I’m writing this on my phone while having lunch at La Marine in Paris, on my 6 hour layover from Sardinia to Paris Orly to San Francisco. For me, one of my favorite travel experience is getting a bonus afternoon or evening in a city on a longer layover - if executed well, it’s like getting a free drink on the house.
La Marine’s bavette steak in red wine shallot sauce on a warm August day by Canal St Martin really did hit for me. For a few hours, I swapped buongiorno for bonjour, grazie for merci, and il conto for l’addition.
I’ve been really enjoying the adventure/travel writing genre over the last year. As legendary surf pioneer Gerry Lopez writes in his memoir Surf is Where You Find It, the only thing better than surfing is talking about surfing.
In the same vein, the only thing better than traveling is talking about traveling. A couple weeks ago I found myself in a conversation with another solo diner at the bar at The Progress about his travels across Europe. He was an architect in SF, maybe in his fifties, and shared that in his twenties he spent 8 years leading bike tours across France and Italy. I asked him where the most beautiful place he’d been to was, and he said the Swiss alps. The coincidence was uncanny, I told him that I was going for the first time that Friday.
One of my hot takes is that leisure is a skill, that there is both and art and science to travelling in a way that is fun, restorative, and expansionary. Good travel inspires vigor and vitality, can both renew and challenge your perspective, and cannot be fully preplanned. Of course, your ideal vacation may vary - there are always different strokes for different folks.
What’s the difference between God and a raft guide?
God doesn’t think he’s a raft guide.
- Edu, our raft guide from northern Spain in the van on the way to the put in at Lütschental.
We spent 5 nights in Wengen, the idyllic car free village in the Swiss alps near Interlaken. The first three days we spent taking the magnificent trains, gondolas, and cable cars up, down, across, and around the mountains - the region is the lazy hiker’s dream, for you can hike and take a network of high alpine lifts to go wherever you want.
On the second day, Jenn proposed hiking from Wengen to Mannlichen since it showed up as a challenging hike on AllTrails. Kat, Evan, and I vetoed the 4 mile 3300 foot climb, and we took the path more traveled, the Wengen-Männlichen cable car. It costed us 15.50 franc on the SBB app, a price I happily paid to save our legs to hike what I’d consider more “worth it” trails.
The hiking and scenery in this part of the Swiss alps, the Bernese Oberland, was as stunning as the man at the bar said it was. On a clear day, it is a real life postcard. Sometimes when I’m scrolling on Instagram, I see a perfectly idyllic shot of a mountain range or green pasture from the growing young nature influencer contingent, and it’s so perfect that it has to have been color graded the Wes Anderson adjacent Instagram nature aesthetic (with some yellow serif font on top). On the Panorama trail from Männlichen to Kleine Scheidegg, it actually looks like that - I had this maybe embarrassing modern thought, “wow it’s like my eyes are color grading the view here”. I blinked twice, three times, and questioned if what I was seeing was real or if I was looking at a nature scene on my now untouched Apple Vision Pro. I had never seen such perfect glacier covered mountain peaks and green pastures before. Was I looking at real life or looking at a camera?
“Yes, we had made an excursion into another world and we had come back, but we had brought the joy of life and of humanity back with us. In the rush and whirl of everyday things, we so often live alongside one another without making any mutual contact. We had learned on the North Face of the Eiger that men are good, and the earth on which we were born is good."
- Heinrich Hammer in The White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger
I felt a bit guilty we achieved such perfect ridge line views from just taking a cable car, but I can get behind how egalitarian and accessible the Swiss transport systems makes these views. It was perfect, but maybe a little too perfect - almost like a manufactured Alpine nature Disneyland. Lines for trains, lines and waiting time monitor displays for the mountain kart and zip line in Grindelwald, and tourists from all around the world taking selfies and posing for their self timer tripods, and in one case, a man flying an illegal drone to get what must have been an insanely beautiful shot of his girlfriend prancing on a green pasture that could rival the closing shot of the Sound of Music. The thrill you get from a rollercoaster is manufactured and engineered, and while the nature of the Bernese Oberland is not manufactured, the trains and trams that get you there were engineered (very impressively, no less). I couldn’t help but feel like I hadn’t “earned” the view.
My friend (the same one with a fish guy) has a fun phrase that I like, that when he travels he seeks out the “dusty local spots”, the kind of weird, unique, sometimes gritty stuff that is far far away from most of the Instagram or TikTok or Rednote guides.
And on the fourth day, we decided to book a whitewater rafting trip. I didn’t know it was a possibility, but Evan overheard someone talking about it on the train up to the Schynige Platte. We’d just done the beautiful Schynige Platte hike to Grindelwald First (the lake swim at Bachalpsee was straight out of one of those color graded instagram reels), and our legs and calves were tired, and the sun had done its damage to the spots on our skin that were not properly protected by sunscreen.
One of my mantras is “a day on the water is never a bad day”. So I did some quick googling and chose the second result I found, where they had a WhatsApp number on their website. I sent them a message asking if they had availability the next day. They responded within minutes, and we had a 1pm slot the next day to raft down the Lütschine.
I love how you can find a certain flavor of familiarity in almost every tourism destination around the world - in Europe it can be the doner shop, where there is always a delicious affordable durum available, or the Brooklynified aesthetic sans serif coffee shop, where there is always a latte available.
