Kandersteg

For Christmas Linda got me tickets for a world cup slalom event in Adelboden. Of course, being a world cup event, it was impossible to stay in Adelboden itself, so she found a hotel in Kandersteg, which is somewhere we'd been planning to visit anyway.

The drive up on Friday night was a bit of a nightmare, since it was snowing heavily and the snow-ploughs were unable to keep the roads clear. We crawled along the moterway most of the way towards Bern. After that the snow was not so heavy and we made it to Kandersteg without too much trouble.

Kandersteg is a really beautiful town in a valley surrounded by high mountains. When we were visiting there was an ice-climbing event, that we stopped to watch for a while. It was impressive to watch but we were a bit disappointed they seemed to spend more time climbing the rock than the ice..

On Saturday the clouds hung low in the valley (in fact the downhill event in Adelboden was cancelled - so lucky we weren't watching that!) so we caught a lift up to Sunnbuel, where we hoped to be above the clouds.

Unfortunately it wasn't quite high enough to be properly above the clouds, but in the end that didn't bother us at all, because the mist in the trees meant that ice formed on the branches and leaves and looked amazing!

We had a leasurely stroll through the forest on our snow-shoes, taking many photos of the icey trees (although it was so cold that Linda's camera stopped working - instead she took some photos on my camera and pointed out some good shots for me to take).

We had a nice lunch in the Restaurant and then returned to the town, where we hired some toboggans and spent the rest of the afternoon tobogganning in the hills around the town.