April 28, 2012
Today is Nika's birthday...Happy Birthday! But, today's blog is not about what she did on her birthday. It's about what she did the day before her birthday. With that being said though when we went downstairs for breakfast and started to sit down, the owner came over to Nika and asked her if she minded changing tables for this breakfast? Unbeknownst to us, she (the owner), had set Nika a special birthday breakfast table in the corner with flowers and a handwritten card. Very nice!
From our hotel we walked through the town, next to the farmers fields, along the cliffs, through the valley of 72 waterfalls, across the river and, all the way (3 kilometers) to "Trummel-bach-falle".
Trummel-bach-falle is a series of waterfalls within a mountain. The water in the falls is from ten glaciers and these falls are accessible by a tunnel lift that took us up part of the way and then we did the rest on foot. Someone must have spent a lot of time and effort building this within the mountain including sidewalks, stairs and lighting. Along the way we saw 10 waterfalls gushing and incredibly enormous amount of water. Once inside it was easy to realize why there was a caution sign at the entrance that warned us to not lean over the railing and for parents with kids to pay close attention their little ones. Up to 20,000 liters of water per second is falling inside this mountain! For us Americans, I googled what that converted to and....5283.4 gallons per second. That is 317,004 gallons a minute and 1,585,020 gallons every 5 minutes! We estimated that we were there for about an hour so with my fuzzy math we saw 19, 020,240 gallons of water falling! Quite a powerful site of our earth's nature!
The walk through the valley also revealed parachutes opening periodically. Apparently this valley is known world-wide for base jumping. We ate dinner last night in a local pub-type setting and overheard a guy from Portland, Oregon talking about his 2-week trip here specifically to base-jump. Our trip schedule is already set and there's not a lot of room to fit extras in so we won't be doing any base jumping on this trip. :-)
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