Bits and bobs

No I haven't fallen off the edge of the world. I just haven't had much to say; we didn't quite make it to Geneva last weekend. However, we did visit our first Swiss curry house and we visited the capital, Bern last weekend, so it's time to bring you up to date.

Swiss Curry!

There's an Indian restaurant quite close to where we live and the last couple of times we'd walked past it, the smell was heavenly. So we decided to pay them a visit on a cold Friday night. Foolishly, we both ordered a large Feldschlossen as soon as we sat down, before they could tell us that they had both Kingfisher and Cobra. Doh'l! Never mind. Now, the way they do things in Switzerland when it comes to currying is a little bit different. The menu has a bunch of sauces on it but rather than picking one to go with your taste in heat, whatever you order, they ask you how hot you want it. They have "levels" - one, two or three (three being "how an Indian has it"). Now we didn't quite understand this bit at the time (I'm thinking what if you ordered a level three fahl, you see) but basically, you could have a butter chicken at level three or a madras at level one. Weird! We both went with lamb, really can't remember what the sauce was but it was very tasty. I went with a level two, Claire with a one and I found it thoroughly tasty, but I might go for a three next time. All very good. And now we know how it all works, next time'll be even better!

Ski Gear

You might remember me saying that we were planning on going to Geneva. It was such a crummy day that we really didn't feel like a long drive, but we jumped in the car anyway as Claire needed to hire her skis and boots for the season. That's how it's done out here. You rent stuff for a season, bring it back in May. Or keep it and rent it for another season. It's great for the kids, obviously, because it's utterly pointless spending a fortune on gear that's only going to last them one season. Great for Claire, too, because neither of us is certain how well our knees are going to hold up...

The idea was, go get the ski gear sorted and then head to Geneva if we felt like it. Bad plan! Going on a saturday was a nightmare. The world and their dog were all there getting their kids sorted with skis, boots, skates, all the winter stuff and the queues were massive! Thank goodness we didn't leave it until November, when it allegedly gets really busy. I think we were there for about three hours and I just wanted to go home afterwards. Claire has a lovely pair of lilac Volkis, since you asked, and a brand new pair of boots, which she can then buy if her knees hold out. It's a pretty good system and works out quite cheap. It's been a while since I hired gear when skiing, but I seem to remember it being about sixty quid a week or so? We've paid about three times that for six months. Someone is making a lot of money out of ski hire.

Bern - the Nation's Capital

On Saturday, we drove down to Bern to have a mooch around. There's nice big Park and Ride just off the motorway, with plenty of spaces so that's what we did. And I'm glad. Traffic was very ... interesting in Bern. The old town is very narrow and cobbled. It's actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site don't you know. It's weird, because it's all narrow streets it seems really small but it's amazingly busy. It feels like a capital city, you know?

A guess because space is at such a premium, lots of the shops' cellars have also been converted into shops, so you can delve down into all kinds of establishments. It's really a very interesting place. We had a bite to eat at the Cafe Des Pyrenees (they don't seem to have a website) on Kornhausplatz and I thought it was wonderful in there.

We headed on down the Nydegggasse towards the bear pits, which I really wanted to see. Bern is named for a bear, you see, and for many years they kept bears in pits at various locations around the city. The last place was just over the Nydeggbrucke at, funnily enough, the Barengraben. Now of course they don't keep them in the pits anymore. Not since 2009. Now they're roaming "free" on the bank of the Aare, in a little bit of open ground. They can still get at the old pits if they want to, apparently. Papa bear (Finn) is seperated from Mama bear (Bjork) and the two baby bears (Urs and Berna) by a great big metal fence. He hasn't been respecting her need for peace recently. Sounds like most blokes to me! It doesn't look to me like they have that much room there but I know nothing about animals so I'll give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Here's a picture of Finn.

And here's a picture of the old pits. Can you see the rings attached to the walls? Can you guess what they're for?

We headed back up towards the bahnhof, stopping to take a look at the rathaus and a lovely church, then stopping for a coffee at Starbucks. Much as I hate loath and detest Starbucks, they do have nice coffee, and their cinnamon roll things are amazing! Final stop before getting a bus back to the car park was for bread and fondue mix. Yes folks, we have a fondue set! Niceness!

We are almost certainly going to Lausanne or maybe Geneva this weekend. Somewhere where they speak French, anyway. The weather forecast is promising, so we'll see what's what. Oh and tonight we're going to the Herbstmesse, Autumn Fayre or something. Apparently it's an annual gastro-fest. Three hours of wine tasting coming up!

A very exciting weekend

You know, sometimes you have nothing to do for a weekend, and other times it's a non-stop festival of fun! Last weekend we had fondue and cocktails (and hangovers), a glorious afternoon's walking in the mountains and a very exciting visit to a very impressive geological feature. I was too tired yesterday to do anything except recover from the excitement.

Fondue and cocktails

Friday night was a cheese-soup-fest with some friends. The fondue was greatly enhanced by the addition of caipirinhas to the mix, as indeed were our hangovers. In Switzerland you can actually buy a pack of fondue mix which you then just whack into the fondue and start dipping (once it's melted down a bit of course). Very civilised. Lots of wine and some beer was also consumed by yours truly, so much of the latter part of the evening is a little bit blurry...

Kandersteg and Oeschinensee

So it was in a somewhat hungover state that we drove down to the Alps on Saturday, arriving at about half twelve in Kandersteg. It was, frankly a bizarre journey through three different weather systems; fine but pretty cold in Basel, then once we came out of a tunnel into Schwiezer Mittelland it was a horrible grey heavy sky, which didn't bode well for the proposed day's siteseeing (I was suggesting a detour into Bern instead) and then we came out of another tunnel into the Berner Oberland and it was a glorious sunny day! It was lovely; there we were all kitted out with multiple layers, waterproofs, hats and gloves and we were down to shorts and a tee-shirt within seconds of getting out of the car.

A short cable car ride up into the mountains later, we set off on a very gentle downhill walk, very well-paved, towards Oeschinensee, along with most of the rest of the local population. There were a million barbecues running, people fishing on the lake, even some lunatics paddling in it! A very very pretty sight as you can see from the picture above. Not as favourite for me as Bachalpsee, but pretty lovely nonetheless. We had sandwiches and a snooze and then wandered around the lake, where there's a lot of wood-carvings carved from felled trees and roots; it's really quite good fun. Another snooze at the far side of the lake and we were ready to walk back down the mountain to Kandersteg, which was actually pretty darned steep but only took about an hour and then we wandered around Kandersteg for a bit, stopping for a beer at once place. New Beer! Egger. Very nice. and then onto another little place by the river where we had a very large pork schnitzel, chips and what we think was boiled fennel, but we could be wrong. The beer in this place was called Gurten beer, which I didn't like nearly so much as the Egger. Home and chill on the sofa.

Rheinfalls!

Now I've been wanting to visit the Rheinfalls since we arrived. According to Wikipedia it's the largest plain waterfall in Europe, whatever that means. It's 120m wide and 23m high and the flow is between 250 cubic metres per second in the winter and 600 in the summer, so I guess it was closer to the lower end when we visited. But still so loud! We had a very pleasant drive to get there, along the Rhine for the most part. At Koblenz, we went over the confluence of the Rhine and the Aare, which are both pretty big rivers, so that was interesting. We went on one of the tourist boats out to the big rock in the middle of the falls and stayed there for a while taking it all in. There's something very primal about waterfalls, I don't know what it is, but they're very ... watchable? I don't know, it's kind of like a bonfire in as much as you can stare at it for ages and ages and it's almost hypnotic. Or does that make me sound like a pyro?

Anyway, so we walked around and over the falls (there's a footbridge just upriver) and took look at them from the castle there, Schloss Laufen, where they've built all kinds of special viewing points practically in the waterfalls but they charge you to get to them and we figured it wasn't really worth it, then we got another tourist boat back to the west side, which is where the car was parked. I was all for getting something to eat at the snackbar there (and by something I mean kalbsbratwurst and chips) but Claire convinced me to wait til we got home. Roast Pork. Hmmmm.

