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Published: September 4th 2010
Our overnight train from Amsterdam to Zurich was not quite the perfect -wake-up-in-another-country-feeling-fresh experience we had been hoping for - the cabin beds were really hard. Also, some flea/mosquito/other biting insect managed to devour half of my face, hands and feet in the night so I showed up in Zurich looking like I’d been in a fight.
We quickly discovered the expense of the Swiss Franc and largely lived off bircher muesli, bread, summer fruits and chocolate! I possibly visited all of the Sprungli chocolatier outlets in Zurich and felt pretty guilty at the expense every time I made a purchase (which made me turn to some more comfort food - it was a bit of a downwards spiral) before deciding that I would find my way to the Lindt Factory Outlet shop… Google maps informed me that I needed to take a bus to get there and so I went to the information centre to find out whether I needed to purchase a ticket before boarding the bus. The information guy asked me whether I “really wanted to go there” as it is “just a shop” and was not “in the Zurich city”… he obviously didn’t know me very
well, and I proceeded to take the tram and the 2 buses to the Factory. I had been planning to stock up in the “rejects” section, but as I could not understand the German labels as to why they were defective, got a bit nervous and ultimately just purchased a bunch of chocolate products I had not seen before.
We booked a tour one day to go into the Swiss Alps and the tour guide was kind enough to drive us in his car after there weren’t enough people for the tour to go ahead. We walked through the Aare Gorge, drove over the Grimsel and Furka Passes (with amazing scenery), spotted some mountain goats and some groundhog things and went into an ice tunnel at the Rhone Glacier.
We also went to Lucerne and Mt Pilatus for a day. So we took the train to Lucerne, got a bus to Kriens, jumped on the first cable car up the mountain, and then a 2nd larger cable car to the top, walked to the summits at the top, caught the cogwheel train (the steepest in the world) down to Alpnachstad and caught a boat back to Lucerne. We
had great weather and the scenery was awesome. As a warning to fellow travellers, by not taking one of the tours, we saved about 20CHF each, had flexibility with times to get the various transports and had a decent amount of time (some of the tour groups only seemed to have about an hour) up the mountain. Also, another warning is that Lucerne doesn’t seem to get up very early and we didn’t easily locate any cafes for my morning breakfast bircher!
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Jenny
non-member comment
love those mountains
Hi Guys,we can get a truck to transport you from Melbourne airport so you can keep up the sampling of those delicious chocolate things Max(aka Fuzzy)will think who are these people? Jared staying a few days to study--- not a lot of that happening that I have seen, Love,Jenny