Summer Time, and the Living is Busy !

Summer Time, and the Living is Busy !!

 Well it seems that since summer finally kicked in she sure has scored good points for effort. With a full week of blissfully hot days and not even a thunderstorm in sight, I feel blessed to be living the dream ;-)). The question often arises, “Where did all the time go?, and such is life here in Interlaken. When the heat is on , so to speak,  it’s always a braai somewhere after work,  fulfilling days in Chli Schliere Canyon, and big nights at the annual Trucker and Country Festival. This weekend I got lucky and scored two days in a row in ‘schliere’, every guides dream. With the water warming up ( a little…) it was great fun hurling ourselves like human lemmings into the fresh mountain pools. Schliere is composed mainly of bedrock limestone, and the character  of the canyon is such like a series of pot holes, with the river pouring itself from one to the next in a stunning array of cascades and waterslides. Guiding through the schliere has to be likened to a controlled lemming march. At times we have two full groups running back to back, that’s 25 guests and 5 staff. Now imagine a train of thirty people clad in wetsuits and helmets, lifejackets and harnesses, lining up on the edge of a 10 metre cliff above a waterfall,  and jumping into the refreshing waters below. As a guide you can sometimes be at one ‘station’ when 25 excited participants line up one by one. Feeling slightly repetitive one deals out the same instruction to every guest, “Put your left foot here, your right hand on my shoulder, and jump just right of where the waterfall lands…. Ready…3-2-1- JUMP!” Somehow though it never get’s boring as everyday it’s meeting new people, and everyone has their own little moment in the canyon which is always funny for the rest of us ;-)). Weather it’s botched jumps, or perfect backflips, everybody has something to add to the trip. We had some classic ‘sky divers’ on Sunday, jumpers who tend to lean too far forward as they jump, adopting the sky diving pose as they plunge towards the pool, and score 10/10 from the guides for ‘bellyflop’ of the day! Bellyflops can also be of benefit, as they help out with a full sinus flush, although they also encourage the stunned beaver look, and definitely bear the brunt of a rather bruised ego! But hey, the amount of humour ( after the initial gasps of shock), by far out-rule any concern for the discomfort of captain skydiver. These photos I took with a 10mm lens, so it picks up an almost 180 degree perspective. Pretty sweet I thought, if I may say so myself.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since the big Greenfields Rock Festival was in town, so what good timing for the Annual Trucker and Country to hit the same venue, the old airfield just on the edge of town. And word on the street is that town and country rocks the hell out of the greenfields gothic freak show. Well one things for sure though and that’s that there was no shortage of freaks walking around the T&C festival either.  Tight cowboy outfits, mullets, tattoos, big bellies and bountiful boobies were out in full force, along with an incredible selection of beautiful machines, from motorbikes to massive trucks, classic cars and countless cranes.  It’s a people watching paradise as all the motor-heads strut their stuff with an air of freakish eccentricity ,  and then there’s line dancing! Jeesh I tell ya, you got to see it to believe it. With bars by the dozen and of course the bumper-car  arena, it’s all round humour, good clean fun some say.

Summer time, too good.