickup
- Your hotel door, early, with roughly two hours of driving to the valley.
- Group size
- One household, one driver, one guide for the whole of it.
- Season
- Year round, and in winter the falls freeze where they land while climbers work up them.
Most people see the Bernese Oberland through a coach window. Interlaken, a photograph, back on the road by two. The valley they drive past is the one worth the day.
Lauterbrunnen carries seventy-two waterfalls in a single valley. Staubbach falls almost three hundred metres off the cliff above the village. Trummelbach runs inside the mountain, ten falls cut through the rock, draining the ice of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau. In winter the water freezes where it falls and climbers work their way up it while you watch from the road.
From there the valley opens at Grindelwald, and the rest of the day is a matter of preference.
A full day out of Zurich and back, about ten and a half hours, in a private driver who knows the valley and is not reading it off a map. Tickets and gondolas included according to the route you choose.
Written about this day
If the summit is the point rather than the valley, Jungfraujoch is the same region taken vertically. Both sit among the private tours that leave Zurich in the morning. Seen from above rather than from the road, the same ice is an hour away by helicopter.