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That's it for this post. We've got Switzerland vs. Wales at Joggli tonight and we're talking about heading down to Geneva at the weekend, so I'll have another very exciting post for you very soon!

Culinary delights

Not much to report to be honest, we've had a bit of break from doing stuff, we had a little cycle ride, about ten miles, out to the Tierpark Lange Erlen on the other side of the Rhine on Sunday but that's been about it. We have found a new very nice cheese though, Bernkase, which is like a very mature cheddar but a little softer. And we ate out last night at the most expensive restaurant we've yet visited in Basel, the Zum Shutzenhaus, which was well worth the price. Claire and I both had schnitzel and fries and it was simply delicious. The best schnitzel I've ever had. And I've had a lot of schnitzel. It also came with these delightful aubergine and cheese fritters which I know sounds awful, but were actually lovely. That's it, I'm afraid, longer post next week I suspect as we're off to Kandersteg at the weekend (weather permitting). We might even take some photos with our new Lumix to awesomeise you with.

Moonshine - Part II

Mourtos

We left Kassiopi fairly early to try to get to Corfu Town where we'd arranged to meet the engineer as early as possible, so we were in the yacht club marina by 1030. The harbour master came along and told us we couldn't stay just for an hour as they only did daily rates, even for mechanical problems [are you noticing a theme here with harbour masters? We call it "being given the Foxtrot Oscar"] and the engineer didn't have the part yet and we didn't seem to have lost any more oil so we headed off to Mourtos. On route, we finally thought we might have some decent wind so we got the mainsail out, just as the wind decided to drop off. We left it out though and a while later I felt the wind getting up again, we got the headsail out as well and managed to get a decent hour in without the horrible chugging of the engine. Lovely sailing. Sadly the wind then turned right around so it was coming out of where we were headed and even more sadly we couldn't put the main away - it's an in-mast furling main and it just seemed to have jumped out of it's track at the foot. We decided to leave it out, hope the wind didn't get up any more and then try to put it away once we were in the lee of the island which might be called Sivota or might be called Mourtos.

It has been suggested that I might be something of a Jonah, but I disagree...

Finally got the main away by loosening the main halyard and pulling a lot and then managed to get the main halyard fouled around a winch retensioning it, mostly because we ignored my wife's suggestion to run it through a jammer to stop it from getting fouled. Oops! Job done, we headed onto the town quay and in an even more seamanlike fashion, got ourselves moored up.

A doggy ate my funnel

This was not at all funny! We'd topped up the petrol in the outboard in order to take the kids around the headland to a little sheltered beach, using the brand new funnel with a flexible and detachable tube on it that Ron had bought specially, very handy for filling up outboards when you're afloat. We'd left it on the quay so the sun could burn off the fuel remaining on it and off we went. We came back an hour or so later and whilst various crew members were having their showers Ron and I had an aperitif in the cockpit and lazily observed this extremely mangey dog wandering around. His fur was all matted and he had this horrible-looking lesion on his back. Then the damn mutt decides that our funnel is a chewie toy and runs off with it! I went to try and get it back, discovering in the process that the tube was detachable, so I had the main funnel bit but the mutt still had the rest. He loved it! As did the punters in the Bamboo Place, who were enjoying the entertainment and gave me a round of applause when I finally retrieved the now slightly-chewed tool. OK, maybe it was a little funny...

The Calm Before the Storm

I'd sort-of got the Navtex half working and we sort-of thought that maybe we'd received a weather warning for the following day of a storm getting up to force five or six. Not pleasant. The rumours seemed to be confirmed by our fellow yachties at Georgeos Taverna where we went for dinner that night, so we were a little concerned about our next stop. We'd planned on anchoring off Parga, which was only a short passage down the coast, which meant that we'd have plenty of time to provision the following morning before setting off. But Parga is quite exposed to the S / SE, which was where the forecast storm was due in from. I was talking up Gaios on Paxos, which is about the same distance (although further from Preveza) and beautiful and very sheltered.

Captain Ron woke me up at 0730 telling me "we'd better leave now"; I thought maybe the port police were after us, but it was actually because it was a fine looking morning and he'd decided to head for Preveza a day early and try to get in before the storm hit. On the way - about a 5 hour passage - I'd got fed up with the state of the decks so spend a couple of hours cleaning them, then I fitted the new toilet seat Ron had bought for the forrard heads, then I helmed a bit. By about 1000 the sea was getting up quite a bit, as was the wind, and it was looking like the storm was going to get us first. But as we neared Preveza and the lee of Levkas, it died down, the sun came out and we motored into Cleopatra Marina in a flat calm. They didn't have any diesel! So we filled up with water and headed back to the town quay where Claire and I (mostly Claire to be fair) cooked an amatriciana senza chili (it did have a pepper in it, which may have been a very mild chili or may not...) and we had a very nice local wine with it called... nope can't remember. Then bed.

The Storm After the Calm

Holy moly did that storm come in! I must confess to sleeping through it [but then again I slept through the Buncefield explosion when I was about half a mile away from it], but I did have an uncomfortable night - the motion of the ocean was nasty. We awoke the next day to rain, rain and more rain. It let up for about ten minutes at a time but it was basically all day. We were all very glad not to be slogging through it. So it was a sit around all day kind of a day. We read, identified leaky portholes, ate, I entered a few waypoints into the plotter, and we finally got around to hoisting the Jolly Roger that Sarah brought with her. Three metres by two metres and there was no way Ron was going to fly it at sea! The kids dressed up in their pirate costumes (and so did the grown-ups) and it attracted an awful lot of attention from locals and other yachties.

Sadly, the time finally arrived for our taxi back to the airport and back to Stuttgart and finally back home. I must say, following that horrible blow overnight, that I have the worst case of landsickness I ever had. I seriously keep missing the floor! Moonshine's a beauty and I can't wait to see her again.

Cheers again Uncle Ron!

Moonshine - Part I

No, I haven't got a new job running illicit alcohol. She's my Uncle Ron's yacht and we've just had a week visiting her in the Ionian along with my mother, my sister and her two kids. She's bloody lovely - a Bavaria 44, teak decks, twin helms, cockpit table, three cocktail cabinets, all the gear you might want (except an auto-helm and radar...); handles well under engine or sails, a little reluctant to reverse.

Getting There...

Wasn't easy. If you were planning to close a major motorway at a certain junction on a certain day, you'd probably post signs and notices well ahead of time and well ahead of the junction that's closed, wouldn't you? Well the Germans didn't. Junction 51 of the A5 was closed at noon on Saturday 18th September for 36 hours. The first to tell you this was after junction 52, which meant you didn't have a chance to change your route (the French A35 is just the other side of the Rhine and pretty much runs parallel) until it was too late! It took us four hours to go five kilometres which meant we missed our direct flight from Stuttgart to Preveza. Disheartened, we headed home to Basel whilst the UK-based contingent tried to come up with an alternative.

Getting There Part II

Leaving ourselves an extra four hours to get to the airport and having planned an alternative route up the A35 in France, we set off for a two-legger: Stuttgart to Thessaloniki on the mainland, transfer to a little internal flight back west to Corfu. Then maybe a ferry down to Preveza if we could or maybe the UK contingent would sail up to meet us. To be honest, I wasn't hopeful. Firstly that we'd get on the first flight but once we'd managed that I was pretty convinced that our bags would get lost in transit. As it turns out, it all went smoothly and we got ourselves checked into the Hotel Hermes with our bags in Corfu Town by about 1700 on the Sunday, having had about an hours sleep. But we were there, which is the main thing. Now we just had to figure out how to meet up with the rest of the crew...

Corfu Town

It's got a lot of history, has Corfu Town. When I've been there previously, it's been late arrival and then early away. So having a whole day or so to explore so was quite nice. Lots of little narrow streets with all kinds of little shops and quirks. They actually have a cricket club. We had dinner in a charming little place which I could probably never find again if I tried, the Taverna Pergola which I believe to be on Agias Sofias but you can never be sure... After dinner, bed, rest and looking forward to the next phase of the journey, meeting up with Moonshine.

Meeting Moonshine

Reports from the crew [as a little aside, this trip would have been completely impossible without the magic of cellular communications] were varied through the morning - weather leaving Preveza not great. Claire and I were poised to do one of three things: stay in Corfu Town; taxi to Kavos; or ferry to Parga or Gaios. Of the three, my favourite was to stay in Corfu although jumping on a ferry would've been exciting. In the end the weather cleared and Moonshine was heading to Kavos. So a taxi it was. After some negotiations with the driver (basically us refusing to pay more than 60 euros; I was happy to get on a bus for a tenth of the price) away we went. It turns out Kavos port isn't actually at Kavos, but at Levkimmi, about 3km up the coast so I'm glad we managed to communicate our needs. Amazingly, our cab pulled up at the dock just as Moonshine rounded the harbour mole. And then she promptly ran aground on an uncharted little sandbar probably thrown up by the tripper boats. I don't think I'm supposed to tell you about that. Ron got her off and we got tied up, got the bags aboard and decided that it wasn't very nice there so we should run up to Petriti, about an hour up the coast.

Sadly, it wasn't so easy. The wind was pushing us against the quay so I had the idea of pushing the bow off with the tender. Which needed inflating first. We hit the sandbar again. Tried again. Hit the sandbar again. Decided to wait til morning when hopefully the wind would be blowing the other way. Had a visit from the harbour master who told us we had to move because a boat was coming in there. Told him we'd tried and couldn't. He told us we had to. We told him we'd tried and couldn't. He told us we had to. The conversation went back and forth. I'm pretty sure he understood what we were saying, just didn't care and didn't want to help get us off. I suggested one last go, pushing the stern out with the tender instead, to show the git that we were stuck. We got off with no problems! Off to Petriti we went. Nice family meal in a taverna with no electricity.

Kassiopi

Our next port of call was Kassiopi, right at the north of the island. My sister was especially keen to go there as a friend she's known since she was five has settled there and runs a restaurant with her husband. We went via Corfu Town again, as Ron wanted to see what the marinas there are like - there are four or five of them; and then up to Gouvia Marina (the largest in Greece? Or is it the Med? It's HUGE!) as we'd be able to get diesel and water there. The queue for the fuel quay was five or six vessels so we decided to skip it and go in on the way back. It turns out that the reason for the long queue is it's about the only place in the Ionian that actually had any fuel - there was yet another strike on.

Into Kassiopi in a very seamanlike fashion and my sister was straight off to find Gaynor. Provisioning, chilling, maybe a couple of beers, hoisting Claire's Welsh flag and my Spurs flag and generally finally relaxing. It had been a somewhat stressful few days. Dinner aboard of a very nice rigatoni bolognese, the kids (6 and 9) volunteered to wash up but I got fed up of waiting for them as I wanted to get ashore and find a pub that had the Carling Cup game on. Wish I hadn't bothered now, of course!

Oil!

The plan for the next day was to head down to Mourtos / Sivota on the mainland. I call it Mourtos / Sivota because, whilst the Pilot book calls it Mourtos with an island off it called Sivota, the Imray chart seems to call it Sivota with an island called Mourtos. Anyway, we didn't go because Ron checked the dipstick in the engine and it was reading as empty. I looked in the bilge under the sump and there were two inches of oil in it. We were quite pleased that we had local knowledge handy in the shape of my sister's friend and her family. We were convinced it was a gasket, which would have been disastrous in terms of getting back to Preveza in time to fly home. The plan that was eventually concocted was to get rid of all the oil from the bilge and clean it up as best we could, shove another gallon or so in and see if it would stay in for an hour, then try running the engine for a while to see if that started it leaking again, then take a view if we could try to get down to Gouvia or Corfu where they might have parts. In the meantime Aki, a local engineer, came and had a look and didn't seem to hopeful, as did Gaynor's husband Tasso, who also brought along every hosepipe he could find and connected them up to the fishermen's water tap (cunningly hidden from the yachties under a manhole cover) so that we could finally top up with water (we'd been out since that morning).

Sarah took the kids off to the beach to get them ou tof our hair. Mum went off to do some shopping. It took about two hours to bail, then sponge, then finally mop up with kitchen roll the 5 litres of oil from the bilge. Not an easy job with about 4 inches of gap to get the "bailer" (a polystyrene cup) into. Interestingly, the engine is only supposed to hold 4 litres. Having done that, we added the oil and waited. It didn't go down. We ran the engine. A little dribble of oil appeared, in the area of the oil filter. Maybe that was it? We cleared it away and no more appeared. We decided to try and get a new filter from an engineer down in Corfu the following day, seeing how the leak progressed as we went.

After a well-earned, but not entirely cold, beer, Claire and I took the tender around to the beach to have a swim and play with the kids (and swill off the huge quantities of oil on my hands!). They were a little frightened of the sea at first but we managed to coax them in gradually and then we took them back to Moonshine, which they thoroughly enjoyed, while Sarah walked back.

We went to Gaynor and Tasso's restaurant, Strofilia, for dinner. Now, I've been to the Ionian a number of times (about 10?) and have had lots of very nice meals. This was the best meal I have ever had in Greece. I'm not saying this because it's run by friends. It was fantastic. My meatballs were served in the most delicious, meaty, tomato sauce and when I ordered the pork steak (my personal favourite Greek dish which I have at least three times a week when I'm out there), it was recommended to me that I try the pork steak marinated in honey and garlic. Out of this world! We all had something different, we all loved our food. Seriously, if you are ever in Kassiopi, go there.

So that takes us to Wednesday. I'll post the rest of the week later...

The Footie!

I'm pretty sure that our first visit to a game of football in Switzerland counts as an adventure. I was kind of expecting it be an FC Basel game rather than an international, but heigh-ho!

But first...

Haven't really been up to much the last week, but I did go to the Munster with Claire's friend who was visiting and this time climbed the tower. Everyone who visits Basel should be obliged to do this - it's 4CHF for adults, free for kids and it is hairy! Even if you don't have any problems with heights (I do, a bit, less so in a solid tower made of stone that I know has been standing for centuries than in a little fibreglass bubble on a wire), the stairs start out steep at the bottom and you have to contort your body to get around some of the woodwork and then as you get higher they turn into a very steep, narrow, "spiral" staircase [not that there's any such thing of course; they should be called helical staircases]. There are several stages to get up there so you have to walk around the outside of the tower a couple of times to get to the next staircase. It's about two hundred feet tall and offers a stunning view over Basel and its environs. Well worth the effort and the little bout of vertigo.

Joggeli (pron. "jockley")

On the 7th September 2010, the national football team of England played a Euro 2012 qualifier against Switzerland at St. Jakob-Park [in case you weren't aware] and we got tickets. Of course, we were sat in the home end so I didn't wear colours and celebrated our goals half-heartedly, which I was quite glad about when it started turning ugly when they got a guy sent off.

Lovely, modern stadium with a shopping centre built around it, but we did have a couple of issues. Firstly, the weather was AWFUL. Seriously, that was the worst weather I've seen in Basel. Secondly, getting into the stadium was ridiculous. For the whole of the D block, there was one gateway, maybe wide enough for ten people to get through at a time and no organisation outside at all. Plus they forced Claire and I to separate as the female entrance has women doing the body searches and the male, funnily enough, had blokes doing it. Claire did not enjoy that at all. It was lucky we got there as early as we did or we might have missed kick-off. Ludicrous! Similar problems occurred on leaving - there are no barriers or anything at the trams stops, so it was every man for himself trying to get on the trams. I'd be surprised if there weren't any injuries.

Inside, the stadium is well-organised - from the concourse you can see the game, which basically reduced the size of the queues at half-time as people didn't need to remain in their seats to see the game. If you can't be bothered to take your seat, there are TV screens all along the concourse as well. Unfortunately, we were in row two, right at the front and pitch level which does give you a different view of the game, so that was OK, but the guys in row one in front of us had decided that they didn't want to sit down at all during the game which meant we had to stand; the stewards had a word with them after about twenty minutes, which bucked them up a bit but we still had to stand up for the whole of the last twenty or so (once Shaqiri had scored that wonder goal).

All in all, a pretty positive experience. Looking forward to the Wales game in October now!

Sportnacht, the Klosterbergfest and the Black Forest

We had a very busy weekend at the end of August. No August Bank Holiday over here, so we had to fit it all into the regular weekend! Luckily, the good citizens of Basel helped us out by having a festival all weekend, combined with something called Sportnacht on the Saturday. All good fun.

Caipirinhas and Samba bands

On the Friday we went out to eat. Mexican at La Fonda. Excellent Burrito. So good, in fact, that we went there again on Tuesday. I think Mexican is my favourite style of food, at least until the next time I have Tapas! Fortified with grub, we headed for the festival. Lots of "lookie-lookie" stalls selling various ethnic bits and a gazillion outdoor bars. We wandered for a bit until we saw a big press of people and heard some live Brazilian music, ducked inside to get out of the rain and stayed for ages! Caipirinhas were a monumental 15CHF but very nice (read: strong), and you did get to keep your Klosterbergfest plastic beaker at the end of it.

This Klosterbergfest seems to be an annual charity event, full of all kinds of ethnic stalls and activities and the streets are thronging with people and music is in the air. Kind of like a very small Notting Hill carnival.

Sportnacht - Powerisers and Salsa

On Saturday from about 1700, Basel (or at least the bits of Basel that weren't Fest-ing) became overrun with various stalls set up by sporting organisations. Sportnacht. For 20CHF (although we got it for half-price from Claire's work) you get a wristband which entitles you to free transport around Basel (worth the money just for that) and allows you to try all these sports. I really fancied the bobsleigh but it seemed to be overrun by kids, and the unicycling ("einradfahre") but we didn't quite get around to it once I saw the Powerisers. I can't describe them, so above is a picture. They are very very cool. But Claire didn't get on with them too well. We had to queue for a hour in the rain to get a go but boy was it worth it!

Having done what I wanted to do, we next had to do what Claire wanted - a Salsa lesson. The fact that it was conducted in German didn't faze us one little bit and we were soon "ein, zwei, drei ... funf, sechs, sieben"-ing, twirling and generally getting a thoroughly good work-out. Much more enjoyable than I expected, and I'm pretty sure we'll be signing up for some lessons.

Salsa over, we headed back to the fest and got us some Paella and Sangria for dinner. Very nice! Massive prawns. Satruday evening was much nicer than Friday weather-wise, so there was much more going on. The was an African drum crew with dancers that we watched for a long time before heading into a little bit of Morocco, set up by the Marrakech restaurant. We had some very nice Maroccan tea - a bit of tea, a bit of mint, and a wasserpfeife, which was far more expensive than in Egypt or Turkey but very nice. Detemined to make the most of the pipe, we stayed there for quite a while and to be honest, by the time we left, intending to head for the Samba tent again, we were knackered and so just headed home instead.

Titisee!

On sunday we had a look at google maps for the black forest and I decided that we just had to go to a place called Titisee, for obvious reasons. We had some fun and games trying to get on the right road out of Basel but once we did it was plain sailing the whole way. The place was absolutely rammed with tourists and tut shops but it was very pleasant and we drove home on a German motorway (oh yeah, gotta love those German motorways!), at one point overtaking a big convoy of campervans which, we eventually noticed, all had these big stickers on them, saying they were part of a convoy that had gone Paris - Peking - Paris!! That's a lot of petrol!

Pretty shattered at the end of such an action-packed weekend. I think we might be taking it a bit easier next weekend...

Bibliophile

On a completely unrelated note; because I'd been doing so much typing this week brining the blog up to date, I was in a writing frame of mind so I've finally started actually typing my book! Still not much there, but it feels really good to have got started!

Into the 'Frau again

Sidebar - Saturday night at the movies

Interestingly or not, Baslers seem to love their cinema. There's about six or seven of them in town. Most movies are shown in English with German and French subtitles, but they do also have dubbed versions. We had an interesting time watching Iron Man 2 the other month as the Russian stuff that Mickey Rourke was speaking, which would have been subtitled in English back home, was only subtitled in German and French! Anyhow, I love the cinema and we go quite often and fairly recently we saw the third installment of the Twilight Saga - Eclipse, I think. The locals were very amused when Bella enforced her neutrality in the Cullen / Wolfboy pissing contest by saying "I'm Switzerland." However, that's not what I wanted to mention. As I said, the movies are subtitled into German and French so it's actually kind of useful for picking up the odd bit of language and, when Bella and her dad were having that conversation, we noticed that the translation of "I'm a virgin" is "ich bin jungfrau". Which is the point of this sidebar. I mean, I kind of assumed it just meant "young lady", but it appears not. So this little post is mostly about our going into the virgin again. I thank you.

Family matters

But first, there's a bit more preamble. Claire's sister and her family arrived on Saturday and then Claire worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so there's a bit to talk about first. The weather had been terrible and it was still pretty dreary on the Sunday, so we took a walk into town and just wandered a bit along the river - I'd been hoping to take a Rhine ferry because I knew the boys would love that [I know I still haven't told you about those ferries, but I will, I promise!] but there had been sooo much rain that the river was too high and so they were all closed. So we wandered up towards St. Alban, where very excitingly the fire brigade were out clearing all this flotsam that had accumulated on some of the chains in the river, forming a great big damn. The lunatics were stood on the damn, in the river, poling stuff downstream. And then they brought out a chainsaw! We had to drag the kids away from it in the end. Strolled up to the old city wall section that's still standing and then went and took a look at the big water wheel at the paper museum (which was turning very fast) and had a beer or two in the cafe beside it. In the afternoon we walked down past the zoo, checking out the elephants and jumped on a number ten tram at Zoo for Dornach at the end of the line, where I'd been before and it's quite nice. Only problem was, my usually completely reliable sense of direction was all out of whack so we went the wrong way! Oops. Still, we didn't actually have anything we particularly wanted to see there, so we got off at the other end of the line where the sun was actually out and had another beer or two before coming back again.

Monday and Tuesday the visitors went off on their own - they climbed the Munster and went to the zoo whilst I mostly chilled. The zoo is apparently quite good. One night, we ate at Aeschenplatz (the restaurant is situated on the platz just underneath the "hammering man" thing and has the same name as the platz); a traditional Swiss place, very reasonable, superb food and wonderful service - they were especially good to the kids, bringing their food asap and then bringing them books and paper and pencils once they'd eaten. Highly recommended; probably the best restaurant we've eaten at since I got here.

Wednesday us boys went off to Dreilandereck, which was very cool, mostly because it was a working day so the port was in full action with massive cranes lifting stuff and barges coming in to dock and trains running and everything! [Girls just don't get it, do they? Dawn stayed back packing and stuff.] We met Dawn in Marktplatz where us grown-ups had a kalbsbratwurst mit brot und senf whilst the kids had hot-dogs from the excellent sausage stand there. Have I mentioned Swiss hotdogs, by the way? They don't split the bun down the middle; they impale it upon a spike, squirt in the ketchup and or mustard and then slide the dog on in there. Cool. A few last minute bits of shopping for the essentials: wine, beer and charcoal and we were ready to head off for the mountains again.

Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn?

None of the above. We'd hoped to get into the camping jungfrau again but they were fully booked so the only place available at Lauterbrunnen was, basically, a youth hostel. The Valley Hostel, to be precise. There were six of us in a four-bunk room and fortunately we didn't have any mystery guests the first night but we would for the following two. I called topsies even before either of the two boys! We'd planned a BBQ for the first night but let's say the weather wasn't conducive to grilling. We still had the sausages and things, but they were cooked in the very well-appointed kitchen facilities. Wine, more wine and then bed.

The following day, after breakfast, we headed for the train station at Lauterbrunnen and purchased four of those 200CHF six-day passes I mentioned before. It turns out that kids under the age of 16 (it might actually be 18) can get the same thing for 20CHF. Which is an absolute bargain! So it was a train up to Kleine Scheidegg, look at the Eiger and Jungfrau for a while; it was quite a cloudy day so it was very atmospheric up there. Then down the other side into Grindelwald, a spot of lunch in the Rendezvous restaurant about halfway between the train station and the cable car station, then up to Mannlichen on the four person cable car. Claire and I were lucky enough to go with the boys whilst mum and dad got a car all to themselves. Actually, it was pretty lucky that Eagle-Eye Owen was with us because he spotted what we thought was a beaver (actually a marmot) down on the ground there. Then it was the gigantic cable car down from Mannlichen into Wengen. Have I mentioned I'm not great with cable cars? And then a very pleasurable walk down into Lauterbrunnen from Wengen. I say pleasurable, but it was pretty steep going, nice views most of the way (it's route 58 on the wanderweg maps). There was an hilarious interlude when Claire picked up this big brown pine cone and threw it at the boys, shouting "giant slug!" Which of course then became a running theme all the way down. We rewarded our efforts with a couple of beers before heading back to the hostel, and then going out for Fondue; actually my first fondue since arriving in Switzerland. You know what, let's call a spade a spade here. It's cheese soup! That was also the sunset were the Jungfrau turned pink, which the not-fantastic photo at the top of this post tries to show.

Weather Witch

Next day was breakfast and sandwich making for our assault on First and Bachalpsee. Call me unimaginative if you like, but it's such a lovely walk and such a lovely place to get to, that I'd happily go there every weekend. It's right up there with High Street or the back way up Old Man Coniston as far as I'm concerned. We'd sussed the previous day that it's actually much quicker to get the cog to Wengen, then the Mannlichen gondola and then the cable car down to Grund on the other side than to go up to Kleine Scheidegg and back down on two seperate cog trains. So that's what we did. Sadly we weren't with old Eagle-Eyes so we missed out on about six marmot/beavers.

First cable car up to First, everyone got quite excited about maybe doing the Trotti-bikes, which are basically big scooters, from Bort back down. We saw a few people going down the First Fleuger, which is a big zip wire from First to the next cable car station. I sometimes think I fancy it and then I actually look at how far off the ground I'd be and think, "naaaah". From First, the walk up to Bachalpsee was as lovely as last time, although all the snow had gone and there were still some cloud floating around. When we were nearly at Bachalpsee, we met a wizened old lady who was clearly about 80 and out for her regular afternoon constitutional and told us to be careful - she didn't like the looks of the cloud above Bachalpsee. She might have been a weather witch...

Sarnies at Bachalpsee, which was a little chilly it must be said, followed by macaroons! Now I couldn't tell you how long it's been since I had macaroons but I am re-hooked on the things. A little taste of heaven. Back to First, damply pursued by the rain as predicted by the witch, onto the cable car at First, off again at Bort. We were going to go on the Trottis! Except there was noone manning the booth and a massive long queue and it started raining. So we nipped over the the cafe by Bort for a swift coffee and to see what happened to the rain. Whilst there, we worked out that we'd run out of time to do the Trottis, to much mithering and discombobulation. In fact, we'd nearly run out of time to get back to Lauterbrunnen!

In the cable car on the way down again, we worked out that we could get back to Lauterbrunnen via the Berner Oberlander Bahn. And that would be everyone's first go on a BOB, so it had to be done! We duly went down to Zweilutischen, where the train (8 cars long) would be continuing into Interlaken, while we would wait for a train back up to Lauterbrunnen. And then the coolest thing happened; the train from Lauterbrunnen met up with the train from Grindelwald and joined together into what we felt obliged to describe as a MEGABOB. Trains are very very cool. Back to the hostel again, possibly via a bar, and dinner. Schnitzels fresh from the butcher in Grindelwald. Be warned when schnitzel-cooking in hostels that don't have grills: they don't take long to fry!

Trotti Day!

Last day and we'd decided on two action items. Firstly, we wanted to get a good look at the big waterfall just behind Lauterbrunnen. Secondly, we wanted to go up the other side of the valley for a change, to Murren, and see how pretty it was there. Chris and I had come up with a third, secret objective, which was to get back down from Murren early enough that we'd be able to drive to Zweilutischen and then BOB to Grindelwald for the Trotti bikes from Bort. What we didn't realise at the time was that Saturday was the day of the Inferno Triathlon and half-marathon. For those who are click-averse, here are the facts:

• Swim: 3.1km


• Road bike: 97km (2.1km vertical)


• Mountain bike: 30km (1.1km vertical)


• Run: 25km (2.1km vertical)

Lunatics!
So there was plenty going on and the cable car up to Murren was very crowded. We walked halfway back, stopped for a very nice lunch and then got the train the rest of way back.

Yes, we were in time to get to Bort to do the Trotti bikes and yes they were worth the effort. They were tremendous fun, only hampered somewhat by some extremely nervous riders in front of us. If anyone ever asks you if you want to try some trotti bikes, your answer should be yes. They're cool. Seriously cool. End of.

Catch up number 2 - Swiss National Day

The original Swiss Confederacy was established (according to tradition) on August the first, 1291. Bizarrely, it took the Swiss until 1994 to decide to mark the date with a national holiday. I think they're trying to make up for lost time!
Bank holidays in Switzerland are quite odd - unlike in the UK, where if a bank holiday falls on a Sunday it gets moved to the Monday, they stay on the date they are. So this year, Swiss National Day fell on a Sunday. In most of Switzerland, the local municipalities have a fireworks display and a big party on the day itself. Basel is a little bit cuter than that though - they have their fireworks on the night before, meaning that everyone can go absolutely mental and then get a guaranteed day off to cover their hangovers!

Claire and I wandered into town about eight in the evening to get some dinner and then head down to Chill am Rhy on the backs on the Rhine which, we were told, was a pretty decent spot to catch the fireworks from. We didn't realise how literal the catching would be. I finally got my pizza and, for the first time in years, actually ate the whole thing! The restaurant was called ... aah ... I'll get back to you. I'm pretty sure it's on Schnabelgasse. EDIT: It's called Piazzetta and it is on Schnabelgasse (well actually it's on Rümelinsplatz, but close enough!). There were lots of people, locals one assumes, walking around with Swiss flags on their clothing - hats usually but more than one or two pairs of bright red bracers with white crosses on them. Very patriotic.

Pizza mission completed, we head on down to the Rhine. Thousands upon thousands of people. Everywhere. Standing around in groups drinking, lining both backs of the river in their throngs, lining the barriers on the bridges in the multitudes. I've never been myself, but I imagine that's what the Thames looks like at New Years. The people on the banks were just letting off fireworks willy-nilly (which I'm sure doesn't happen in London!) and generally having fun. We fought our way into Chill Am Rhy and got ourselves a couple of drinks and then tried to find somewhere to perch - it was pretty crowded. After a bit, it got even more crowded as they seemed to be ushering people along from the far end of the pub.

I'm not sure if I can describe this in words, but I'll try - Chill is basically one big, long, open-air pub along an embankment of the river. There are three main bars selling your beer and spirits and stuff and then a couple of little serveries just doing for example Caipirinhas. The bar furthest from the entrance, which is the steps down beside the Munster, has a little decking platform above it, which we kind of think of as a VIP area. The whole pub is maybe 60 metres long and 10 metres deep (but it could be more or less - I'm not great at estimates). We were perched about two-thirds of the way along, basically level with the second bar when all these people started being hustled towards us from the far end.

We couldn't work out what was going on - maybe power was lost down there or something, but then a guy came trundling along with a great big fire extinguisher. So our next thought was that there's some local law that says that you have to have a fire extinguisher available at all bars when fireworks are being let off on the river. Switzerland is sensible like that.

But we were wrong.

About ten minutes later our ears were being subjected to the loudest, coolest, fireworks I've seen in years! It was awesome! It only turns out that Chill am Rhy is part of the display, doesn't it?! I used to go to Wardown Park's fireworks on bonfire night back in Luton when I was a kid. They might as well have been indoor fireworks compared to this. I saw an amazing display set up by a crew called Armageddon at an EasterCon in Liverpool somewhere about 1990, but that was out on the water, a good [read "health and safety approved"] distance away. These massive rockets and roman candles and goodness-knows-what-those-megaloud-things-were-called-but-they-were-fecking-awesome were going off TWENTY METRES away. We had to cover our heads and our glasses as we were literally catching the fireworks. And that was just an appetiser - after about twenty minutes of bombardment it died out and then the main event started out on the river ten minutes. It was even awesomer [yes it is a word!]. I was suffering from shellshock all the way back to the UK the following day.

