I flew out of San Francisco airport on Lufthansa, the national airline of Germany. I flew nonstop for 10 hours into Frankfurt, and then got onto a connecting flight to Zurich, Switzerland.

After arriving, I went through passport control. I expected them to stamp my passport, but no. All he did was look at it and handed it back to me. It took all of 3 seconds.

The next step was to take the train into Engelberg. The Zurich Airport has a train station, which is very convenient. I went to the ticket counter to get a ticket to Engelberg. After 10 minutes, I was in downtown Zurich at the main train station, or "Zurich Hauptbahnhof" in German (this is also referred to as Zurich HB). I stayed on the same train, traveling southwest into Luzern. I switched trains there and took the Luzern-Stans-Engelberg train, or the LSE-Bahn for short. It took about one hour to reach Engelberg. While on the journey, it was nice seeing the countryside and I couldn't help but notice that this area was once a glacier valley.

The terrain quickly turned into steep mountain passes. The train was going up from 400 meters to 1,000 meters in altitude in a very short distance. It traveled up very slowly through a steep incline which flattened out once we were about 3 miles outside of Engelberg. The train station in Engelberg is in the middle of downtown, and is within walking distance of most hotels. I was about a 5 minute walk from my hotel, the Hotel Cathrin, which I chose mainly because it was closest to the lifts, about a 100 yard walk. I arrived shortly after 5pm, just in time to settle down and have dinner at the hotel, which is a four course meal. The total time on the train was about 2 1/2 hours, including the train transfer in Luzern.

The next morning, I walked across the street to Quattro Sport, which rents all types of ski equipment. After setting myself up with some Salomon carving skis, I walked 100 yards to the Mt. Titlis ski lift at the base, which is at 1,000 meters.

I took the gondola up to Trubsee, which is at 1,800 meters. This is the point on the mountain where you can continue going up to the top of Mount Titlis to the south, or go west to the Jochpass region of the resort.

When I reached Trubsee, I took a second gondola up to Stand, at 2,428 meters. I skiied every run from that point on the mountain and had a blast. The ski runs are steep, and some of them would qualify as black diamond runs, even though they were listed as intermediate level. Only a couple of runs had any moguls on them, and they were limited to small sections of the ski runs.

After skiing, I decided to take a nap. The problem was that I slept through dinner. A combination of jet lag and intense skiing was too much for me, and ended up waking up very late. The Gobat family, who runs the hotel, called my room to check on me to make sure that I was fine. They thought I got lost on the slopes. Let's just say it was a well earned lesson to take it easy your first day after a long flight.

I decided to go up to the top of Klein Titlis, which is the highest point in the ski resort at 3,028 meters. To reach the top, you have to take three gondolas. The first two, Gerschnialp-Trubsee and Trubsee-Stand are the regular gondolas that you see at most ski resports. The last one is unique. It's called Rotair, and is the only rotating cable car in the world. While you are moving upward, the floor rotates in a complete circle, giving you a 360 degree view of the region without having to move around. After about five minutes, you reach the tram station at the top.

The station has a couple of restaurants and the usual tourist trap shops, including a watch store with all kinds of expensive gadgets. The big draw up here is the Titlis Glacier itself. There's a glacier grotto that allows you to walk inside the glacier and see what it's like. They carved out thousands of tons of rock and ice 150 feet below ground to create the grotto. It was very nice to walk inside the glacier, and you cross over two cantons - the Oberwalden canton (which includes Engelberg), and the Bern canton (home of the Swiss capital city Bern) which is on the south side of the glacier grotto.

The weird part about the whole thing was understanding that you were skiing on a moving glacier and not a solid ski slope, unlike Heavenly in Lake Tahoe. In September, there are large crevasses. They have to wait for the snow to fill them in to open up this part of the mountain for skiing. Additionally, some of the towers that are used for the ski lifts have to be reanchored three to four times a year using heavy duty machinery and equipment, because of the glacier's movement. Only a couple of the towers are in solid rock.

This was the big day. The Swiss Masters 2000 (or SM2000) Telemark Skiing Championships were being held at 10:30 that morning, on the Jochpass mountain. I went to that side because I was too busy having fun on the TItlis Glacier the previous day. It was a bright sunny day, and we got enough snow overnight to improve the race course conditions.

I got a few warm up ski runs in and waited for the race to begin. It was a fun event, and a lot of people were rooting for their favorite racer. They had a large variety of categories, and two racers were racing together. They were wearing a special set of skis designed for two people.

The hardest part of the course was a jump, which was followed by a right-left-right combination. Four skiers in a row hit the left turn flags, with a couple of nasty crashes. One person had a binding snap at the start of the race and had to stop.

