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!