Yes, these Swiss chappies know how to do a party.

Next: into the 'Frau again (this time with kids)...

Catch up number 1 - "the Italian bit"

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!

A Little French Adventure

Sorry readers, you were probably starting to think I'd forgotten you. It's like this - I went to import the pictures from our weekend into Picasa and noticed it can look for faces. It's not perfect but it's very cool. So I then spent the next three days identifying all four thousand unrecognised faces. Call it being severely sidetracked. Then we had visitors (our first ones yet!) and then another adventurous weekend. So this is all about the week of the 17th to about the 23rd. I'll post again very soon about the weekend just gone.

Strasbourg

I was pretty shattered after my fortnight back in the UK - going from a zero commute time to two hours each way kind of wiped me out; so I didn't feel like doing much at the weekend. We decided to drive to Strasbourg. How cool is that by the way? That we can just think "let's go to Strasbourg for the day"? So off we set, about elevenish I think and one hour and twenty-three minutes later we were parking in the Sainte Marguerite car park (just outside of Petite France, near the modern art museum, and a very short walk to Petite France. Also very reasonably priced.)


Into Petite France and it's lovely - incredibly old buildings, little streets, picture postcard lovely. [I know I keep using that term in my posts, and it's becoming a bit overused. Any suggestions for alternative phrases would be welcome!]


First stop was lunch. I was extremely peckish by now and was prepared to commit various crimes in order to get my hands on a croque monsieur. Claire had a quiche lorainne. Both were exceedingly nice - the pastry on the quiche was paper thin - and washed down with a Kronenbourg.


Fortified, we took off towards the cathedral which, as is usually the case, was beautiful. Hard to get a decent picture of it because Strasbourg is so densely constructed but it's open to the public and has many information placard things telling you all about this and that. The most impressive part is the astronomical clock which is massive and a work of art and not only shows you the position of all the heavenly bodies and the current time but also seems to be able to work out when religious holidays are (which to me is most impressive!)


We bimbled around a bit more, tried some wine and chocolate tasting, which is apparently the "new way to taste wine" and I have to say the Gewurzstraminner went ever so well with the 80% javanese cocoa chocolate. We didn't buy any.


We checked out some of the shops. Now neither Claire nor myself are what you'd call "shoppers", but we are in the market for a new camera. Claire's is old and getting knackered now whilst mine is just plain bulky. So we're kind of half-heartedly looking into what to get next. I fancy a Panasonic Lumix but there seems to be thirty-five different models which makes it really hard to do price comparisons.


Bizarrely, Claire decided to strike up a conversation with a frenchman by shoving her camera under his nose whilst he was looking it it's newest incarnation (cannon powershot) and saying "I've got one of those!"
I say bizarrely because Claire actually speaks less French than I speak German, so we then had a twenty minute conversation about, naturellement, the english and french football teams and digital cameras. Very odd, but it felt good to actually be able to a) understand and b) make myself understood in french considering how long it's been since I spoke it at any length. I could almost feel my brain's language centre changing shape.


We then spent half an hour or so trying to work out where the heck the car was, and headed home. Because we can pop back any time we like!!!


Kelim for dinner. I notice their website's currently "down for maintenance". I hope that means they're gonna get rid of the music on their homepage! I had kushbasha, marinaded chunks of lamb on flatbread with vegetables and Claire had the same meat but on a bed of vegetables. Lamb was perfect for me but Claire would I think have liked it to be cooked for a little bit longer. It can't have been too bad though, because we both ate every scrap of food on our plates.

Rhineschwimmen und Grill

I have finally plucked up the courage to swim in the Rhine! OK, it was a blazing hot day and a drifted about 50 metres before getting out, but I've done it now and I know what to expect from the current and the next time we get some decent weather I'll be doing the whole thing!


We attended a little BBQ / chilling / swimming party beside the Rhine on Sunday. And I got wet. I didn't want to, I really didn't want to, but it was so hot and I had been told by several people not to be such a pussy, so I did it. We met about a thousand people, whose names of course I cannot recall, but it was a very nice few hours. I think I may have had one Ueli beer too many as cycling home was a little tricky but on the whole, a very excellent weekend.

Visitors from home

Claire's very good friends Lawrence and Nigel drove down to visit us, which was very nice. We had a thoroughly enjoyable couple of days, even if it was unbearably hot and humid - a storm was brewing. We could tell.


We ate out both nights - first at Papa Joe's [also plays music at you! Must be a Swiss thing!], which is right on Barfusserplatz. Kind of tex / mex / american cuisine. Excellent service I must say, and decent food to boot.


The following night we just kind of wandered until we were hungry and stopped at the first place which did food, which was a Swiss restaurant very close to the english bookshop and called... no, can't remember. It's another one I'll have to get back to you about. I had calf's liver and rosti, which was delicious, and Claire tried a local dish which we thought was going to be a nice crispy rosti with bacon and raclette but actually turned out to be the whole thing is kind of fried up together; basically a kind of sloppy potato omelette is the best was to describe it. Unfortunately, Claire hates sloppy food and she couldn't eat very much of it so once I'd finished mine [yes I did offer it to her but she doesn't like rosti or liver] I swapped plates with her and tried my best to eat some of hers. It was actually very nice but very rich and I was already stuffed. So the waiter gave me some grief when he collected the plates. [See? I'm a gent.]


We had intended to go for a nightcap at Chill am Rhy, the open air bar, but just as we were heading that way the storm which had been threatening all week finally broke so we dashed for one indoors in Mr Pickwicks before heading home.

Adventures at altitude

Boy oh boy, what an adventure we had at the weekend! Such an adventure, that it's taken me four days to write it up! It's a long one, sorry!


Claire finished work early on Friday while I packed the car up. It didn't actually take me all day, but I was trying to be thorough. I nearly did it right as well, only forgot one bag, which happened to be the one with the bread and disposable bbq in, so not a huge problem!


By 1530, we were on the motorway, heading south at high (but legal) speed for Lauterbrunnen via Bern. Very uneventful journey with excellent navigation from the co-pilot. Took us maybe two hours to get there and we found our campsite, Jungfrau camping with no problems. Got a pitch no problems got the tent up no problems noticed the missing bag slight problem but on the whole all good. Then the adventure began.

The kindness of strangers

Our plan had been to do some walking. We had a route up to Wengen all planned out for the morning and everything.

But just as we'd got the tent sorted, a Kiwi couple came over to us from another tent and told us they had one day left on a travel permit for all the cog railways of the area that they couldn't use as they were heading to Frankfurt the following day and did we want it? Now, these cog railways are not cheap. This particular pass also gives you a 50% discount on the Jungfraubahn, which we knew was very expensive as it's basically a tunnel cog railway that goes up to Jungfraujoch at 3.5km (ish). Claire has wanted to go up there since twenty years ago but couldn't afford it at the time as she was a poor student. So after thinking about it for a nanosecond we said "of course, yes please, we owe you a beer" [which we still owe unfortunately]. So all our plans went out of the window.

New plans

We went and sorted out the finances at reception - they gave us a whole bunch of leaflets and flyers and things, including one for the Jungfrau Bahn - an early bird price (from Lauterbrunnen) of 130CHF each. And you had to get the first train at 06:59. But of course we now had our travel cards, which gave us 50% off the JB and we only had to pay from Kleine Scheidegg. We sat in the bar area, had a couple of beers and made our new plans. We decided that we could go up to Jungfraujoch pretty early, to take advantage of the cloudless morning skies and then still get in some walking. So after supper it was an early night. We didn't sleep very well as there were some "issues" with the air bed that meant we kept having to reinflate it...

