Switzerland is known for many things. For example, there are Swiss chocolate, Swiss cheese, and Swiss clocks. But Switzerland offers at least one commodity that cannot be managed by the export market: The Swiss Alps. On Sunday afternoon, via increasingly narrow-gauged railways, we made our way from Bern into the Berner Oberland. It is a region of alpine splendor dotted with small towns and minuscule villages that cater to skiers, trekkers, and glacier-gawkers alike. We were intent on spending several days here. And so for our home base we booked a hotel in Wengen, a car-free village that can be reached only by foot or by cog railway from the only slightly larger (but significantly less elevated) town of Lauterbrunnen. Our Wengen hotel offered each of us each a balcony with alpine views, so it was a treat from the moment we settled in. Transport in the Bernese Oberland is incredibly good, but also highly varied. There are buses, funicular railways, cog railways, cable-car/gondolas. Also there are walking and biking trails between hamlets, although the elevation change takes some getting used to ... especially when the air is already a bit thin. But all the while you are surrounded by the most astonishing and distracting scenery. Monday's weather looked a bit iffy, so we decided to take a route where we could easily stop to endure a downpour. Now, what follows will sound like a gazetteer of alpine hamlets that speckle the Berner Oberland, but it was genuinely a wonder in coordinated and creative transportation. If you want to follow our path, here is a good online map. First, instead of taking the train, we walked through misty rain on a trail that dropped us 550 meters to Lauterbrunnen. After a look around, we then took a gondola to Grütschalp, followed immediately by a train to Mürren, where we ate lunch overlooking the valley. Since the weather looked a bit better, we then walked to Gimmelwald, and took a thrilling gondola ride back down to the valley at Stechelberg. A bus then carried us back to Lauterbrunnen and the train carried us back up the mountain to Wengen. Whew! Tuesday, however, we decided to truly test our tenacity by climbing up from Wengen, with the ultimate goal of reaching The Top of Europe. But that is a tale for a different day.