Crash Landing on You | Iseltwald Jetty, Lake Brienz — The Piano, and What Came After

A wooden jetty on Lake Brienz, a man alone at a piano, playing a piece he wrote for a brother who is dead. Se-ri hears it in passing, remembers it for years, and cannot place where. It is the quietest scene in the series and it did more damage than any of the others.

Iseltwald has about 420 residents. In one recent year roughly 400,000 people came. Coaches began arriving twelve a day in August, from Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. Most groups got off, photographed the jetty, and left inside five minutes — bringing their own food, so the restaurants saw nothing. Independent visitors mostly stayed the ninety minutes between buses.

In April 2023 the village installed a turnstile. Five francs to walk onto the jetty, one franc for the public toilet, and coaches must pre-book a parking slot. It is the most-cited example in Europe of a place that got famous and then had to charge admission to its own waterfront.

So: pay the five francs rather than framing your shot from behind the barrier, use the toilet you paid for, and — the part that actually helps — eat lunch in the village. Bus 103 from Interlaken Ost, twenty minutes. Check the last bus before you settle in.

The lake really is that colour. Stand on the jetty and understand why 400,000 people came, and then walk up into the village and spend something, because the whole reason this scene exists is that somebody loved a small quiet place enough to film in it.

Cover photo: Iseltwald on Lake Brienz, by Andrew Bossi, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.