Lauterbrunnen to Jungfraujoch via Kleine Scheidegg

We left the campsite at 0640. On a Saturday! But we were there in plenty of time for the first cog train up to Kleine Scheidegg. In fact, astonishingly for Switzerland, it left the station a bit late. It seems it was waiting for the train up from Zweilütschinen first. Then we were on our way. I'm sure you could drive up there quicker, if there were any roads. And you could maybe walk it, but it would be tough going. This is the way to travel! After a brief stop at Wengen, which is very picturesque, to take on more passengers, the train wended its ways up to Kleine Scheidegg, where we'd get the train up to Jungfraujoch! This picture was taken from the bahn at Kleine Scheidegg and if you zoom in a lot, you can just make out Jungfraujoch just right of centre, where the mountain comes out of shadow. Pretty breathtaking stuff!

We scrambled to get a seat on the train. Even this early in the day it's an incredibly popular place. In fact, there were people left on the platform, so another train was laid on for them. We were on a pretty new train, which had TV screens telling the story of the railway which was all very interesting - basically it was tunneled out of the rock about a century ago. Wikipedia has more history. The journey took about an hour, with stops at Eigergletscher at the foot of the Eiger, then Eigernordwand - The North Face of Eiger where there are big picture windows and interestingly enough that's where mountain rescue go out onto the Eiger when climbers are in trouble. Then the Eismeer - the sea of ice, which is just one big ice river on which some of the blocks are bigger than houses. I'd love to post a pic but the panorama windows, understandably, are a bit weathered and you can't get a really good picture. Then finally, you're at Jungfraujoch. Wow.

Our first stop was the observation platform at the very top. You get in a lift which goes up about another hundred meters from the train station and you then get rewarded with an amazing vista. It's simply stunning up there. And quite hard to breathe! Previously when I've been up that high, it's either been gradual as in we've gradually climbed over the course of days so you get used to it or I've shortly afterwards skied back down again. When we left the comfort and safety of the building and walked onto the metal platform outside in the cold, it got even better. And worse.

Please don't think I'm a big girl's blouse here, but standing on what is basically a bit of scaffold with nothing but sharp jagged rocks beneath you is a little bit stomach-churning. It's not that I have a problem with heights, I think I have a problem with falling from them. We went back inside and back down pretty quickly.

Again we left the rocky station, this time to walk on the glacier. There were lots of others doing the same thing, but these guys had ropes and spikes and things and they were actually going to WALK on the GLACIER. We just strolled along the prepared path for a while. Man my eyes hurt! A pair of sunglasses is required equipment when you're surrounded by snow and it's a very bright sunny day, you know. Mine were about 2.5km down, sitting the glove compartment in Lauterbrunnen. What an idiot!

Given that we hadn't paid anywhere near full price for our train tickets, and given that we wanted to do some walking that day, we felt we'd seen enough. There's an ice sculpture palace or some such up there, which maybe we'll look at another time, but really we just wanted to walk on the glacier. It was amazing. I'm actually grinning to myself as I type this, thinking about it. We were pretty much the only people on the train going back down. Now here's a thing: you'd think that you'd go down much more quickly than you went up, wouldn't you? Only a couple of problems there. Firstly, for most of its 9km, the Jungfraubahn is single track with passing places in the stations. Secondly, at this time (10:00), the tourists are really starting to arrive thick and fast. So although there was only one train going down, there were lots coming the other way so we'd have to wait for them all to come past at each station. It took about an hour and twenty to get back down! I think we both had a little snooze at one point.

Kleine Scheidegg to First via Grindelwald

We got on a train down into the next valley along, into Grindelwald. Much of the journey was consumed with looking at the north face of the Eiger slipping past on our right. You can see the attraction for climbers. Grindelwald is a much bigger place than Lauterbrunnen, and very pretty. The cable car station at Grindelwald is the other side of town from the bahnhof so we walked over, grabbing some rolls and cheese for lunch on the way [I did mention that somebody forgot the bread, didn't I?]. All the shops which will be selling ski gear in a few months are selling walking gear at the moment. We got on the cable car up to First, which isn't so-called because it's the first stop, it's actually the last. First is the name of a peak above Grindelwald. I hate cable cars almost as much as I hate walking around on scaffolding! The worst part is when you get the bumpy bit as you go over a pylon. The journey up was about thirty minutes, with obviously great views of the Wetterhorn and other peaks.

From First, we followed a well-marked wanderweg to Bachalpensee, a picture-postcard lake looking over at Wetterhorn. It was a pretty straightforward walk in the brilliant sunshine, old snowdrifts still yet to melt on either side of us, lots of incredible views into the valley or over the mountains. We stopped for a bit more lunch at the lake and then tried to decide which route to take back down the mountain, whether we'd have enough time to walk all the way down to Bort [the first cable car station] as planned, or whether to take a shorter walk back to First and get the gondola back down. We decided that we had time, bearing in mind we had to get back down into Grindelwald, up to Kleine Scheidegg and then down again to Lauterbrunnen before the trains stopped), to walk on down to Bort. So off we set. I spend most of my time trying to work out if you could ski down the path we were on. There was one bit that looked like it had to be part of a piste, but I just could not see how you'd get down it. We looked at a piste map later and it was, indeed, a very nasty-looking black run. Black and curly. I look forward to skiing it in a few month's time!

Hiking downhill is definitely quicker than up, but it takes it out of your knees and thighs, especially when we decided to take a "short-cut" at Waldspitz down to Bort; there were two signs one saying Bort 1hour and one saying "Bort blumenpfad, 40min". The blumenpfad, which we translated as "flower path" was very pretty but essentially straight down. Steps and very short switchbacks absolutely killed our legs! But it was very very pretty so worth the pain we felt the following day.
Back into Grindelwald, up to Kleine Scheidegg for a bier whilst we waited for the train, then up from the train station into Lauterbrunnen where we felt we'd earned another bier (or two maybe...), then back to camp.

It was a fantastic day.

Now, we did some quick and rough calculations and we reckon the journeys we took (including the cable car) probably would have cost about 150CHF each. I know we were gifted this travel pass, but at 200CHF for six days, it has to be the best value way of getting around the Jungfrau area, even if you're only there for a couple of days.

Home again

Both suffering from extremely sore legs, we felt it only right and proper that we took it easy on the Sunday, so we got up fairly late, although we had to pack up and leave the campsite by 10, so not that late and went into Lauterbrunnen for some breakfast. We then drove up the valley as far as we could - about two miles! Then turned around and headed down towards Interlaken.

We stopped at Bonigen on the Brienzersee shore for a while and saw the paddle steamer come in. Then we headed for Brienze itself at the other end of its eponymous lake and had a wander around and saw some paragliders doing some mental tricks before landing in a field just in front of us. Then we headed home, via Luzern this time, which is a much prettier if slower route back up to Basel. It's kind of like taking the A5 rather than the M6, you know? We got a lovely look at another ski resort, Lungern, again very pretty, and then drove alongside various lakes until we got to Luzern, after which it was motorway all the way.

Sadly, we were home in time to watch the football!

Right, hopefully that'll whet your appetite for Swiss Adventures of the Large Kind, as I'll be taking a break from adventuring for a couple of weeks. More soon though, I promise!

A rainy weekend in Basel

The weather forecast being absolutely diabolical, we decided to postpone the planned trip to the mountains (the real ones) for another weekend, which left us free on the Friday to go out and watch the England / Algeria match [yes, I wish we hadn't bothered!]. The atmosphere in Pickwicks last time out was good but a bit partisan and we are here to explore after all, so after some research, we decided to go to

Eoipso

Man what an interesting place! Oh, here's their website by the way. We got there, about a half hour before kick-off; it's not the easiest place to get to by tram but well worth the effort.


Sorry, I need to backtrack a little here; en route to Eoipso we called in at Mister Wong at the Bahnhof for grub. Claire had been to the one on Steinenvorstadt a couple of times before and really liked it and we had to change trams at the station so it seemed like a good plan. The great thing about Mister Wong is that they cook your food right there in front of you when you order it! It's like a cafeteria kind of a set-up where you grab a tray and your drink and your cutlery and then look at what's available and take your choice. Except that the pre-prepared stuff is all cheap and doesn't look very appetising and there's a menu where you can choose fresh stuff and it's GREAT! [and still very reasonable]. Claire went with a Thai green curry, which was very fragrant, very fresh-tasting and very effing hot! I just went with the fried chicken noodles, which I do believe I could happily live on for a year. And I tried the dunkel feldschlossen, which is a darker version and is quite nice. A bit tough to have a session on, I would imagine, but quite nice with my dinner.


