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On Sunday we began with breakfast at the hotel. To our delight we discovered they serve champagne at the breakfast buffet!

We then took a train out to the town of Engelberg at the foot of Mt Titlis (don’t snigger it’s pronounced Teet-leez). We got the bus to the base of the mountain where we joined hundreds of serious skier types on the ascent of Mt Titlis. We were the only tourists among goggle-wearing, ski-boot-clomping, stick-brandishing sporty types, and yes, I had my camera around my neck.

The ascent to the top of Mount Titlis takes 45 minutes (not including waiting time) on three different types of cable car. The final cable car is a 360 degree rotating monster called the Rotair that holds up to eighty people.

I have the feeling that our car had a few more than that. Everyone is herded like cattle and there was no drinks service or anything! I don’t know what I was expecting but I had somehow imagined myself sipping Sauvingnon Blanc whilst gently rising above the alpine hills but it was not to be.

At the top the view is spectacular.

That’s right 10,000 feet up. 3020 metres. The air is quite thin at that height so I found I had a little altitude sickness and found it hard to catch my breath from time to time. It was also extremely cold.

You are literally on top of the world. There are other activities at the top of Mt Titlis such as an open cable car across the glacier and activities with names like Crevasse Abseiling and Bikini Tobogganing (I made that last on up but it is true that there was a picture of such an activity at the Titlis Glacier Station). Instead we opted for lunch in the restaurant three kilometres in the sky with an amazing view from the top of the Swiss Alps.

We did venture in a little way to the Glacier Cave. Yes, they burrowed into the mountain and then made a cave inside the glacier. The walls look like marble but they are ice.

The floor is ice too and I got a little overexcited to take this picture and I slipped and bruised my knee. No permanent damage done though, but it was enough to tell us that this place was potentially dangerous and that we should return to where humans are meant to be – somewhere that serves ten different types of potato.

 

See the shadow of our cable car? It was much less crowded on the way back down, which was pleasing to us.

We then returned to Lucerne. It was 3pm so we decided to take a cruise on Lake Lucerne.

The trip we took was two and half hours and there was a drinks service (finally!), which is more our kind of thing.

The boat stops at various locations all over Lake Lucerne.

We were lucky enough to see the sun setting in glorious fashion.

It was time for dinner by the time we returned from the boat ride. We passed the KKL building, Lucerne’s marvelous cultural centre with its cantilevered roof and crossed the bridge into the old town for some well-deserved noshing. There were plenty of kartoffels on the menu!

The Chapel Bridge at night.

We headed back to the Montana for a good night’s sleep.

 

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