We’re cycling across Switzerland, land of milk and money, from west to east. That is, from the French border, at the splendidly-named Chancy near Geneva, across its mountainscapes right across to where it meets Austria at Martina.
We’ll have the chancy to use our French, German, Italian and Romansh, and to spend ten days and a lot of money in the lawful-neutral country that’s entirely surrounded by the EU but not in it. Will we have a good time riding in Switzerland? You can bank on it! And hide all your money in the process…
So: we stayed last night in the French town of Valserhône, about six rainy miles of climb from the border on an unpleasantly busy road.
There was nothing explicit to announce our arrival in Switzerland as we crossed a rain-sodden, puddle-filled bridge: only an empty customs post and a change of typography on the street signage.
A curious feature of the signs here is the upside-downness of many of the village names. This, apparently, is some sort of farmers’ protest against the sort of things farmers protest against.
Luckily, thanks to the roads being strewn with standing water, there were always reflected images the right way up. Just the wrong way round.
The first impressions of Switzerland were of quaint rural back lanes picking their way over small hills through green villages. Not many people around; possibly because they were sitting inside their nuclear shelters eating chocolate and counting their money, or perhaps just that it was still raining.
Anyway, a succession of pleasant but unremarkable damp lanes took us to Geneva, via some factoryish suburbs, and there we were suddenly by the famous lake with the famous fountain. It looked greyer and less exotic than the mental image I have of it from my childhood, when it featured in the opening titles of the 1960s ITV superhero series The Champions. (I watched it then more for glimpses of Alexandra Bastedo, the multilingual spy, than for civic ornamental water features.)
We didn’t stay in Geneva any longer than it took to snap said fountain, and headed out east along the lake shore road’s bike paths. The rain eventually stopped and the sun even came out, so we could stop for a pizza and drink at a lakeside cafe and admire the views of France over the other side of the lake, wondering how much cheaper the pizza would have been there.
Nigel whizzed on but, with blue skies now taking over from the grey, I couldn’t resist investigating a couple of the swimming beaches just off the path. At one, Perroy, I had a dip in the refreshing waters. Alexandra Bastedo could probably have swum across and back in the time I took for my paddle, saving the West while speaking French, Italian and Spanish.
We switched to back lanes, taking the Swiss equivalent of NCN1 to Lausanne. I met a farmer, though not in a good way, because he was driving his tractor too fast coming the other way on a singletrack road round a blind bend, and he nearly took me out.
At least I didn’t meet my maker. (When that time comes I have a list of design flaws I want to ask them about.)
After gravel paths and lakeside woods – like most of today’s Swiss portion, mostly flat – we got to the suburb of SwissTech, which as you might guess from the name consists of shiny new blocks with hotels, conference centres, university accomm and faculties, craft beer bars and 21st-century tram stops.
Our hotel was ultra modern, but wasn’t afraid to include the odd traditional period detail in the room design, such as not having enough plug sockets.
We took said tram into central Lausanne to admire its multilevel centre and had a picnic dinner down on a lakeside bench. It was a sober affair, not only because England were drawing in drab fashion with Denmark, but also because the supermarkets here stop selling beer at 8 o’clock.
However, we managed to put that right in the craft-beer bar next to our socketless hotel back in SwissTech. Far from being a mega-pricy hipster ripoff, it proved a top-quality bargain-price place, thanks to its student clientele that no doubt consists mainly of PhDs and postdocs in AI and biotech and nanothings.
We only had one beer; not through any sense of moderation, but because the fire alarm went off halfway through our drink and the place had to be evacuated.
A good first day.
Miles today: 66
Miles since Chancy: 58