AS A TRAVEL WRITER I’ve specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader’s hair stick on end.
I’ve waded through swamps, hacked through jungles, done my time in war zones and in mine fields, and in rotten, rat-infested sewers the world over. Never before though, have I been asked to drop everything and journey to a place of sheer idyll.
Not until now.
So when an itinerary came through for a jaunt around the Swiss Alps, I balked. It all seemed too good to be true. My wife said they’d sent me the wrong trip, and that I’d better leave before they realized their mistake. So I packed my bags and left, post haste.
The next thing I knew, I was at Zurich airport picking up my Swiss Pass. It allows unlimited travel on most trains, buses and boats within the entire country. The clerk was a slim, small-eyed man with three clocks laid out neatly on his desk. I asked about getting to Appenzell, the heart of Alpine country.
‘There is a train leaving in three minutes, forty-five seconds,’ he said precisely.
‘Well, I’ll never make that.’
The clerk narrowed his eyes. ‘Of course you will, sir,’ he said, ‘this is Switzerland.’
Two minutes later, I was aboard a train so silent that, when it left the station, you could only tell it was actually moving by looking out the window. It didn’t grate along the tracks, so much as glide.
Lulled by the sense of safety and the silence of the carriage, I fell into a deep childlike sleep. When I awoke there were hillsides all around, rolling like waves and overlaid with fields, their grass the colour of crushed emeralds. There were mountains, too, great grey crags looming down like broken teeth, some still tinged with snow.
At Appenzell I alighted, and found myself in the backdrop for an Alpen commercial. No bigger than a village, it was the kind of place I never quite believed existed at all. Prim little chalets with window boxes overflowing in riotous reds and pinks, exquisitely painted buildings, cuckoo clocks, cow bells, and perfectly squared stacks of firewood awaiting the winter freeze.
In dazzling light of late afternoon I drove the short distance to Weissbad, where a smiling farmer named Johan showed me his cows. As someone who lives in a world shaped by crude reality, I was at first skeptical. It was as if the whole place had been conjured as a kind of tourist fantasy. But, the longer I stayed there, the more I came to see that the orderly perfection and sense of contentment were utterly real. Farmer Johan’s grin was always on his lips, even when my back was turned. And he wasn’t the only happy one. His cows were simply beaming delight as well.
If the surroundings were out of an Alpen commercial, then the cows were surely extras from a Milka chocolate ad. They were spotless, pale brown, pretty beyond belief, and had oversized bells fastened on leather collars around their necks. As they roamed the lush pastures ruminating, they made a wondrous music all of their own.
Johan told me that happy cows made lots of delicious milk, that he thought hard before naming them, and that they were all his girls. ‘This one is Lisa,’ he whispered, cupping the head of one lovingly in his arms as she licked him, ‘and this here is Carmen. She can be quite naughty sometimes,’ he said.
After much talk of cows and after a taste of the local weissbier, Johan showed off his trophies and the wreathes he’d won for scything grass. It turned out he was a champion. When I praised this little appreciated Swiss skill, the farmer grinned until his cheeks dimpled. Then, as a way of changing the subject modestly, he showed me to my room.
In actual fact it wasn’t so much as a room, but a barn. Instead of beds there were stalls filled with fresh straw. I got a flashback of the travelling hardship I’m more used to, and sighed contently. Johan demonstrated how to fluff up the straw to make a pillow. Grinning, he went out to check on the girls once more before turning in himself.
Early next morning, after a breakfast of cured ham and tangy Appenzeller cheese, I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. The hillsides were glazed in dew, cool morning shadows streaming over them like giants’ cloaks. Johan had just finished milking the herd, and was cooing over them like a mother hen. He introduced me to another farmer, called Willi, whose ample white beard sprouted from a creased face, and whose hands were the roughest I can remember ever shaking. He spoke of the past, of his eighteen grandchildren and, then he told me about his own herd.
As I wondered how much more talk of cows and milk I could take, Johan took me along winding roads to the cable car. He pointed up to a distant crag and clicked his tongue. Squinting against the sunlight, I made out a straw-coloured building nestled there. Johan nodded, cackled with laugher, and hugged me goodbye.
Minutes later, I was floating up towards the mountains in the cable car, sailing high above a seamless mantle of bottle-green conifers. The gondola was packed with hikers, most of them locals, whose lives are nailed firmly to nature. There was an extraordinary sense of anticipation, as if being in the mountains was a love affair.
The gondola delivered us to sixteen hundred and forty-four metres and to Ebenalp, one of the highest points in all Alpstein. After watching a flock of paragliders arcing and pirouetting on the summer thermals, I toured caves where prehistoric bears once lived, and where their bones can still be found. Nearby, nuzzled into the rock, I saw a tiny chapel built by hermits, who for centuries sought sanctuary in the Alpine solitude.
The next day, the wheels beneath me were moving once again.
I had boarded the fabled Glacier Express at Chur, which bills itself as ‘the world’s slowest express train’. On the exterior, the sleek carriages were gleaming grey and fire engine red, while inside was washed in blinding light, streaming in through special side-lights.
Outside, an idyllic canvas of nature rolled by, peppered with picturesque little villages, silent beneath boiling cumulus clouds; rivers swollen from weeks of late spring rain, their waters the hue of aquamarines, sided by forests as thick as any.
