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.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment