How to spend a weekend in Switzerland across beautiful lakes, huge mountains, powerful waterfalls and deep canyon?
Well for us it is easy to answer…. But let’s start from the Friday afernoon.
The weather looked very good for the weekend, so after work we prepared our Rav4 for our camping weekend. Sleeping bags, food, gas cooker, chairs and table are mostly what you need to survive 2 days camping in Switzerland.
Through Gottard Pass we took direction Interlaken-Brienz.
First stop is the village of Brienz. It has a nice lake-side walk full of flowers, decoration and an incredible view of the lake and mountains around. Sadly Stefano forgot, ( for the first time in his life ) the camera batteries at home…… But we had the opportonity to use our brand new Gopro Hero 9 to record video and photos 🙂
We parked our car at coop parking which is not too expensive, 1 CHF Per hour.
The village is on lake side and has small streets beetwen the typical Swiss chalets.
At this link you can find many information about all the activities you could do around Brienz
Brienz – tradition and customs on Lake Brienz (brienzersee.ch)
Next stop is the Giessbach Waterfall. We guessed the end of June would be the best period to see this amazing waterfall. The power of water is incredible !
This huge waterfal is composed by different steps, you can easly get the top of it with a short hike, starting from the parking ( a bit expensive 10 CHF ). The path goes along the waterfall and there are many natural terrace from where you can get close to the water, take nice pictures and get fully wet!
There is also a bridge that goes under the waterfall, you can really feel the power of the water coming from above your head.
In the same park there is the famous luxury hotel, ( Grand Hotel Giessbach) in case someone would like to spend one night with waterfall view and water noise.
The waterfall is reachable also with the boat from anywhere among the lake. We didn’t take it but we have seen many photos taken from the boat and it looks very scenographic!
After we spent 3 hours walking and taking photos, we moved to Iseltwald.
Entering inside the village with you own car is forbidden, so there is a parking in the entrance, then we proceeded walking in and feeling how peaceful this place is.
No car noise for sure! Just the sound of the wind and waves of the lake. Here is and old fishing village with only 400 inhabitants.
At the end of the small peninsula there is a beautiful castle. In the past it was a rehabilitation center, now on sale since 2015. Getting closer to castle you can realise that sadly looks like abandoned place.
Was time to find a camping where to spend our night. The plan was to go in Grindelwald. During our research we found a cute camping from where the view of the valley and mountains is astonishing.
Camping Holdrio is a small campsite ( max place for 10 van), very simple but clean, the road to reach it is small and not doable with big campers.
It wasn’t expected rain and weather was still warm, perfect to prepare our dinner. We settled up our car for the night and a delicious pasta was waiting for us!
In meanwhile the clouds that were covering the peak of the mountains slowly slowly were vanishing showing us a beautiful sunset colour.
For us is the perfect time to open our beers admiring this beautiful landscape.
It is dark and the temperature is dropping quite fast, it is our signal that is time to have a look one last time to the beautiful valley painted by houses lights, and get into the car to sleep.
In the next morning after a good breakfast we took a walk in Grindelwald city center. Being honest here we can’t say it is the cutest village of Switzerland, but it deserves 1 hr of walk.
This time we didn’t take any cable car to any peak. Just so expensive to reach places where everyone can easly go… we thought was not in our priority.
Last stop of our weekend was the Aare Gorges.
We had our lunch in a spot along the river. Nice one!
Bienvenue | Les gorges de l’Aar, Meiringen, Haslital (aareschlucht.ch)
There were, of course, many people and in Covid time is not the best staying to close to people, but with a mask it was “doable”.
We really enjoyed this incredible path, made by bridges suspended above the river, dark tunnel digged in the canyon rocks and waterfalls.
The water colour is amazingly turquoise and the eco of the water is impressive.
The canyon is really deep and narrow.
The Path is around 1.5 km and from the exit you have 2 options to go back to the entrance where probably your car is parked.
1 – Take the bus
2 – Walk around 45 min following a nice path over the canyon and inside the forest.
We would suggest you to walk 🙂 We did it and it was a nice one!
When we arrived it was almost 5 pm and we still had many km to go back home.
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