Ah Venezia

Skip this part if you want to avoid the rather long tale of woe regarding missed connections – aka John complains about yet another aspect of being overseas.

Here's a cliche I don't think we've used yet: The journey is the destination (or something to that effect). Meaning of course that the enjoyable part of travelling is actually the part where you get from A to B, and not so much what you do once you get to B. This can apply to things like the Flamsbana or the Transiberian (we hope).

In this case, the journey wasn't the destination. The journey was mediocre, and made us miss our train.

We'd got these free tickets for a bus trip on Meinfernbus – the German company which made us late to Berlin with a flat tyre. We were able to book tickets to get us from Zurich to Milano, arriving in Milano with 50 minutes to get across town to our train for Padova.

Fools. We of course thought that Meinfernbus wouldn't always be late. It's a German company after all, and it was leaving from Switzerland, so surely it'd be punctual.

The first worrying sign was when the barrier arm to let the buses out of the bus car park (buspark?) wouldn't open. There were more and more buses filling up the cramped space while we waited in line for someone from the parking company to come and let buses out individually. Tedious.

Once we were on the road we got to see some fantastic scenery. Seriously, the roads through the mountains to Italy are fantastic, with ridiculously long tunnels and views over lakes and mountains. Can recommend.

We stopped somewhere on the other side of the mountain in a place where they speak Italian, but isn't yet Italy. Presumably there was a reason for this 30 minute break, considering we must have already been running late – the best reason that I can come up with is union regulations stating how much rest a bus driver is entitled to, but it's a mystery to this day.

We arrived 45 minutes late in Milano, figured out the metro system and ticket machine in record time (refusing to purchase a ticket from the shady dude who offered us one as we were working it out) and arrived late for our train – hoping that it would also be late and we would be able to catch it. Overly optimistic.

We had to purchase another ticket – fortunately there was one more train trip that night, and the ticket could be bought easily at the ticket machine for the same price we'd paid for the others – and then contacted our accommodation to tell them we were going to be late.

We return to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

One thing I've found weird is that places will often have different names in English than in their native language. Brussels vs Bruxelles. Munich vs Munchen, Seville vs Sevilla. Whanganui vs Wanganui. Italy has an abundance of this nonsensical nomenclature. It's hard enough booking train tickets in foreign lands without having to convert place names to different languages too. It's not like these names are harder to pronounce either. Most of them are easy enough to decipher, but surely it'd be better to begin to refer to these places by the name that the people who live there use. I'll be using Venezia (Venice) and Padova (Padua) in this post.

Padova is around half an hour by train from Venezia. It's also around half the price to stay there.

Venice. I mean Venezia.

Venezia was crowded, fancy, dirty, damp, dilapidated, expensive, strange, and full of people, pigeons, pizza and puddles. It's cool having no cars on the roads, and little winding streets linked by bridges gave it a nice atmosphere. It's a place that it would be easy to get lost in. There are signs on some of the buildings pointing to main locations like San Marco, but none of the roads are straight, and it's hard to find out where you are on a map, let alone find a route to your next destination. It was a cool place to wander around though the crumbling facades, and we did rather a lot of wandering.

San Marco square was thronged with a throng of tourists trying to avoid huge puddles in the middle of the square. Venezia has a problem with flooding. It must be sinking, since no one would intentionally design a public space that fills with ground water seeping up from below whenever the tide comes in.

Huge puddles.

We were told off for sitting on the steps that line the square when we were about to eat lunch. For some reason we were allowed to sit on the edge of the clock tower.

We saw the Bridge of Sighs (which apparently is a thing). We walked past it without realising, assuming that the bridge we were going over was just crowded because it's Venezia. It wasn't all that great, so we didn't take a photo. Maybe the bridge of yawns would be a better name. If you want atmosphere, Venezia has it, but apart from the couple of different buildings to visit (Doge's palace included – which I can't take seriously because of this Doge) there isn't much to do other than wander, shop, eat, and sit in little boats while costumed men row you around. Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.

Dear Switzerland

Switzerland is a wonderful place, but it doesn't come cheap. On the one hand: majestic vistas, lovely remote areas; on the other hand, thinking to buy a cheap snack out, we paid the equivalent of NZ$10 at McDonald's for two large fries. Daylight robbery! And that was just the tip of the iceberg. However, no more complaining about steep prices – onto the good stuff!

From the Swiss Alps, we headed to Zurich to stay with an old school friend of mine – Sara came to Inglewood High as an exchange student a whole ten years ago now! My word, would you look at the time. Every morning during our stay we all ate a hearty breakfast together; fresh bread and croissants or porridge, with fresh squeezed orange juice! Yum!

We also ... dum dum duuuummmm... picked up our passports, sent back from New Zealand by my kind relatives, with our Russian visas inside!!! Yaayyayayayayyyayay!!! Khalva and ice-cold landscapes, here we come!

On our first day in Zurich, we explored the city. With quite a compact city centre, we managed to see the Fraumunster, St Peterskirche and Grossmunster, where Zwingli headed up the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland.

Fraumunster

St Peterskirche

Not surprisingly, Grossmunster wasn't as grand as other churches we've beheld, with the Protestants' eschewing of ostentation and iconography. The stained glass windows, rather than picturing Mary, Jesus or saints, were composed of what looked like unicellular organisms. Interesting! The feel of the place was relatively homey, though, so instead of being awed, we could imagine actually being part of a church service there.

Zwingli outside

 

We also saw Lenin's place of residence in 1917 or so, before the Russian revolution, and took a lovely walk by the lake in Zurich. Our legs were protesting a bit, even now, from our walks on the Swiss Alps, so we didn't strain them too much.

Lenin's old abode

That night Sara and Jan, her boyfriend, had organised a surprise activity for the four of us; we discovered that we were to be trapped in a room and have to figure the way out by solving a mystery! Our mission was to uncover the men guilty of a recent bank robbery. We had to find various keys and codes to unlock padlocks, through solving different riddles, logic puzzles and generally using our powers of deduction. We had an hour in total, and managed to finish with three minutes to spare! It was so much fun.

We celebrated our victory with dinner at a restaurant, where John and I sampled raclette for the first time, a traditional Swiss dish. We were served (delicious) melted cheese on a plate, and were supplied with baby potatoes, little onions, little gherkins and mini maize cobs. The concept is simple: grab a little food item, place cheese on it, and eat. It was actually very filling, and very yummy.

Capital City #14

The next day we took a day trip to Bern and... riddle me timbers! We did another clue-based activity, called a Foxtrail. Again, we had to solve various clues to follow a trail around the city, getting to see the sights of Bern while exercising our mental faculties at the same time. It was good fun, although frustrating at times, when we couldn't find the clue, or took an alternate meaning from the clue, and spent an extra 40 minutes wandering around the wrong part of town. It didn't help that our paper instructions were in German, but at least John had the English instructions on his smartphone. We ended up taking 4.5 hours or so for an activity that is meant to take 2.5 hours – so we got our money's worth! For the record, we saw a park, a church, walked past some bears (in a bear enclosure – bigger than the ones we saw in Canada), some statues, the river, a government building, and a tent with people rehearsing for a Miss Switzerland contest the next day. They were just setting it up in the middle of the square, and it looked fancy.

 a bear lying around, in the middle of Bern

The Swiss like huge clock faces.

The next day was a Saturday, so Sara was able to take us out for another day trip, this time to a mountainous region about an hour's drive from Zurich. We exercised our leg muscles again with a hike up to a lake, and were rewarded with beautiful autumnal trees on the way, and a picturesque lake with moutains behind it and a restaurant beside it. We loved getting back out into Swiss nature.

autumnal trees

autumnal hues on autumnal trees

the lake in its picturesque setting

so pretty!

We had lunch at the restaurant, sampling some of their delicious homemade ice cream for dessert, and then drove round to the gondola up to the mountain we'd seen from the lake: the Santis.

The prospect didn't look too good from the live TV they had playing at the ticket desk of the viewing deck from the top of the mountain; a big heavy cloud had descended on the top of the mountain, and it looked like all the view we would get was swirling grey fog.

 The unpromising view up from the base of the mountain.

Still, Sara was an optimist, so we decided to go up anyway, to the 2500m high tip, higher than any of the heights we'd reached in the Swiss Alps. It was really cold up there and after a while our hands were freezing. But these were the kinds of views we got:

on the way up

We then drove to a charming little village called Appensell and wandered round, admiring all the pretty facades. We sampled the local culinary delights again at a restaurant there for dinner, where Sara recommended another typical Swiss dish – a dessert this time, noodley-type things made of chestnut, on top of a meringue, with cream on top. It was unexpectedly really good!

a pretty facade

Our last activity before moving on was going to the Zurich Protestant Church on Sunday morning. It was a proper old school service, with a liturgy, hymnals and robe-wearing ministers. The preacher spoke on the tension between faith and science, pointing out how the two coexisted (most of the time) quite happily for ages until recently, and basically that not everything can be explained by science, as some would posit. Not everything that exists can be held under a microscope, and we should be more humble and mindful of how little we really know, as humans, rather than be arrogant about how much we think we know. He spoke from Job, which contains the best question in the Bible, in his mind: God asks, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” Indeed.

The Swiss Alps

From tropical Spain to wintry mountains – what better way to cure a pesky cough than some fresh alpine air?

Our next stop after Cordoba was Grindelwald in Switzerland, which meant a weekend composed almost entirely of travelling. Never fear – that's what we have Kindles for, to alleviate the tedium of two long days! I pulled it out on the first morning and discovered it was broken. Again. My new Kindle, only bought a few weeks ago!! Am I the Kindle-breaker? Or could it be my Kindle cover wrecking the Kindles it contains, bitter because this was not the career it had envisaged for itself? We are still not sure.

