Fourth day in Swiss

11/8/08
The morning we decided to take it comfortably to regain the energy after the hectic Jungfrojaun mountain trip. That made us skip the walk to the lake. We thought we will have a deko of the lake while traveling by train.

As I had mentioned the place is endowed with two mega lakes, one Thunersee and another brinezersee. We had crossed Thunersee while entering into Interlaken town now while coming out of the town and traveling to Lucerne we had to cross the Brinezersee. Even if we had strolled we could have done so only in a corner of the lake. It took more than 15teen minutes to travel by train along one lake at a good speed. To have such huge glacial pure water lakes in midst of Alps is a real boon to the place to promote tourism and the people here have done a superb job of it. In spite of all these developments and conveniences they have retained the environment absolutely pollution free by opting for electrical emission free rail roads and houses around cutely made of logwood jelling with the natural setting.

We left hotel Oberland after our usual fill of inhouse breakfast. But by now the same menu was paling off a bit.. Having the breakfast , collected the 50 franc deposit for getting the kettle and left to the station. We caught the Interlaken east 10.04 train to Luzern and settled nicely for 2 hr travel along various lakes. We were now drastically climbing down from Interlaken to Luzern down to the plain grounds. The chill was also pretty less. We packed in out cats, wore half sleeves and the weather was increasingly becoming like India Feb, march weather.

Our train now was cruising thorugh another glacier lakecalled Lungersee ( the post name see seems to denote lake)

As we reached Luzerne the scene was getting little more prosaic. The leisurely country houses and meadows were giving way to more urban setting with multi storey structures, factories etc. We felt we are moving to one of Indian cities but a bit more organized and clean.
Getting out of the station Lucerne for a while we felt a bit stranded with all the unfamiliar anglo saxon crowd moving around. Now we had to get our moorings in the city and find our NH hotel Lucerne. Asking me to take a of the luggage Venkat went in search of Tourist information office and after a while came armed with details.

Our hotel was near by but we require a transport to reach there. We opted for the bus though it may entail for a little bit of walk to the hotel;. Here buses are large elongated ones each one like a railway compartment. It has automatic opening and closing.

We located our No.1 bus and found the ride was free due to our Euro pass . On reaching the hotel we had to wait for an hr. for our room to get vacant , so sitting in the reception frontage we went through Lucerne details and marked the places to visit.

Lucerne has its huge lake right in the middle of the town, its main feature and lot of ole Architecture buildings – Gothic style.

Our room was in the 5th floor the room space getting increasingly smaller but neat one with a sit out in the front. After setting our luggage and having our lunch we decided to move out to see the city as the sun was shining and weather was good.

The first thing we saw was the lake close by. There were lot of boats there for single users and some beautiful white swans moving in the lake. After jaunting along the lake we then went to the long wooden bridge build in medieval times with a stone cellar in the middle of the canal whree prisinars of the war used to be kept. There were lot of painting too depicting the old wars.