Quote of the Day
Moose Report #6
On est en Suisse!!!
They say it's been a long time since I wrote anything. Some say I may even have disappeared completely from the world of cyberspace. In fact I have just been in a parallel dimension of cyberspace (that's where France is) but too much has happened to really recount it all... So I shall maintain my "mysterious allure" (ha ha) and provide a meagre bullet point list of what I am up to, and a moderately to overly long ramble about my recent adventures in Switzerland (to accompany the photos). Coming "soon": tales from the Long White Cloud.
Right. So I am in the throes of a tumultuous relationship with that most tempestuous of mistresses, SCIENCE. My PhD topic is sufficiently arcane that even most geologists have to feign interest, but in a nutshell I am looking at a mineral named rutile (most famous for being a constituent of white paint, sunscreen, and the fine white dust used to keep salami fresh. Or so I am told.) The purpose of this is purportedly discerning when, how and why (and with whom) hot squashed rocks got hot and squashed. I play a lot with big machines and data, but last year I scored a week's fieldwork in the Italian Alps, which was bello!! And I am LOVING the science! As a side project I am growing tomatoes and herbs, having become quite enamoured with gardening. OK there is more to my current life than work and vegetables, but that will do for this installment.
Now to Suisse, where I spent two wonderful weeks last November becoming totally enamoured with said country (surely there's a reflexive verb for that?). I love their trains, their mountains, the sound of cowbells everywhere you go, the people, the fact they have FOUR national languages (!!) ... I am hooked. I started off in Lausanne (lovely town on shores of lake overlooking rearing mountains. Like most of Switzerland, it seems), but rapidly left the French-speaking part and was immersed in the only precipitation of the trip, as well as German (of which I speak keine). I spent a couple of rainy days in Bern but was still completely taken with it, and passed a lot of time in a state of intense euphoria just wandering around with music in my ears. (Plus I found the coolest tea shop in the world). Bern is set in the crook of the arm of a deep, clear blue river - right in the middle of a meander loop! - so that it had natural protection on 3 sides (and now, a great proliferation of leggy bridges tiptoeing gracefully across). I was also touched by the friendliness of the people here, who were really responsive to my two sentences of tourist German (and ample gestures). I am really inspired to learn some German!
...and then I was off to the ALPS, via a train trip with more legs than a centipede (my purple pack was in its usual state: towering above me, throwing each of its many square centimetres into a gleeful state of gravitational potential energy). After the last in a series of increasingly small trains, I caught a cable car (woot!) up a cliff face that rose about a kilometre above the valley, to Gimmelwald, a tiny village perched on the edge thereof. Here I stayed in the greatest youth hostel of all time, with views of the Jungfrau right from the wood-fired hot tub! From here I had two days of epic awesomeness, the extent of which is hard to convey. The first involved me walking most of the way up to the Schilthorn (made famous by James Bond and his revolving restaurant), a peak with incredible views of the Eiger, the Jungfrau, and stacks of other amazing mountains. The walk up was incredible. I started just after the sun got up, and it was quite a long walk (at the time I was all chuffed about the amount of elevation I was climbing, but now I forget). Unusually for the Alps, I didn't see anyone all day, as I made my way up through green be-villaged valleys to what looked like an impassable cliff into which the path sort of disappeared. But the path continued up reassuringly, and didn't even feel scary (until I heard a rock bouncing down the slope behind me, just as I took a photo of the rock fall sign. How ironic.) The only thing I crossed paths with was a whole HERD of chamois! They raced across the slope (oh, how nature makes a mockery of trampers). I can't really express how beautiful (and ever-increasingly so) the views were, so I'll let the photos do the talking... I spent several hours at the top, admiring the mountains and the choucas, these beautiful black birds that hang out in the European Alps playing on the air currents and occasionally flitting across several valleys to a peak that would take mountaineers days to reach, then lazily circling back. They always look like they're having fun and they are beautiful to watch flying. I also saw a giant eagle!!! Circling slowly, with a choucas for scale (just to really emphasis his vastness).
Ohhhh this is getting rambly. Right: the next day featured lots of fun trains, including a funicular AND a tunnel through the Eiger!, and various spectacular mountain & glacier views. I walked down from where the train emerges from the Eiger, and this was also just amazing. Again... to save you the thousands of words... see the photos!
Not having quite exhausted my capacity for romping through Alpine pastures (not to mention many-legged train epics) I headed next for Zermatt, from whence I went on yet another spectacular tramp (up to 3100m!). I think you'll just have to see the pictures [when in doubt, direct them to the photos] ...but even they can't really convey my wonder at wandering round at 3000m, having come from 1500m or so, in the calm and surprising autumn warmth of high-altitude, under a sky that felt kind of close, with the Monte Rosa & attendant glaciers in the background, and more chamois in the foreground. Incredible!!!
And now to Ticino, the Italian part of Svizzera, where I visited Lugano and Bellinzona. Coffee, steep streets, and three awesome castles were highlights. Getting shafted by the SNCF (who manage to make any train poking so much as its whiskers into France ridiculously expensive) was not. The castles (in Bellinzona) were a fantastic assemblage of beautiful stone edifices, green lawns, and the blue expanse of the sky above. And omnipresent associated vineyards. They are really lovely calm, peaceful places open to the public (for free!) and afforded some very agreeable lawn time with shoes off & a new book.
I can't resist one final note on trains (because I love them, and why not make some excellent broad cultural generalisations based on public transport?!). The trains in Switzerland are legendarily punctual, and as such tickets are commonly sold with only 3 minutes to change trains, because you just know the first train will not be late. My very expensive ticket from Lugano back to Paris featured several such 3 minute correspondances, which I thought gave me no cause for concern until the cold 6am light found me staring aghast at the announcement that my train was 10 or 15 minutes late! I was shocked to say the least, but it transpired that the train had started off in Italy and crossed the border into Switzerland, presumably acquiring its tardiness somewhat before the border. This was just too hilariously stereotypical, but I was somewhat concerned about the havoc this could wreak on my plane-catching (and credit card). However, despite the delay, the train pulled into my stop on the stroke of the minute scheduled, and I caught my next train with ease and an amused grin, as I concluded that the Swiss train system must schedule for the lateness of Italian trains!
