Switzerland – too perfect to be true ?
Hello
everyone
Well
here’s the second one and we’re a little over two weeks into the trip. This one is being sent from the shores of
Lake Maggiore, currently bathed in early morning sunshine with a bit of snow
still glittering away to the north on the mountains.
Les
For
those of you who don’t know, Switzerland has four official languages, French in
the west, German (Swiss-German to be strictly accurate) for most of the rest of
the country, Italian in the south, and in the far south-east in the Engardine,
Romansch, derived from Latin is spoken.
We’re
heading towards Fribourg on the border of the French and German areas, where in
the same town French is spoken on one side of the river and German on the
other. A dispenser of cash is required because
having got some Swiss Francs before we left home I managed to leave them behind
for safe keeping. Euros are accepted
everywhere but I don’t expect the Swiss to offer a generous exchange rate. SFR300 from the cash machine was three notes
and we decided after a little stroll to nip into a bank and ask to change them
for smaller denominations. Amazingly,
the banks close for an hour and a half at lunch time. We didn’t know this and Heather had arrived
at the door as it was being unlocked, said what we wanted and double-amazingly
we were shown in 15 minutes before opening just to get our money changed. I don’t think it was just to put us in our
place but we were told that 100s are ‘not difficult to change anywhere but the
SFR1000 are more troublesome”. SFR100 is
about £75 or US$100. One SFR, Euro and
US$ are all roughly the same value.
It
used to be said that the Swiss would rob and kill any strangers entering their
valleys until they realised that if they just robbed them via a cheque book or
credit card, the strangers came back the next year to be robbed again. We
haven’t seen many caravans or motorhomes from anywhere but Switzerland, a few
from Germany and a couple of Brits, one Dutch I think and the prices must have
something to do with it. It is such a
beautiful country that it would be absolutely heaving if it was as cheap as
France or Spain. So, we’ve chosen to
come and we have to pay the prices.
However, I shall mention some of the costs as we go because I find it a
form of catharsis.
Interlaken
nestles (aren’t they the chocolate people?) between two lakes as you might
deduce from the name. It’s in the
Bernese Oberland and lies a little to the north of some spiffing alpine
scenery. The Lauterbrunnen valley runs southwards
into the Alps. This is a classic glacial
U-shape valley which I still remember from a school Geography text book and it
has the Grindelwald valley branching off to the east. This is where you can see some of the famous
giant Alpine peaks, The Eiger, The Monch, The Jungfrau and The Toblerone.
We’ve
found ourselves on a small and wonderfully situated site with views along a
flower filled valley towards the snowy peaks to the east. There are no other outfits on site and we
think it’s not yet open for the season.
But it is and the owner thinks we don’t want to stay because we’re the
only people there! Empty is our ideal
site and we book in for a couple of days.
We’ve often noticed that on continental sites people do seem to want to
huddle together and they pitch closer than we would choose to. The British Caravan Club wardens would have
nervous breakdowns (and some of them deserve it) with their insistence on “a
four metre gap for fire safety” and “back in to the wooden peg and keep it on
the left edge of your outfit”. Anyway
this is a lovely site from where we cycle to the rack and pinion railway
station, request a train to stop, catch a bus in Grindelwald to the cable car
and get hoisted up a mountain, all on the same ticket, just so that we can
enjoy a walk. Once we get off the cable
car we’re at about 1400 metres among big patches of snow and with the earliest
flowers in abundance, some of them clearly having burst into bloom almost a
soon as the snow has melted. There are thousands
of white crocus, no more than a finger joint high, Yellow Coltsfoot dotted just
by the snow’s edge and just about our Alpine favourite, Soldanella or Snowbell,
pale blue with a nodding bell shaped fringed flower standing about two inches
tall. We’re walking in the pine trees at
times and while tramping along on a snow covered track we come across a car
with no apparent tyre marks leading to it, implying that it has been there for
quite some time. Not a wreck, just a
mystery. Across the valley and towering
sheer and snow covered is the famous north face of the Eiger (Ogre, apparently)
looking very much like an energetic day out, but not for me thanks.
As for
many campsites on the continent, prices are broken down so that everything is
charged for individually and the total is always more than you think it’s going
to be. So, a price for the place, a
price for each person, dog (no, we haven’t), electricity, shower, even drinking
water on our first site near Interlaken.
Oh and then there are taxes, VAT at only 8% (for my non-UK readers it’s
20% in Britain and it stands for Value Added Tax although for the life of me I
can’t spot the ‘value-added’ very often), recycling tax of SFR3 per person per
day and a tax just for the sake of it.
Our current site near swooningly beautiful Lucerne is SFR44 a night
(£33) and we’re not having the electricity, relying on the perfectly adequate
supply from our batteries and solar panel.
Our friends Jan and Clive who are currently in Spain in their van are
paying 15 Euros (about £12) a night.
Lucerne
really is a lovely town and I would be happy to return. The views across the lake have snow capped
peaks but here in the sun it’s definitely shirtsleeves and sunglasses
time. Traditional Victorian concoctions
of turrets, towers and ornamental stonework dot the wooded hillsides disguised
as hotels and the town has most of the 15th century or thereabouts defensive
wall still in place. The river flows at
speed from the lake and has a system of wooden baffles which they call needles
across the river to regulate the flow of the water and hence the depth of the
lake. A little further downstream is a
modern and very subtle hydro power plant.
The most arresting sights though are the two medieval covered wooden
bridges which cross the river. Neither of
them run in a straight line nor do they cross the river at the narrowest points
and they are both stunning. The smaller
one is original, completed in 1408 and with a series of 67 paintings from the
early 1600s but the larger one from the early part of the 14th
century was badly damaged by a fire in the 1990s which destroyed many of the 112
painted panels. It has now been repaired
but the spaces where the destroyed paintings were have been deliberately left
blank. This larger bridge is over 650
feet long. Our cultural outing here was
to the Sammlung Rosengart, a gallery displaying the 200 or so works of the
private collection of an art dealer who was a friend of Picasso and various
other modern artists of the early and middle 20th century. She’s donated the whole shebang to the city
where it’s located in a converted bank. Loads of Picassos and Paul Klee plus a
number of Miro, Matisse and Monet amongst them but I confess to much preferring
the Impressionists among the collection, especially a very small Seurat. Specifically I think some Picassos are really
good but for an awful lot I think he’s just taking the mickey.
I’d
either not noticed or forgotten about all the wooden covered bridges in
Switzerland. We’ve seen dozens of them
and I suppose that as well as keeping snow off the walkway the roof provides
some decent shelter in really bad weather.
For some reason I’d believed that Vermont was the place for the covered
bridges and they do have some good ones but for sheer numbers Switzerland takes
the prize (of those we’ve visited) with the two in Lucerne taking the Gold.
On
this Lucerne campsite we’re near the lake and next to what is in a few days
going to be the World Beach Volleyball championships. We watched a bit of practicing but only one
player was suitably undressed enough to take part.
Now
I’m sure many of you drivers have cursed a car and caravan before now because
it wasn’t going at the speed you wanted to.
Well on this site is the person you really do not want to be stuck
behind, especially on a narrow, winding mountain road. He’s a Swiss driver whose classic combo is a
converted horsebox as a caravan which is towed by a tractor. Apparently he’s well known and travels all
over Switzerland, slowly.
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