Adventure 2012: The hills are alive with the sound of music.... (ok not Austria I know)

23 June, 8.30pm, Switzerland

The remainder of Katriel’s birthday was spent at the pool, until we were hungry enough for dinner. We had crusty bread, soft cheese and salami, along with some leftover pasta – it was nice to have something decent after ice cream for breakfast and cake for lunch! Katriel really enjoyed her birthday and having a relaxing day at the pool was good for all of us.

Friday saw us on the move again. As soon as we’d had breakfast, we packed our cases then sent the children to the pool for one last swim while the adults cleaned the unit from top to bottom, in the hope of avoiding the 40 euro cleaning fee. We had leftover cake and watermelon for morning tea before packing everyone into the car and heading back towards Milan on the way to Switzerland. Unfortunately only about 20 minutes into the trip we were brought to a standstill on the motorway by an accident that had happened only a few minutes earlier. It took about an hour to get moving again so our hopes of getting through a good chunk of the journey before lunch were a little dented. That was the second time we had been held up by an accident on the motorway (the first time on our way over from Milan the first day). Although the roads are very good quality, and wide, the speed of the traffic means that when there is an accident, it’s quite serious.

Following the main motorways we headed up from Milan into Switzerland. All of a sudden at the Swiss border, the landscape changes, from flat fields to steep mountains. Switzerland is just so scenic, everywhere we looked were postcard-worthy views. We then headed northeast, almost towards Zurich, then east again almost to the border of Liechtenstein. By this stage we were all a bit over the travelling, so we weren’t in the mood for popping over the border to claim one more country. The road we took was really good – including lots of tunnels (one of them about 6km long!) to iron out the worst parts. In fact the old road, which we could see zig-zagging wildly on the GPS, has been entirely replaced by the new road – the old one still exists, but none of it has been reused. I guess it was efficient to build it that way without having to work around traffic etc, but seems a strange approach.

Our accommodation in Switzerland is an apartment in Nesslau, booked again through airbnb. The owner is often away on business and lets out his home while he is out of the country. It is a beautiful apartment, very very nicely fitted out (we don’t want to touch anything in case we break it), and is in a lovely little Swiss village up in the Alps with mountains all around. The Swiss people obviously don’t believe in using up too much space, everywhere we look there is so much land and space, yet people build multi-storey homes and high-density housing like apartments. So the views are really different from New Zealand. In winter this whole village is covered in snow. Many of the houses and village church are traditional designs, with the pointy shape, window boxes with flowers, and the church bell seems to ring for about 10 minutes every hour. We’ve even seen cows wearing cow bells – how much more Swiss can you get!

Not many people here speak English. Our host’s neighbour, who let us in and showed us around, barely speaks any, and most of the staff in other places we’ve seen don’t either. The language here is a Swiss variation on German, and all the signs and TV etc are in German. Just before bed they were playing The Matrix on TV. Not only have they dubbed all the voices (what the heck happened to Morpheus’s booming voice!), they have added a new soundtrack, with 70s style clanging (and distracting) music in the tense bits. Very very odd. Quite a lot of the TV here is English or American shows dubbed over with German – I wonder if it gets frustrating watching TV where the lips don’t move at the right time, all the time.

Today was Saturday. Heading out after a good night’s rest and a quiet morning trying to watch kids TV in German, we wandered down to the supermarket to see what we could see. Lots of food, quite a few recognisable brands, and some very unrecognisable items. Switzerland in general is very expensive, and a small town foodmarket probably even more so. Meat is entirely out of reach cost-wise, but a budget brand of pizza and pasta gave us some options. Chocolate in Switzerland is very big, and there are lots of cheese options as well. One of the things that is massive here, and Italy as well, is Nutella! Big jars, little jars, individual serves, white and dark nutella, nutella crepes, nutella filled croissants, nutella snacks, nutella chocolate bars …. Feel like Bubba off Forrest Gump with the shrimp thing!

We are up in an area called Toggenburg, which simply must be the inspiration for Toblerone chocolate (which is of course Swiss). The mountains are these massive, rocky, pointy peaks, all in a row with a gap in between each one. The area is very popular for skiing in winter and hiking in summer. The ski-lifts operate in summer as well to take hikers up into the mountains, and there are walking and mountainbiking tracks all over the hills. Today we bought a 2-day pass for the various lifts and trails in the area, and took a chair-lift ride part way up one of the mountains. It is quite different being in a chairlift rather than a gondola ‘capsule’ so there were some nervous moments for some of us, especially since Peter spends the whole trip talking about how the system works and where the weak points are, and wow look how tall and close these trees are, if one of them fell over it would take out the cable etc etc. The kind of information you want to hear once you’ve arrived safely and your feet are on solid ground. In any case, we did arrive safely (both ways) and were treated to some amazing views across the valley. There was a really neat see-saw at the top which had xylophone-like bars in between the two seats, and a ball that bounced gently along each way making bell sounds as the see-saw went up and down. Added to the cows and their cow bells in the nearby field, it was quite musical. Though I imagine if you had spent whatever enormous sum of money it would cost to stay in the very fancy guest-house up there, you might begin to find it a little tiresome after a while.

Tomorrow we are going to do some gondola and chair-lift rides, and hike a bit from one to the other in between. The ticket we have includes the bus which connects them all at the bottom, so it won’t matter if we come out at a different village than where we went in. There seem to be walking and biking trails all around these parts, even some people doing the pole-walking thing as well.

Although it has been neat to see some famous cities and landmarks, it is quite refreshing to be completely out of tourist-ville, and just seeing a small village with real people – and unbelievable scenery. We have definitely taken more generic scenery shots here than anywhere.