Getting up at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning is never easy. But this time it was definitely worth it, in hindsight. Packing just a towel, my charger, a few slices of birthday cake and my book (“the trillion dollar coach”, if you’re interested) I slouched to the Basel train station. As expected, the early morning streets of Basel were empty a.f., but the Lamborghini parked outside a cheap motel really gave me the giggles. And off it was with the train to the city of Thun.
On this beautiful summers day I was invited by my former roommate from Bordeaux, Serban, to celebrate his birthday, by rafting down the Aare river to Bern. Since the guys had camped out in the mountain over night, I had a couple of morning hours to myself in Thun to explore the city. So I just wandered around, marveling at how cute the city was with its houses right at the water front, early bird surfing in the river stream and the astonishing greenish blue of the Aare river (the river inherits this color from “glacial milk”, which is water that carries mineral particles like sand and abrasion from rocks and moray from the glaciers).
Thun ferris wheel and waterfront
Thun waterfront cafe
Around 11 a.m. I met the guys and gals with whom we would go down the river. After putting on copiuous amounts of sun screen, it was off into the Aare on wich we would spend about 5 hours to get to Bern. Accompanied by hundreds of other stream-enterers, we started off chilling on the inflatable boats and in my case, together with Serban on a stand up paddle. The only trouble was that the stand up paddle was very imbalanced the moment you hit segments of faster current, so that soon we toppled over for the first time, plunging into the cool river. Now that is per se not too bad. However, sometimes the current gets faster and wilder so that one time we were kept under water for quite a while so that when we finally got back up to the surface we were quite out of breath. Indeed every year, apparently more than a handful of people die in these currents.
Mapping the route we took down the river
Since the river is not very deep most of the time, there is a really sweet phenomenon you can observe. When you plunge into the water and face the river floor, you can open your eyes and experience how fast the current really is by observing how fast the floor moves. And not only that: the lighting and reflection of the stones, as you float with the current, are a very enjoyable piece of natural magic. This, of course, made up for the many times our board decided to give up and throw us off.
Sometime in the early afternoon we decided to take a longer break, relax and eat at one of the many stony and sandy beaches along the river. It turned out that getting into the water is much easier than getting out. Since the current of the river is so strong and the segments of beaches scarce and short, we really had trouble getting the timing right to go to the riverbanks. Not least because all of our boats were tied together, making it a team effort that needed to be coordinated. While we had to abandon the first attempt, the second one was successful and we could relax our muscles a bit, have a smoke and something to eat.
The heroes going down the Aare
I think it is easy to imagine that after a day in the burning sun, it was a relief to get home and relax for a bit. But the night was not over then. Since the 1st of August is a national holiday, for in 1291 the swiss conferderation was founded, a huge firework was scheduled to take place at 11 p.m. Obviously I didn’t want to miss that, so that I made my way to the rooftop of my apartment building to watch an extraordinary firework. Got time for 15 minutes of watching a virtual firework? Don’t let me stop you. Here you go: