Swiss Holiday 7 - Bern

Friday October 17th
Today was a free day, but it was rather cold and miserable in Kandersteg in the morning, while the weather forecast for Bern was good. Also, Bern sounded like an interesting town, so Paul and I caught a train there. It took just over an hour, starting high above the valley but soon descending to the valley floor and passing through more and more little towns on the outskirts of Bern.

Once there, we quickly found the tourist office and hired two iPods with a tour of Bern, which is a historic city full of interesting buildings.

One of the first stops on the tour was the Bagpiper fountain.



This was the first of about 15 city fountains, all from the 1500s. The city was well supplied with public fountains from the Middle Ages, and they still flow today with water you can drink. We didn't, but later in the tour we passed some workmen who were drinking from one and also washing their faces. The bagpiper fountain showed a rather ragged musician playing the bagpipes, musicians being very popular in the Middle Ages, but not well paid!

The next stop on the tour was the Prison Tower.


This was actually one of the original gates of the city, and it had been decided to use the upper storeys as a prison. There are still bars on the windows under the clock.

The trams going away from you in this photo pass through this gate. The trams coming towards you pass to the left of the gate.

A little further down the street is the Dutch Tower. This was originally used for secret smoking!


Apparently, the use of tobacco was forbidden in 17th century Bern - which seems to me an excellent idea! Dutch merchants who wanted to smoke tobacco they had imported came to the upper room in this tower to smoke it in secret.

The imposing baroque building below is the Swiss Parliament building.


In the summer months when it is hot, the fountains are apparently very popular. It was pretty hot today, we were both in short sleeved shirts, but didn't quite feel inclined to run into the jets of water. Mind you, neither did anybody else!

Our walk took us to the Kirchenfeld bridge where we looked down on a very old part of Bern, called the Mattequartier, medieval Bern's smallest neighbourhood. Workshops and mercantile activity filled this area, and medieval sources tell of numerous complaints about the ceaseless and apparently nerve-wracking noise of machinery, carts and commerce. There were three city-owned watermills built in 1360.


This was also the area where the city bath houses used to be, and consequently it attracted prostitutes. Apparently, Casanova visited here!

The Town Clock just a short distance away is absolutely amazing!


On the very top is a golden man who strikes a bell for the hour. Under him is the big clock, with a pointing hand for the hours and an arrow for the minutes. Under that are 5 panels of Roman Gods for 5 days of the week - Tuesday to Saturday. Sunday and Monday are represented by the sun and moon on the astrological clock just above the arch. They're probably too small to see in my photo, but the moon is half black and half gold and turns to show the different phases. Also too small to see are the moving figures on the right of the astrological clock. There's a golden rooster which crows for the hours, various figures which come out, and above them is the figure of Chronos who turns the hourglass for the number of hours. It's quite a performance!

We went on to the cathedral, which is undergoing restoration so parts of it were swathed in plastic sheeting - hence there's no overall photograph. However, we were able to see the wonderful carving over the main door.



It shows the Last Judgement; the big gold figure with the sword is St Michael, and he's overcoming a kind of nasty grey coloured Satan, who has one foot on a set of scales. Behind them, the saved are on the left, in lovely white garments. And on the left are the damned, all naked and suffering torments; for instance, you won't be able to see it in my photo, but a man on the right is being nipped with big gold pincers in a very painful place, a punishment for the sin of lust!

Opposite the cathedral is the Moses fountain. Moses, with a long beard, is holding the tablet of the Ten Commandments and pointing to the second commandment, the one about not making any graven images; this is a Protestant cathedral. However, the carvings over the door were not destroyed, even though they are also graven images. The guide said it was thought necessary to remind people not to sin; I wonder if it was really an artistic rather than a religious decision, but at least the wonderful carvings weren't destroyed.

We went along a little narrow alleyway nearby to see the Spysi, a charitable institution set up by the burghers of Bern in the Middle Ages to provide low cost meals for those in want during the colder months. It is still open, and apparently popular with workmen and elderly people.

Right next door to it is what remains of a medieval lavatory, so, as I haven't recently been following my usual procedure of photographing historic bathrooms for quite a while, I thought I'd photograph this one!



It is set directly over a medieval sewer, now covered over with dark grey paving slabs. There is a gap in the houses opposite, as you don't build over an open sewer. Also on one of the houses opposite is a tiny room on the second floor which overhangs the sewer. This was also another lavatory, obviously with direct sewer access!

We walked across the Nydegg bridge over the river Aar, which is only a few hundred years old but overlooks the first bridge that was originally built a few years after Berne was founded in the 12th century.



It was originally wooden, and was re-built in stone in the 15th century. Before there were any bridges, the only way into the city from that side was by boat; the gap you can see in the houses was the original landing stage for the boats.

We crossed right over the bridge and went to have a look at the bear pits. Bears are the symbol of Bern, and the city has always kept bears. The bear pits no longer felt to be a suitable environment for bears, so they aren't used today; today's bears have a much nicer and larger enclosure beside the river, with trees for shade and their own long swimming pool which is almost like a canal parallel to the river.




Both bears were looking a bit hot as it was a very hot afternoon by then, and they were sitting panting in the shade.

There was a lot more to the tour, we were walking around for more almost three and a half hours, but I've probably written too much already and there are certainly too many photos.

However, I have to say something about the shopping arcades. Originally, the streets were wider and the traders set up stalls to sell their goods in front of the houses. Then roofs were wanted to shelter the stalls, so the houses began to be built with an overhang, so forming an arcade. This is the case throughout the old town and means shoppers are out of both sun and rain as they window shop.



I certainly found it pleasantly shady and cool to be out of the sun, and the pavement is nice and smooth - the streets are mostly cobbled so I found them a bit hard on my ankles after a while.

There are all the usual high street shops - including C & A! Britain must be the only place where we no longer have one of those, we saw them in Germany too.

Something else we don't have in Britain is anything like this beautiful delicatessen.



If I hadn't been so tired by then, I'd have gone in and bought something, but my feet were getting very sore and quite swollen so we made our way back to the tourist office to return our iPod tour guides, and were back on the platform 10 minutes before our train.

Our return journey had one big difference; the low clouds had lifted, and we saw a wall of white mountains in the distance.



These are three peaks you can see from Bern on a clear day. They are the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau mountains, I believe in that order, starting from the left.

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Swiss Holiday 6

Thursday October 16th
Today we travelled from Kandersteg to Zermatt via Brig. Kandersteg is a very pretty little place, about 25 minutes by train from Brig, which is a main terminus. So we have to travel to Brig before going anywhere else. 

There is a huge tunnel through the mountains to get out of Kandersteg, which sits in an almost circular bowl surrounded by high peaks. It takes 7 or 8 minutes to get through the tunnel, then you are high above the U- shaped valley, looking down at untidy little settlements in the valley below. The train continues along the side of the long valley, gradually descending to the valley floor, and soon you are in Brig. 

The departure platform for Zermatt is on the main street of the Brig, with big hotels overlooking the line. 



We caught the train to Zermatt, with a rack and pinion engine at the front, because some of the slopes the train tackled were very steep indeed. 

We travelled for over an hour, at times ascending or descending very steeply, and sometimes traversing very narrow canyons.


This was one of the narrow canyons, with the river flowing along the bottom.
At other times we were high up the side of the mountain, sometimes looking down on villages far below. Some of the villages were also quite high up the mountain.


This one had a rather fascinating tower.

I took the opportunity of photographing the bit of the rack and pinion system that you can see. This shows the centre rail quite clearly.


The are cog wheels under the engine and under the carriages, and these can be made to engage with the centre rail, preventing the train from sliding backwards on steep ascents - or sliding forwards on steep descents. It is engaged as required, but you usually know when it's engaged because the clanking noise starts, and then the train starts travelling up or down an unusually steep slope.

As we approached Zermatt, we got a vague view of the Matterhorn, but it was very misty so we knew we wouldn't get a clear view and might be lucky to see anything at all. Once we had arrived in Zermatt, we got tickets up the Gornegrat, a mountain just opposite the Matterhorn. This is a rack and pinion railway, and rises to a height of just over 3000 metres.

We were soon climbing up the mountainside and looking down on Zermatt.


The train ascends very steeply indeed in places, in fact it sometimes feels more like a funicular railway.

As we climbed higher, we could barely see the valleys below.


The journey takes about 40 minutes. Well before the end you are above the tree line and in the bare alpine meadows.



This shows part of the route of the train up the hillside. Towards the foot of the photo, you can see the walking path. Some people choose to go up on the railway and walk down; in the train from Brig, we met a Swiss man who was travelling up with his mountain bike, intending to bike down. It is very steep in places though, so I wouldn't care to try it.

Eventually I managed to get a view of sorts of the Matterhorn, when the clouds thinned for a short time.


This wasn't a particularly close view, but for most of our time up the mountain, we could see very little as the clouds were so thick.

At the top, we had a very good view of all the glaciers.



This was the longest glacier, clearly flowing down the mountain, a river of ice.

It was bitterly cold at 3000 metres, and there was snow and ice on the ground. There is a very smart hotel at the summit, as well as a shopping mall, a restaurant and a self-service café, so we were able to warm up and have something to eat after viewing the bare rocky peaks, the ice and snow and all the glaciers flowing down from the peaks opposite.

After lunch, we found more of the mist had closed in and we didn't have such good views as we had enjoyed before.

Once down in Zermatt, we had time for a quick wander through the town. Zermatt is far smaller than I had previously thought, and has some delightfully old fashioned looking buildings.




By 3.30, it was time to catch the train back to Brig, and then our connection to Kanderstag.

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Swiss Holiday 5 - Glacier Express and on to Kandersteg

Wednesday October 15th
We didn't have to make a very early start today, which gave us a bit more time to recover from yesterday. We had a leisurely breakfast and completed our packing, then made our way to the station, buying our lunch time sandwich before meeting to join the train.

It was another train with panoramic windows right up to the roof, so we had the same problem with reflections when trying to take photographs. I've had to bin two thirds of my photos, which is bit of a shame.

The journey starts with the train entering the Rhine gorge, which is quite narrow, with steep cliffs.


According to the railway guide book, the area was largely inaccessible until the coming of the railway in 1903.

Further up the Rhine, we stopped at a town called Disentis, which is dominated by a huge monastery.


The original church is claimed to date back to the eighth century, and by the eleventh century, it was established as a monastery which had become a well-known stop on the pilgrim route from Germant to Rome. The current monastery and church was built between 1683 and 1695, so it is the oldest Benedictine abbey in Switzerland.

We made a fairly long stop in Dusentis, as the engine has to be changed at this point. After this, the track is very steep and the train uses the rack and pinion system.


You can see it here in my photo, and you are certainly aware of it because the train is suddenly climbing much more steeply than usual and making a clanking sound. I made several attempts to photograph the train to show how steeply we were climbing, but the reflections in the window made it impossible.

At the highest point, Oberalppass, the train has reached over 2000 metres above sea level and the terrain is quite inhospitable.



There are no trees at this altitude, only sparse alpine vegetation and bare and jagged rocks.

You overlook some more fertile valleys far below, and there are snowy peaks in the distance.


As you approach closer to the snowy peaks, you start to see the glaciers.


Eventually, you begin to descend again towards the town of Andermatt.
The descent is very steep indeed, needing the rack and pinion system to be engaged again.



Paul liked the look of Andermatt, he could see evidence of a lot of steep ski trails and he decided he might like to try skiing there.

After Andermatt, the train follows the Rhone valley.
The river water is green here, because it comes direct from the glacier.


The Rhone often floods, apparently, and we could see dams being built for flood control.

Eventually, the train reaches Brig, where we got off. The Glacier Express goes on to Zermatt, but that is the journey we will make tomorrow. We caught a small local train to Kandersteg, where we are staying for three nights.

Kandersteg is a small village which is completely surrounded by mountain peaks. This is the view from the station platform.



You may just be able to see our hotel in this photo, it is just behind the tree on the left with beautiful deep orange coloured autumn leaves. It is called Hotel Victoria, which you may be able to see written on the front of it.

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Swiss Holiday 4 - Bernina Express

Tuesday October 14th.
Today we travelled on the Bernina Express, all the way to Poschiavo, returning by way of St Moritz. It really is a masterpiece of engineering, and the combination of this and the landscape around it led to it's being recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. However, I am so exhausted from running up and down the train taking photos, I don't think I have the energy to write very much about it, I'm afraid!

After leaving Chur, the train travels through a valley said to contain Europe's highest density of castles. Owing to the morning fog, they were pretty hard to spot!


This looks like something Turner might have painted!

The journey continues through a gorge and into a valley which contains a world famous viaduct, the Landwasser Viaduct. My photos of the viaduct are awful, but this is the view as you go across it.


It isn't the only stunning view of course, and even the roads are masterpieces of engineering.


The railway climbs and climbs, using 55 tunnels and 196 bridges, running along what seems like a shelf of rock most of the way up the mountain, with sheer cliff faces and bare exposed rocks. Far below, you can sometimes see glacial streams.


At the highest point, there are glaciers.



You can probably see in the distance that there is far less vegetation; the train eventually crosses a bare bleak plateau above 2200 metres, before descending towards Poschiavo.


Poschiavo has a great many old Renaissance buildings in the old town.
This tower next to the main church would not look out of place in Italy



There's even a whole row of 'palaces' at one end of the town.

This looks to be the oldest building, with a date around 1460.


As you can see, the streets are cobbled.

We were due to lunch in Poschiavo, but most of the cafés were closed for lunch - restaurants were open, but we only wanted something light like soup or a sandwich, so it was quite hard to find a place.

Just after 1.30 we set off back towards Chur, stopping around 3 in St Moritz. Unfortunately, the station there is being re-built so you are rather trapped inside it, and we were there for too short a time so we weren't able to walk into town.

We arrived back in Chur around 6, having had the opportunity to photograph a few things we missed in the morning, and being able to see more of the scenery, as much of the morning's fog had cleared.

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Swiss Holiday 3 - Chur to Arosa

Monday October 13th
We woke this morning to a day of heavy rain. This was a free day with no planned expeditions, but although there are a number of interesting looking museums and art galleries in Chur which would have been ideal on a wet day, they are all unfortunately closed on a Monday! We considered an excursion to Lucerne, which looked to be a very interesting city as well, but was probably also closed on Mondays and anyway would take two hours on the train. We felt a day without too much train would be preferable, so settled instead on the short but scenic rail trip to Arosa.

The train leaves once an hour on the 26 km. trip, and climbs quite steeply 1000 metres up. I found it quite remarkable that trains could climb so steeply, especially since, when the line was built 125 years ago, it used steam! Mind you, it apparently took two steam engines to get the train up the climb.

The train begins by travelling slowly through the streets of Chur – past the town walls and alongside the river.



This photo above isn't mine, it comes from the Internet, but shows the train passing through the town. The river is just beyond the railings you can see on the left of the photo, and was quite deep and fast today - there's obviously been a lot of rain!

Minutes later, the train starts to climb and suddenly you notice you are rapidly climbing the side of the valley and the river is far below.


Photographs were quite difficult through the raindrops on the window, and many photos were ruined by reflections in the windows. It was really a very dull day outside but the train was well-lit inside, so many good photos were spoiled by ghostly figures reflected in the window or just reflections from the bright lights.


We were soon high up - you can see the clouds clinging to the hillsides - and we felt we were in a scene from Heidi. This is an Alpine pasture, with a small building that might be for animal fodder - or even for Heidi and her grandfather!

There are constant tunnels and viaducts, the most spectacular being the Langwieser Viaduct (over the Plessur river).


I must admit I was so amazed by the viaduct I didn't even notice the river until I looked at my photo! Going over it is quite an experience too, and it's hard to decide which side of the train you want to look out of.

The views all along the route were amazing and breathtaking, looking right over the valley, which continued to be wreathed in cloud. Sometimes we were staring down vertical rocky cliffs we could only glimpse through the pine trees, sometimes the whole valley stretched below us in different shades of green.

After an hour of constant photographing, we arrived in Arosa, a small ski village which is now full of new concrete tourist accommodation. There is a mountain lake, which is used for 'son et lumière' during the high season.


By this time, the rain was very heavy indeed and we soon became very wet wandering through the village, so Paul decided we should go back to Chur. This turns out to have been a mistake, because others of our party went right up the mountain in the cable car and had wonderful views at about the same time as we were leaving. Apparently there was a short period when the rain was only falling in the village and not on the mountains above, so we might have enjoyed even more spectacular views if we hadn't been so worried about drowning.

We enjoyed more views as we descended.



This is a village part of the way down, showing some of the lower pastures and even a cow!

Back down in Chur, we lunched and then did a little sightseeing in the town. The tourist guide describes Chur as 'the oldest city in Switzerland, boasting 5000 years of civilisation', but as we couldn't visit any museums and we didn't walk around a great deal because of the very heavy rain, I don't feel we did it justice.



This is St Martinzplatz, a square which is in the oldest part of Chur, on part of the historical north-south route through the inner city. The church is the Kirche St. Martin, a late Gothic church which was built following the city fire in 1464 using parts of a previous even earlier Carolingian building. An attractive feature inside is apparently three stained-glass windows painted by Augusto Giacometti in 1919, which we did not see. The church was shut.

The fountain you might just be able to see in front of the church is called the Martinsbrunnen, and dates from 1716. Its basin is adorned with signs of the zodiac, which you can't see in my photo because there was so little light. It was really raining very hard.