Speaking of tedium, though – back to the blog post. We saved some money by booking a slow train back up to Barcelona, one which stopped at every town on the way up (it seemed) and took ten hours in total. The next day it was an early start to catch a 7.20am train to Lyon. After an anxiety-inducing hour-long delay at Perpignan, we somehow managed to arrive right on time at our destination, where we caught a train to Geneva, then one to Bern, then one to Interlaken Ost, and then one to Grindelwald, arriving at 9.30pm. We were thankful we didn't have any issues with all those connections!

Upon our arrival in the small town of Grindelwald, we discovered that our accommodation, Mountain Hostel, was not 100m from the main train station, as we had thought, but a very dark and steep half hour walk away, 100m from a different, cogwheel train station. Again, we were glad it was downhill, and that even at a dark 10pm it was totally safe to be walking around a mostly deserted township.

(NB: If anybody is wanting to follow in our footsteps and stay here at some point, also note that the Mountain Hostel in Gimmelwald is not the same as the Mountain Hostel in Grindelwald. This is a helpful distinction to make.)

Grindelwald. All the lovely chalets!

Our accommodation in Grindelwald turned out to be a very comfortable place to stay, with a helpful receptionist who supplied us with an adaptor plug for the silly Swiss sockets. It would seem the Swiss feel the need to be unique; not content with being more expensive than all the places around them, they also need to have their own currency and their own power sockets.

To their credit, however, they do have beautiful scenery and nice people in the mountains. On our first proper day there, there happened to be a market on! We love markets, so we checked it out, quickly realizing that this would be a window shopping experience, so to speak, given the hefty prices.

We hadn't travelled to the Swiss Alps for shopping, though, but to appreciate the alpine countryside by going for some walks. After our brief survey of the market, we set off on our first attempt. It turned out to be sharply uphill. Moreover, the sun had become unexpectedly hot, making us uncomfortable in our long pants, socks and sneakers. I felt slightly weak, too, with my cough persisting from our time in Spain. After about ten minutes, we did the sensible thing and came back down, and paid for the gondola up to our destination instead. We then enjoyed a nice walk going downhill.

view from the gondola

scene from our first day's walk

Our walks in the Alps stimulated all our senses. Our eyes feasted on lovely scenery. It often smelled of the country (not necessarily in a good way). We could always hear a faint tinkling sound from the bells tied around the necks of cows, goats and sheep in the fields – we're still not sure of the purpose of the bells. We felt the gravel beneath our sneakers on the broad paths, as well as our sore legs and eventually toes from too much downhill walking. And we tasted the fresh bread we bought for lunch every day.

Our walks also got my imagination going. I could totally imagine Heidi frolicking about in the more remote areas we passed through (and then waking up the next morning and going, “Where am I?” – as she ALWAYS seemed to).

Cows with bells on. Not a picture of mountains!

The next day was the true pain-causer for our legs and toes. We took another cable car, apparently the longest one in Europe, up to the top of the mountain Mannlichen, 2343m high. The views were breathtaking, surrounded as we were by majestic snowy mountains. We then walked down to Kleine Scheidegg, at 2061m, from there to Alpiglen, at 1615m, and then the steepest section back down to Grindelwald, at 1034m. It took a total of 4 hours or so, and we definitely felt it the next day (and the next. And the day after).

 At the top of Mannlichen.

 A rare and elusive moment, superbly captured on camera: John really going all out in his imitation of the new camera pose we've been seeing: not just the victory sign, but holding your arm/s out wide while doing the victory sign! In John's case, also bending the body in a strange manner.

Near the top.

 On the way down...

Gorgeous colour lake!

Our pained legs didn't stop us from exploring further afield, however; the following day saw us travelling across to Murren, another little town in the same general region. The route was interesting for us, as a train took us most of the way, but the transport from the valley floor up to Murren involved a cable car for most of the way. We wondered if our luggage would be alright in the cable car, and then saw the size of it – a massive one that could fit about 100 people. Murren is apparently a car-free village, which means you have to have a special permit to be able to drive there. We did see some hardy vehicles there, but very few, and not many people either. It was a very quiet and peaceful place.

We had intended to take another cable car from here up to the top of the Schilthorn mountain, but when the price turned out to be significantly higher than we were expecting, we forewent that opportunity, figuring we'd seen enough beautiful views already to make us happy. Instead, we went for another walk, despite the protestations of our legs and feet, going on a round trip to Gimmelwald.

scene from our third day's walk

We also saw quite a high, thin waterfall in Lauterbrunnen.

And so ends our not very exciting account of various walks to places you haven't heard of in the Swiss mountains. Otherwise it would've just been all photos!