Karen's Swiss Adventures: Titlis, Ice Grotto and Cable Cars

Last Saturday we took the car to the town of Engelberg which is situated on the foot of the mountain Titlis.

View of a mountain (not Titlis) from the parking lot in Engelberg.

A real mountain, with real snow and real people skiing. In order to get up to the top of Titlis, we had to board three different cable cars. The first one was a bit like sitting in a first class carriage on a train (funny story: the other day I was so tired when boarding my morning train from Zurich HB to Zug, that I mistakenly found a seat in first class. I only realised when my ticket was inspected (five minutes before arriving in Zug). Hence there was a reason why the carriage was pleasantly free of crowds and the seats wider than usual. Inexplicably, could be my new haircut that makes me look kind and naïve, I wasn’t charged extra!!! Instead the friendly inspector told me where the second class carriage was), - and now back to the cable cars: the second and third ones could be compared to hanging out with sardines in a can (without all the scales and smell). I think a Japanese group of tourists were doing their own version of: How many people can we squeeze into one cable car without it tipping over? (280,972 is the correct answer.)

Once up on the top, we went a little bit mad with our cameras – please see below.

From the cable car going up (the scratches are from the window).

The black dots are people skiing.

Another one of my potentially award winning short (very short: Blink and You'll Miss it) films...

While walking around the area, we came across an ice grotto which was cool in more than one sense of the word.

Doesn't this look like something you see on medical programmes?

When the euphoria of all this beauty literally surrounding us had faded a little bit, we decided to have something to eat and start the descend on three more cable cars, making Facebook friends with several thousand more Japanese tourists.

Due to both of us (Paul more than me, let’s be honest here) being born adventurers, we went out for a walk before changing from the first to the second cable car. And this is the view that greeted us after five minutes:

This is how I greet beauty.

When we got back to the cable car station, we boarded the second one to take us closer to our end station, but decided, after reaching the end of that journey and before getting into the last (less crowded) cubicle, that we wanted to walk the rest of the way. Our adventure genes were obviously pushing for more action.

So we did, and after a little bit of panic from my side (‘but the orange pillars we’re supposed to follow down to Engelberg, take us back to Titlis. Let’s go back to the cable car. It’s getting dark and I don’t want to be stuck in a field in the middle of nowhere in Switzerland’) we managed to find our way back to the parking lot after an hour or so of walking down very steep paths. This was a good test of my hiking boots which passed – and so did my feet: No blisters! Here are some pictures from this walk, which ended up taking us past a ski hop slope!