There are plenty of other very old buildings near where we are staying, but they are quite hard to photograph. The streets are narrow and the buildings are quite high, and I didn't want to tilt the camera too much because I didn't want to get the lens wet - it was continuing to rain very heavily. I took a photo of the house where Angelica Kauffmann was born, but I won't post it here as I only manage such a little bit of it. (For anybody who is interested, Angelica Kauffmann came to England in 1766 where her paintings became very popular and she was a close friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds. She was one of the founders of the Royal Academy where she often exhibited and I notice that National Trust properties seem to be full of her paintings! Many feminists know about her because she thought of herself as a painter of historical subjects which was extremely unusual for the time; historical painting was thought of as a strictly male preserve because it was seen as prestigious and moreover it usually included nude studies so required painters to attend life drawing classes with nude models, which would have excluded women artists at the time).

The only building I got a decent photo of was yet another view of our hotel, parts of which date back to the 1400s. It's easier to photograph because it's in a little square, so you can photograph all the floors.



Eventually we gave up and returned to the hotel to dry out. Later, when the rain had stopped, we went out to eat in a nearby Italian restaurant.
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Swiss Holiday 2 - Into Switzerland

Sunday October 12th
We arose at some ungodly hour this morning, so as to have breakfast and be packed and downstairs by 8.15. I rather overestimated the time it would take us, and must remember that an hour and a half will be sufficient for showering, packing and breakfasting in future! Fortunately, there's no need for such an early start tomorrow.

We walked back across the square to Cologne station to catch our train into Switzerland, which was late and then came in on a different platform to the one advertised, where we had been standing for about 20 minutes. So we had a mad dash down one huge set of stairs and up another - just like what's always happening at London Bridge, especially when you're carrying a big suitcase!

The journey took all day, from 9 until 5, and I'm afraid parts of it weren't very interesting. After we left Cologne, the train went along the banks of the Rhine, so there would have been an opportunity to see all the castles again, had it not been for the very heavy mist. Visibility was low, and the tops of the hills couldn't be seen at all.


I suspect this town could be Konigswinter, but I'm far from sure, as you couldn't possibly see if Drachenfels castle was looming over it or not.

I had another disappointment with the Lorelei, as you can see.


This one was even more foggy than the last time we went past it, when we were on the boat. I seem doomed never to get a very clear photo of it!

As we passed further along the Rhine, I took a number of photos of Die Pfalz, the sweet little castle in the middle of the river. Most of them were terrible, but I did get one very good one. Then when I was deleting all the poor ones, I deleted the good one by mistake! This is the town just below Die Pfalz.


I think I'm correct in saying that it's Kaub, the town which became very rich as a result of all the customs duty charged by Die Pfalz.

We continued on until we made another stop in Mainz. After Mainz, we turned away from the Rhine and headed towards Switzerland. The weather improved, but the land was largely flat and not very interesting. There was a long stop in Basel, where three carriages on our train were uncoupled and coupled to a different train, and we set off towards Zurich and the Chur.

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland, and is set at the northern tip of Lake Zurich. The railway passes along the western side of the lake, so there was some opportunity for photos, though there are rather a lot of houses built close to the lake.


Photographs are not easy out of the train window, especially when the train is travelling so fast, so I seem to have taken a lot of photographs of bushes, trees and other trains, all of which leapt into my viewfinder between my pressing the shutter and the camera taking the picture. And of course, I have plenty of photos of the window reflections, like this one above. It does show the lovely calm lake though.

The areas round the lake are quite built up, so it's also hard to see the lake between all the smart houses.


The lake is also extensively used for leisure, so there are marinas all along it, as well as jetties and boat houses like this one. And there are large and small boats.


This one is obviously some sort of excursion boat, and it seems to be absolutely packed - not perhaps surprising on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon.

As we progressed further south, we began to see the mountains, and by the time we reached the end of the lake, there were mountains on both sides.



You can see all the wonderful folds in the rocks, and the jagged peaks standing out against the sky. The little beach at this end of the lake is the only beach I have seen - mostly, the lake margins seemed very rocky.

Our train continued on and eventually reached Chur, (which is pronounced 'Coor'.) Here, the hotel staff collected our baggage from the station and took it to our rooms, while we walked the short distance through the town to our hotel, which is in the old part of the town.



Dinner was in the hotel tonight, and was something of a local speciality - a ham cooked inside a loaf of bread. It makes a nice change to eat the food of the country; the food on the boat down the Rhine was lovely, but it was International rather than German. So it makes a nice change to have local specialities.

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