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Published: July 11th 2011
And they're Off
We entered Switzerland from Menaggio, on Lake Como, ItalySwitzerland
For our honeymoon we hired a car in Italy and then spent 9 days on the road, including 6 days and 5 nights in Switzerland. We entered Switzerland from Lake Como, so started in Lugano then travelled anti-clockwise around the country until we reached the Visp area before crossing the Simplon pass back into Italy.
I was quite excited about the prospect of travelling around Switzerland, a relatively small country, so easy enough to travel around and with neighbouring countries such as France, Italy and Germany I thought there would be a mix of culturally aware, cosmopolitan people with various cuisines on offer.
Well, in my opinion, I was bang wrong. The scenery was beautiful, as you’d imagine Switzerland to be; full of lakes and snow-capped mountains, with castles around every corner but this was ruined by the huge over-pricing, the miserable people (of course not all but I am generalising) and the food was worse than England’s.
The weather was damp and drizzily as we entered the country, and remained the same for most of the day, so we visited Bellinzona, with its Unesco castles, then we checked in to a cute hotel and had some
Lake Como
The view from our hotel room, the morning we crossed into Switzerland beers.
Next day the sun came out and we headed north towards Schauffhausen, stopping in Chur for tea and Liechtenstein for lunch. We ended the second day sleeping in Schloss Laufen, one of the castles over-looking the Rhine falls, Europe’s biggest waterfall.
On our third day we spent the morning walking around Schauffhausen, a pretty medieval town next to the falls, full of pointy spires and medieval buildings, the most interesting of which was the Munot, a circular 16th century fort on top of a hill. After lunch we drove down to Isewald, a little lake side town in Bernese Oberland (the Lake District) and got drunk in the evening.
We spent a day chilling in The Lake District which was very picturesque although a little spoilt by the town of Interlaken which seemed to aspire to become the next Benidorm.
Next day we drove to Bern, the unique and pretty capital situated at a bend in the river Aare. I liked Bern and in particular the interesting architecture with medieval style buildings, all the same shade of colour. From Bern we headed to Lake Leman to Lausanne but we were beaten by the torrential rain
Towards the Border
The road following Lago di Lugano and ended up driving south around the lake so that we could enter France and get some value-for-money accommodation and some descent food.
We were unlucky with weather from here on, our third day wind blew us all over the place in Geneva, which was basically a big block of concrete, and in fact the wind was so strong that they had to switch off the famous jet of water. From Geneva we drove passed the Lavaux vinyards, which were nice but hard to fully appreciate when its raining. That night really finished us off, as we ended up being completely ripped off with both the hotel room and the evening meal in Sierre, the hotel, La Grotte was £120 for an empty room over-looking a little lake, with bad service and the peak of our general feeling of being ripped off.
For our last day in Switzerland we drove to the Zermatt, ignoring the signs saying you needed police permission, but the unlucky weather continued as the Matterhorn, the pointy mountain I wanted to see, was hiding in the clouds.
This was where I wanted to take my corn flake shot so rather than have a famous Swiss
mascot in the background, I chose to show my feelings about my time in Switzerland, in a very immature way.
Xenophobic, miserable people, and hugely expensive, I shall not recommend Switzerland to any one.... or at least anyone I like.
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