Sorry I've been so quiet for so long - I've had a chest infection, then was back in the UK, then we had visitors, and I still had the chest thing to get over; I just couldn't get myself in the frame of mind to blog. I'm making amends this week.
Should have taken the train
When Claire got home from work on the Friday after telling people about our plans for the weekend, she said that she'd been told we ought to take the train down to the Italian part of Switzerland as it was the start of the school holidays and traffic would be bad. Now, we're used to the M25 so what are we worried about a little Swiss traffic? Besides, we didn't actually know where we were going, just generally, "down there somewhere".
SIX hours later, we really wished we'd listened! It seems that the road we were on - the E35 at the end of July is the Swiss equivalent of the M5 on a bank holiday weekend! We'd guessed at three hours driving, but we hadn't taken into account all the tunnels which have traffic lights (we're guessing for safety purposes so that emergency services can easily get into the tunnels in the event of an "incident"). The fairly new Gothard tunnel is 18KM long but there are a number of tunnels as you're heading up towards it, each one of which is traffic light controlled. Nightmarish!
But we decided that we wanted to see the actual passo St Gothardo, which had only reopened after the winter in June [how cool is that?], so we turned of from the traffic and headed upwards a bit further. Weather was atrocious, visibility minimal, and the road surface was basically cobbles. AWESOME!
Out the other side of the pass, the weather was glorious and there's this lovely, long, sweeping series of switchbacks down in the valley. Lago Maggiore is only about a half-hour away once you're through the moutains, so then we had the enormous fun of trying to find a campsite with vacancies - none of the ones close to the lake had any, my sat nav only had the major roads on it, so I had a serious slippage of sense-of-humour by the time we found the sixth one, well out of Locarno up a river, which still didn't have any vacancies but we were welcome to try and find a pitch in the "forest".
Chaos! There were tents everywhere! We finally found a pitch that we reckoned we'd be alright at as long as we didn't put all our guy ropes up (not that wind was going to be a problem). Pitched, paid, went for a wander down to the river with our books, some beers and some sandwich-making materials. Sat on somes rocks by the river for an hour or two while the sun sank lazily behind the mountains, the freezing river making an excellent beer cooler, my wife braving a dip in the icy waters. Then back to the campsite, more beer and more reading until dinner time. I'd been talking about getting a pizza for weeks so I was looking forward to a proper Italian one.
We had to wait for a little while for a table at the only restaurant on the site, but not too long; it was well worth the wait. We ordered up some red wine (I'd had enough beer by then...) and studied the menu. Having been keen on a pizza, I was overwhelmed by the choices so changed my mind fairly rapidly into a saltimbocca. Nice! And so to bed, steeling ourselves for the walk I'd picked out for the following day.
Two and a half vertical kilometres
This looked like a nice circular hike with a little bit of ethnographic history besides. It. Was. Spectacular. Incredible views all the way up, if a little tough going at times. People actually live up here, an hour (or more)'s hard hike from the nearest road! As you climb, more and more of both Lago Maggiore and the reservoir Lago di Vogorno become visible. You're walking through clouds of butterflies and crickets and, unfortunately, some nasty big biting things and you almost don't notice the 6 hours passing. Although you certainly feel it in your legs the following day!
Halfway up, at Odro, there's even a bar / restaurant! The landlady was absolutely lovely and charming and was delighted that we'd walked all that way just to visit her. It was also a working farm with lots of extremely cute goats and not-so-cute chickens roaming free and indeed a guest house, presumably for people who want to literally get away from it all. Right at the top (of the walk - the top of the mountain was another 4 hours away) at Alpe Bardughe is another village and the water fountain there had the coolest, sweetest water I ever tasted! Worth the walk just for that.
Finally the hike back down - not so pretty as it's mostly behind the mountain so not so much to see. And of course it put different demands on your legs. The drive home was without incident and we both slept extremely well.
Next post will be about Swiss National Day!
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