A contrast to the cutting-edge carriages, the train’s dining car was a throwback to the 1930s when it was built. It was compact and wood panelled, with floral velvet seats, brass fittings, starched table cloths, and wild flower posies arranged at each place.
The waitress, whose name was Elvira, was energetically polishing the silver. She seemed a little flustered at seeing me arrive for a late lunch. ‘We have already catered for one hundred and twenty,’ she said apologetically, as she handed me the menu, adding, ‘the kitchen may be small but we prepare everything from scratch.’
Uncertain of what to order, I asked Elvira to do so for me, and was rewarded with one of the most memorable meals of my life. The dining car had the ambience of a well-loved gentlemen’s club, its cuisine – presented silver service – was worthy of any gastronomic pleasure dome. There was Salsiz sausage and veal paillard, bouillon aux crêpe en lamelles, platters of Alpine cheese, and a wine list that would make the most pedantic sommelier proud.
Leaving the Glacier Express at Brig, I had a lump in my throat.
All I could think of was about clawing my way back to the dining car, for another meal under Elvira’s conscientious watch.
In most other countries, changing trains tends to be a sordid ordeal of waiting and of discomfort. You hang around for hours, switching platforms at the last moment, charging up and down, overstuffed cases dragging clumsily behind. But in Switzerland, things are very different. It’s a land in which rail travel is still a genteel pursuit, one of enjoyment rather than of endurance. The station masters are well-dressed and courteous, the platforms clean, the efficiency of the system as reliable as an Oyster Perpetual. It explains why the Swiss one meets off the beaten track sometimes appear alarmed at how the rest of the world grinds on.
In the afternoon I reached the Alpine village of Kandersteg, a favourite with the British since Victorian times. Set in a monumental amphitheatre of peaks, ridges and jagged stone bluffs, it’s far more rugged than the sweeping farmlands I had encountered at Appenzell.
I took a cable car up to the magnificent Lake Oeschinensee, whose azure waters mirrored the sky. The setting was lovely, abundant with wild flowers and lizard-green ferns, with soft, moist moss, lichens, the air thick with bumble bees and marbled white butterflies.
At the water’s edge I met an American woman in a wide-brimmed hat. She was searching for tiny wild orchids, and had one of those smiles that sticks in your mind. She told me that she’d been coming to Kandersteg every year on the same day for four decades. ‘My fiancé proposed right where we are standing,’ she said. When I asked if he was with her, her smile faded. ‘He died in Vietnam,’ she said.
In the days I spent at Kandersteg, I found myself reflecting on the courtesy of almost everyone I encountered. However rushed or busy, there was always time for good manners. In Swiss villages, complete strangers greet each other as they walk past. Men still tip their hats, and people live in a well-honed system with do-as-you-would-be-doneby at its core. When taking a train, there’s none of the usual fear that your belongings will be pinched if you slip to the loo. And, when you get to the loo, you find it immaculate, because the last person left it how they would want to find it themselves.
The journey north-west to Lake Lucerne involved three trains and a paddle steamer in a single afternoon, each one running on a schedule as precise as Swiss clockwork. I found myself flinching at the thought of ever travelling in any other country again. More worryingly, it was beginning to seem as if an on-time world was quite a normal place to be.
Set on the western edge of the lake, the town of Lucerne is as placid as the waters in which its medieval buildings are reflected. Rust-brown tiled rooftops, church spires and onion domes, its skyline is a credit to Swiss style and to diehard values. Thankfully lacking are the rows of grotesque package hotels which tend to accommodate tourists on a grander scale elsewhere.
Like everything else in Switzerland, when it comes to tourism, the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity. As a visitor you feel fortunate at being allowed in at all. It’s rather like peeking under the curtain to see a play for which all the tickets were long since sold.
The lake and the town exist in harmony, each one respectful of the other. And, gliding across it like princesses dancing at a ball, are the steamers. Although built in 1901, the one I climbed aboard looked brand spanking new, and was christened Wilhelm Tell. One of five such vessels plying Lake Lucerne’s gleaming waters for more than a century, its mechanism was a marvel of the Victorian age. Pistons heaving up and down, it ushered me gracefully past swans and pedalos, around the zigzag margins of the lake. As we moved slowly forward, I glimpsed a handful of fabulous chateaux poking out from between the trees high above the waterline – homes of the super rich.
The steamer pulled up at Weggis, little more than a hamlet. Having been thanked politely for my custom, I clambered off. Then, as the sun set, long shadows waning into night, I took a meal in the Weggiser Stübli.
A fragment of Swiss life from antiquity, the wood-panelled salon had escaped the ever-threatening need to renovate. With portraits of the hamlet’s leaders looming down, I dined on bratwurst and bauernrösti, washed down with a glass of crisp Les Murailles.
Seated at the next table was a wizened old man who looked as Swiss as Toblerone. I half thought he might break out yodeling any moment. Raising his glass of Riesling, he caught my eye.
‘We ought to keep it secret,’ he said with a smile.
‘Do you mean the food, or the wine… or the Stübli itself?’
The man sipped his drink, thought for a moment. He frowned.
‘All of it,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep it all to ourselves.’