My favorite is the outdoor action sport scene - raft guiding companies, surf shops and camps, ski rental shops. There is a certain spirit and shared language of adventure that lives in these establishments all around the world. In these establishments live the fleet of human made water/snow/landcraft that allow us to experience nature in increasingly higher adrenaline ways. Perhaps more spiritually rich than the fancy five star hotel brands with locations in the “sceniest” destinations around the world, is the “dusty” ragtag conglomerate of adventure companies with locations by the natural wonders of the world.
Like Ragone, Marc and I had come to Switzerland to climb the Nordwand. One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun.
- Jon Krakauer in Eiger Dreams, on climbing the north face of the Eiger, one of the most famous and challenging climbs in the world.
We took 2 short trains to get to the raft camp for the 1pm rendezvous, from Wengen to Lauterbrunnen, Lauterbrunnen to Interlaken Ost, and then walked the 20 minutes to the Rafting.ch location. It was behind a somewhat derelict hotel, and when we walked into the rafting shack, I could both hear and smell the “dust” — we were greeted by a guy standing on a stack of three rafts on the van trailer: “wazzup!”.
They told us to sign the waiver, and on the clipboard sheet there was a column that asked “how did you hear about us?”. There were about 20 previous guest answers, and 18 of them were “Google”. Two of them said “ChatGPT”, notably from two travelers with Chinese names. I wonder if they’ve ever gotten “Rednote” on there.
The raft guides introduced themselves - two Spanish guys with warm and jokester Spanish flairs, and one strong looking guide from Peru who they introduced as “from the legendary river in Peru”. They explained the safety logistics and made a good joke that I appreciated.
If you have any important medical conditions or medications that you must bring on the river, please let us know. This includes both physical and mental conditions like asthma, or multiple personality disorder.
If you have multiple personality disorder, you must let us know, because then you have to go to the office to pay for each personality.
On the van ride over to the put in, they asked us what we did for work, and Jenn said she works in marketing. The driver, who had been silent until then, lit up and said “maybe you can advise us on our marketing and SEO”. Jenn, the ever so friendly and approachable one between us, complimented their website and SEO, as those 18 customers had found out about the company from Google. The driver said he was using Claude to vibe code their new website… saying “I don’t know much about coding, but I know a lot about the rafting business.” He talked about his SEO, “I’m very proud of our SEO and Google reviews game. Just had a call with my Google ads guy yesterday, now we’re working on AEO”.
The rafting trip itself was a delight, we were thrown immediately into a class 4 rapid called “zero to hero”. Nothing gets the adrenaline going like bracing for impact after hearing “get down” from your raft guide, and then getting splashed with a wave of ice cold glacial melt.
Left forward one!
All forward one!
Left forward right back!
Stop!
Get down!
There is no place like rafting in Switzerland - our put in was right next to the train tracks where the iconic yellow Bernese Oberlandee train would pass by every 10 minutes on the dot. On the river, we’d see the towering ridge of Harder Kuln on the left, and those precisely engineered train tracks on the right.
On a quieter section of the river, I asked Edu where he spends his winters. Usually as a ski mountaineering guide in Baqueria in northern Spain, he told me. Edu said that he’s also been a raft guide in Norway, and a couple winters ago he was a snowmobile guide in Lapland. I told him that when I was on a kayak excursion in Lofoten last year, my guide was also a snowmobile guide in Lapland. He made a compelling pitch for why we should spend our holidays in Finland.
Levi is like the Las Vegas of Finland. But it’s not playing games, instead they ski and then they party all night.
The Finns love their karaoke, and they’re not embarrassed to sing bad pitch
Edu had the kind of lifestyle and personality that I at times envy - he gets to spend his days outside doing something he loves, joking around and traveling the world by meeting customers from different countries. The seasonality to the job takes him all around the world, with global friends from various raft camps or ski lodges. In the age of AGI and the changing nature of knowledge work, it’s clear to me that barring global warming, the nature of action sports jobs will roughly be the same, likely with higher demand.
As we paddled to our take out spot in Lake Brienz, we saw the sights of beachgoers playing some house music. We were wearing full body wetsuits with a NARS life vest, dressed as conservatively as can be as if we were deathly allergic to the sun. It almost felt like we had just landed in the ocean after a space mission.
Jumping into Lake Brienz, bobbing above the surface of the lake with these super buoyant life vests, gazing up at the mountain peaks and dark green forest and turquoise water, in that moment it felt perfect, perfect in a different way from the “perfect” views we had up in the mountains. Maybe it’s just me, but I always feel a sense of renewed vitality after an action sport activity.
We ended the evening with a wonderful fondue dinner at the beautiful The Deck restaurant in Wengen, where a curious fox came to visit at the end. Evan, Kat, Jenn, and I all agreed that the rafting was a highlight of the trip. If you find yourself in this part of the Swiss alps over the summer, I give this itinerary my highest recommendation - some days hiking, then a raft trip down the Lütschine, and a fondue dinner at The Deck.
Cheers to more adventures, dusty local places, and a future trip to Lapland.
From Wallpaper magazine on trains:
The metric - the number of passengers multiplied by their average distance travelled - reveals that, unsurprisingly, India and China account for around half of the world's rail passenger travel. Yet in terms of distance covered, Switzerland and Japan rank higher. According to the latest statistics, on average, a Swiss person travels more than 2,500km by train each year, accounting for nearly 23 per cent of all passenger journeys. Despite having the world's largest rail network (220,044km), in the US, this figure is just 0.3 per cent.