Back to Eoipso. It's like this massive old barn or warehouse or something (there's still some kind of lifting apparatus that runs on tracks up in the rafters) that's been converted into a kind of arty restaurant slash bar, with lots and lots of TVs everywhere. Old TVs of the CRT variety; presumably when people throw them out to replace with LCDs, the Eoipso people are taking them into their bar. It's all open plan, the bar area has sofas, and some chairs and tables and very relaxed while the restaurant half of the building has candles and white linen and things. It really was a very very interesting place and if you're ever in Basel, it's well worth looking at. It's also the first time I'd tried Zeigelhof Bier, which was pretty pleasant too. We won't mention the footie...

Stepford Tourists

Actually, the really weird thing about Eoipso was that as we were arriving, a whole bunch of people with headphones on were leaving - we assumed that they were part of some kind of tour party of course and didn't think any more of it. But when we went inside, there were a whole bunch more of them. Just sitting there at various tables, some in groups and some by themselves, with drinks in front of them, not speaking just (presumably) listening to some audio guide. I joked about them being the Stepford Tourists. It was pretty weird, right. But it got weirder when suddenly, as if on some cue that only they could hear, they all rose, silently, leaving their drinks behind and heading en masse for the exit. Spooky! [Well obviously it was a cue only they could hear because they were wearing the headphones but let's not spoil the narrative!]

International Tourism

On Sunday, I went to France. Then to Germany, then back to Switzerland. Then Germany, Switzerland, France, Germany, France, Switzerland, France, Germany, Switzerland. Then France. And finally Switzerland. And then I had a little sit down because I was dizzy.


As you may or may not be aware, Basel is up in the North-west of Switzerland and as such, it has suburbs in both France and Germany. It also, naturellement, naturalische, has borders with both countries and where those borders meet is ... the middle of the Rhine. But very near to where they meet is the dreilandereck, which is translated into English as "Three Country Corner", but the French version is something like "the pylon of three lands", which is I think a nicer translation. It's a fairly pretty monument, a ten-minute walk from the end of the number 8 tram line (well signposted all the way), but there's not a lot else going on there - it's at the end of a wharf and there appears to be a restaurant there. I'll leave the creative among you to guess what it's called, but it wasn't open.


I think it's the sheer symbolism of a border with TWO OTHER COUNTRIES that makes it a special landmark. There can't be that many of them in world and there's some primal appeal that I certainly felt from visiting it. That is all. Hopefully, next post will be about the mountains!

Mini solo adventure

I've been getting bored of the World Cup! [no, I never thought I'd say either! Although, yesterday things picked up a little. Do I feel sorry for France? Not one jot] So I decided to head off on a mini adventure all by myself.


Except, we've got this dodgy unseasonable weather just now. Apparently, we're right in the centre of this massive storm system that's causing such chaos throughout Europe [and the part of France that's had these terrible flash floods does get a lot of my sympathies]. So the weather is changeable to say the least - one moment beautiful blue skies, the next, lots of precipitation.


Am I waffling? The point is, I was thinking about going for a stroll in the hills outside Basel, but didn't really fancy it if the weather was inclement. So I hit upon a cunning plan: head out to Dornach on the tram (I love the trams!); if nothing else it would be interesting to see where that line goes. If the weather looked semi-decent, go for a walk otherwise, head back into the City and do a little city walk from a booklet we happen to have here at the flat (there's one that takes in both banks of the Rhine and the clever ferry that I promised to tell you about)


At the end of Tram Line 10, Dornach, there's a little station and a lot of wanderwegs. So I decided to head for one of those - there's one that goes back into Basel at St Jakob, which happens to be where FC Basel's stadium is located, so I thought that sounded good. And it was - the wanderweg goes alongside the River Birs (a tributary of the Rhine) so there were plenty of trees to give me a bit of cover in case the threatened rain did happen to arrive [it didn't]. There's a big nature reserve along a lot of the way and lots a dogwalkers, joggers, cyclists and indeed the odd wanderer [none more odd than yours truly of course!] The 70% or so humidity wasn't great for my tee-shirt though. The posted time for the walk was an hour and three-quarters, so of course I saw that a challenge, which also wasn't good for my tee-shirt, and I made it to St Jakob in an hour and fifteen minutes.


The picture at the top of the post was from about halfway along the walk, where there seemed to be a bit of a widening of the river and a smallish quarry. To be honest, there were nicer spots along the walk but it was too tricky to get a decent picture of them.


I was a bit tired (and hot and bothered) by the time I got to St Jakob, so I didn't have a big look around the stadium, but it does appear to be very impressive and I'm looking forward to watching a couple of games there once the new season starts [I have a little fantasy that Spurs are either going to play a pre-season friendly against FCB, or get drawn against them in the Champions League]. There's also a massive shopping centre there and all sorts of things. Interesting historical fact about the Birs and St Jakob.

Irish Bars and Wanderwegs

Irish Bars

Let's face it every town in the world has at least one. You could be stuck out in the middle of nowehre in a town with two chickens and a dog and one of the two shacks will have a Guiness sign outside it! And that's not a bad thing!
I had a job to do on Friday: suss out where to watch Saturday's game. Now, as you know, I'd already checked out Mr Pickwick's on previous occassions, so that was always an option but I'd had two other suggestions - McGuinesses and Paddy Reillys. Hence the subtitle.


I tried McGuiness's on Elisabethenstrasse first and I must say it looked pretty good - nice size, big sign outside saying "showing all world cup games" and "open from 12:30" and "smart dress only - no baseball hats". The problem was, it was half past three, a half-hour before kick-off of the opening game, and the place was locked up and in darkness!


So off to Paddy Reillys on Steinentorstrasse I went, where a sizeable community of South African fans was gathering outside, spreading across the grass and peering at a 32" flatscreen outside. Me, I went inside, sat at the almost entirely empty bar about 6 feet from a nice 42 incher. Almost next to me at the bar was a very nice American chap with whom I spent most of the match talking about soccerball. It was good, and will be visited again, but not on Saturday as a decision was taken to go somewhere else entirely.

Wanderwegs!

We jumped on a tram at Zoo. [bet you can't guess what attraction that stop is near, can you?] We headed out to Oberwil, which isn't too far out of Basel, with some sandwiches, water, and a free map my wife had got of the front of a free newspaper (or something). I wasn't too confident about the quality of this map, but I was assured that we wouldn't need it as the Swiss wanderwegs are very well signposted. As you can see. As soon as we stepped off the tram, we saw the sign for the various walks we could take. We'd decided to go into Basel St Margarethen, a short stroll of an hour and a half, so off we went.
Every junction, if you're not sure which way to go, check the lampposts / trees / fenceposts for a yellow diamond saying "wanderweg", and you're sorted! A perfect system until, just like back home, someone forgets to put a yellow arrow [or diamond] on a stump / post. At which point you're buggered.
Despite all this, it was my first little stroll through the hills of Basel and a not unpleasant one. We saw a fantastic "pick your own" berry place, called "Beeriland", and I really wanted to go off towards the "batterie", which I assume is the old defensive battery for Basel [equals excellent views!] and will report on at some future point probably. There was also a garden centre, and a wildlife reserve with, honestly, a frog-crossing! Look!

Pickwick burgers

I should also mention that we ended up in Mr Pickwicks for the England game and had burgers for sustenance. I had a "Mr Pickwick Giant Burger (the biggest burger in Basel)" [™ probably] and IT WAS GREAT and big and good. Not much bigger than Claire's Spicey Burger, but big and tasty nevertheless.

Housewarming BBQs

Lastly, but not leastly, Sunday was spent at a very-nice-colleague-of-my-wife's house who had just moved in. I met lots of very nice people, drank lots of beer and Pimms and ... something else ... and it was very nice. Thank you Lisa.

Hopefully, if the weather is nice, we'll be off to the Jungfrau this weekend and if so there will be pictures.

[...STOP PRESS...] Hopp Schwiss!