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It’s a nice day, so we bought lunch from the bakery and had a walk in the valley. The first signs of autumn are appearing in the colours of the trees.

As we walk we hear a loud ‘crump’ from above. Some brave soul has jumped from the cliff, enjoyed a few seconds of free-fall, and then presumably hoped his parachute opens. Luckily, it did.

This somewhat hazardous sport is called BASE jumping, and Lauterbrunnen, with its near-vertical cliffs is one of most popular places in the world to do it. The jumpers are usually in groups, and sure enough a few seconds later another one jumped.

Whatever you think of the sanity of doing this, they certainly provide some entertainment for us walkers. Dinner at the Eiger with Emily and Vicky tonight.

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We’ve had two days of almost nonstop rain, and today has been overcast but dry. It’s cold. This evening however, the clouds suddenly disappeared.

All that rain fell as snow above about 2300 metres, so the Jungfrau looks splendid. Val had her hair done this afternoon, and I tried to silence our gurgling central heating. It’s still a bit noisy, but eventually I’ll get all the air out of the radiators.

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We spent most of yesterday in Interlaken, with another session to help me decide how to proceed with my eye treatment. Val got a nice shot of Interlaken castle. These days it’s used as council offices.

Big queues at the pharmacy. Everyone wants to go out on Saturday night, and to get into a bar you need a negative Corona test. Vaccine take-up hasn’t been great here, particularly amongst the young.

Emily’s sister Vicky is here for a few days. Val picked her up from the station, and she came round for dinner.

Emily was playing football at the nearby town of Steffisburg. The final score – Steffisburg 1, Interlaken 5, meant Emily was in very good spirits when she met us later in Rocks.

Poor weather was forecast for today, and sure enough it’s pouring with rain and very cold. Up at Scheidegg and Männlichen it’s snowing hard. The first signs of winter.

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Our plan to circumnavigate the lake continues today. We catch the bus to Leissigen, where our last walk ended. Lots of fruit trees here.

A bench with a view. It must be lunchtime.

Eventually we arrive at Därligen. It’s a very small village (population about 400), but the setting is lovely.

We caught the bus back to Interlaken, and queued-up for another antigen test so that we can have get a Corona certificate so we can eat out and go to the pub. Later this afternoon we learned that starting on Monday, the Swiss will be happy to recognise our U.K. vaccine certificates. Nice.

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Val has her German class this afternoon, but it’s a nice morning, so we can grab a quick walk. The cable car takes us up to Männlichen. We had expected it to be pretty cold up there, but it turned out to be quite mild, particularly in the sunshine. We walked around to Kleine Scheidegg, which takes a little more than an hour.

Vaccine certificates are the topic of many conversations at the moment. You need one if you want to visit a bar or restaurant. Swiss and other European certificates work fine, but none of the others are recognised by the app which checks them. This is a huge problem for the proprietors, who certainly don’t want to turn away customers. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out – the Swiss hate losing money. I hate not being able to get a beer too, so I’ve no doubt a solution will be forthcoming before long.

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Last night we hiked up into the forest above Wengen, laden with meat, bread, potatoes, beer and wine. There are thousands of public barbecues in Switzerland, and even here in tiny Wengen we have three. Emily had already got the fire going when we arrived.

We had a really good feast, and it was dark by the time we hiked home.

This morning we’re doing another section of our walk around lake Thun. We begin at Faulensee, and first we need to climb high above the lake. The views make the climb worthwhile.

Our destination is the village of Leissigen. It’s a couple of hours walk.

On our way home we popped into the Gemeinde (local council) and picked up our new residence permits. While we were waiting for the train we bumped into Robert and Jeanne, who are here for a couple of weeks after an 18 month absence. We enjoyed a beer together on the Eiger terrace.

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The big day has arrived, and it’s the 28th running of the toughest marathon in the world. The route starts down at the airfield in Interlaken, and winds its way up to Eigergletscher via Lauterbrunnen and Wengen.

There are about 8000 competitors this year – numbers were limited owing to the pandemic. Here’s Jana, the Estonian running machine.

And Tim, trying to catch her. She eventually beat him by 0.3 seconds.

The winner was a Colombian called Jose Cardona. He ran to Eigergletscher in 3 hours and 5 minutes.