The Jochpass slopes were gentler than those on Titlis, but were still very nice cruising runs.

Conditions really sucked today. The entire area was in a dense fog, and with a lot of snow. I made the big mistake of going all the way to the top of Titlis. I did one ski run and called it quits. It was so bad up there that I couldn't even see in front of my face. Most of the time I was concentrating to make sure that I didn't fall off the trail. On the glacier, this can be a really bad thing, especially with all of the rocks and sudden drops.

The weather eventually improved a bit, but you had to stay at either Stand or Trubsee to enjoy any skiing. Even at those two places, the visibility was overall quite bad. The only good part was that the excellent powder snow made up for it.

I set aside one day for checking out Luzern because there were a few sights I wanted to visit. The first place I saw was the Glacier Garden, which is a natural monument that shows the emmense power of glaciers and how they shape the landscape. Located next to it was the Lion Monument, which is a rock carving dedicated to the Swiss soldiers who were killed during the French Revolution while protecting the home of King Louis XVI.

The city was very nice and had a lot of beautiful architecture. The water tower, which is the symbol of Luzern, boldly stands out in downtown. It was very easy to walk around and see everything.

I also went to the Swiss Transportation Museum, which is considered the most popular attraction in Luzern and the busiest museum in Switzerland. They get about 500,000 visitors each year. It's complete with a planetarium and an IMAX theatre. I skipped both of these because the planetarium show sounded wimpy and the IMAX picture was Disney's "Fantasia 2000" - BORING!! I decided instead to spend more time checking out the exhibits on airline and train travel. They showed the evolution of train travel in Switzerland from the 1800's to the present. They also had an old SwissAir Coronado jet and the first Swiss Air Force plane, which was called the Vampire. It was a fun place to visit.

This was my last day in Switzerland, which was a travel day to Zurich. I left in the early morning and arrived in the Zurich HB just after 12 noon. I had a 7:10am return flight the next morning, and I wasn't sure if I was going to get a room in downtown Zurich, or near the airport when flew to Switzerland. I went to the tourist office in the train station and they told me that every room in Zurich was booked.

It turned out that I arrived on a very bad day to ask for a room. There were two conferences going on at the same time. One was an education conference, but the big one was the watch manufacturers conference. (That figures - Switzerland and watches) The only place I could get a room was at a youth hostel 15 minutes from downtown by tram. I had them book a room for me, which was only 33.50 Swiss francs including breakfast. They also served dinner, which was only 11.50 francs.

I got a 24-hour train and bus ticket and took the tram #7 to the east side of Zurich. The hostel was a five minute walk from the "Morgantal" stop. I checked in and decided to take a nap, as it was a very long day. I was too tired to go around Zurich and visit the sights.

I did meet a few interesting people there:
- A college student from England, who was travelling through a few countries in Europe.
- An young Englishman who recently moved to Zurich from Sweden, where he lived the past five years. He was staying in the hostel for two weeks until we could move into his apartment in a few days. His work was with computer technology and decided that he could make more money with a 4 1/2 month contract in Zurich than in 14 months of permanent employment in Sweden. Overall he was happy with his move. In his two weeks at the hostel, he determined that about one third of the people actually live there continuously.
- A doctoral student in Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who was also living in the hostel until he found an apartment. Apparently finding furnished apartments in Zurich is next to impossible.
- The official representative and exclusive distributor of Omega watches in India - no kidding! He was in the same boat I was - no hotel rooms available. We were talking at dinner, and he told me that a lot of other people attending the conference were also staying at the hostel, and that the watch conference is the biggest conference in the world. It included over 100 different companies from all over the world, including manufacturers, distributors other watch-related businesses.

The next morning I woke up at 4am and caught the early tram to the train station. I arrived at the station and took the next train to the Zurich airport. I took my roommate's industrial strength lead-lined film bag on my trip, which weighs a whopping 2 pounds while empty! I was going to hand it over to the female security guard for a visual inspection when she told me, "Don't worry about your film - this is Switzerland! It will be fine." I put the bag through, and naturally, the film bag showed up as a big black lump in the x-ray scanner. As I helped another woman inspect my bag, she didn't notice that I took the film safe out. She looked at everything and talked back to the x-ray scanner operator in German along the lines of "I thought you said there was something in this bag! There's nothing here!". After running the bag through again, I told her that the film safe was inside the bag when it went through the first time. She looked at it and said "That's a heavy duty bag. No wonder why it showed up on the first scan."

The remaining flights went smoothly, and I arrived back home just after 1pm. When I arrived at the customs station at San Francisco, I simply told them that I only had Swiss chocolate bars, and I finished the whole process in two minutes.

I ended up only seeing a small portion of Zurich, but I'll make up for it on my next trip to Switzerland...