Terminal Switzerland July 10 - 14, 2001 on highest railroad station in Europe, and permanent marks we collected.

	It is surely obvious which country we arrived to

	Eiger with clouds

Sid reassured me in the morning that his fever must have been some tough cold and that he was quite well and there was no reason to cancel our vacation. Especially since we wanted to move over Lichtenstein into Switzerland - that meant most of the day spent in the car.

Paying our bill at Hotel Wenk, we got pleasantly surprised by a 25% discount (as we met a sale requirement - stay of three or more nights). We had to take a detour, as I bought a sweatshirt at Ramsau the day before and naturally found out back at the hotel that it had bleached edges where it had been folded and exposed to sun. No problem returning it, but the detour around Dachstein range cost us a good hour.

	A view from a hotel dining room

	Top view into a canyon - the unfortunate I-beam is probably what's left of an older bridge. In the background, somebody it about to bungee-jump into the abyss.

We crossed the border near Feldkirch, and it was rather interesting. A customs officer told us nastily that we did not have a freeway tax sticker and would not be allowed to Switzerland (while this was an entry to Lichtenstein from Austria). We told him that we were about to buy one at the next available spot, which he acknowledged by waving us aside, grabbing our passports, and leaving the scene. After he was gone for about ten minutes, I sent Sid out to find out. Our passports would not be returned back to us until we purchase said sticker. Then the customs man kept making a disgusted face about us not able to produce Swiss francs (understand, who would have thought that you have to get them (or a Swiss tax sticker) in Austria, just to get to Lichtenstein?), but eventually he "relented" to accepting a credit card, which his office was obviously equipped to handle, by the way. And yes, we had to buy a whole year tax (calendar year, that is, with half of it already expired), although we planned for only up to 5 days. Other, less greedy governments (Austria, Czech Republic) provide cheaper stickers for that alternative. Welcome to Switzerland (no, he did not say so...).

Our mood, positively charged by great time in Austria, turned sour. On top of that, Lichtenstein presents you with a road that's too small even for local traffic. Fortunately, the duchy is really tiny -- in a short while, we were entering the real Switzerland. I was looking forward to famous, quality Swiss freeways, but got disappointed even there. Only some parts have a speed limit up to 110 km/h (70 mph), and nobody drives more than five (mph) over. About one third of the freeways leads through tunnels, where speed is limited to 80 km/h (50 mph), and about one third of the drivers doesn't use headlights there (very "nice" to catch up with someone like that ahead of you). Another third of the freeways is in permanent re-construction and traffic is being squeezed into two lanes - one "regular", one only six feet wide, with trucks excluded. That does not help as a large trailer, rolling in the wider lane, still bounces over the line, so you can't really pass it anyway. In these stretches of the road, I prayed for them to get behind us, even if we were to go through another tunnel.

	Entering the land of Mordor

	This ain't no choo choo train ... for it runs on electricity

Still, everything comes to an end, even driving through Switzerland. Towards the evening, we were getting closer to Grindelwald and imagining, how we would find another easy, quiet, small alpine village, like Obertraun. Instead, we arrived to an alpine touristic center. Don't get me wrong -- the alpine part of it relates to the Alps only by proximity, possibly by offering a view. And plenty of cableways, hotels, and upscale restaurants. And an unbelievable volume of small stores, where you can buy the only genuine, Swiss mountaineering equipment. Take, for example, two color-matched quickdraws that would elegantly ring, hung on your backpack (I'm not kidding, I saw several "rough sportsmen" thus equipped) - if possible, in a fashion that everybody could see that you're an established climber. You may also purchase telescopic poles - those are extremely practical for extending them inside a heavy crowd down town. I'm not even mentioning all kinds of clothing, about twice as expensive as in the U.S. (and three times as in Czech), sleeping bags, and other stuff.

I must confess that Grindelwald took our breath away. Still, it was too late in the evening, and so we landed at one less ostensible hotel outside down town. A nice waitress was the first pleasant person we met in Switzerland that day, and remained alone in that aspect (what more, she turned out to be Polish). Next -- and last -- positive attraction of the hotel were our blankets. Those of you who beheld Sid in person, may understand that it is not easy to find a comforter that would have the area to cover the WHOLE Hippo. This hotel, however, included blankets of nonstandard sizes, and Hippo just purred blissfully. Those blankets came very handy at night, when Sid got feverish again.

In the morning, he shared with me his sweet secret, namely that he probably contracted a kidney infection and would need to see a doctor. I loaded him into our car and took off to locate a physician, who was ultimately very surprised by Hippo's diagnosis -- other patients there came either with disjointed limbs or with sunburn. Hippo's autodiagnosis was confirmed, pills were prescribed, and physical strain forbidden. Eventually he compromised down to allowing Sid to live his childhood dream - since he was a little kid, he always wanted to take a cog railway to Jungfraujoch.

	Cog railroad station Kleine Scheidegg

	I am being spontaneously encountered with a glacier

It gave us some hope, but looking up, we found that taking the train today would only bring us into clouds and fog. We had to invent some clever progam suitable for an ill man (i.e. no big hiking) - and we remembered there was a creek and a gorge right outside the town. The creek flows out from under the glacier between Mönch and Eiger. The water has a medium gray color, which, combined with dark gray wall of a narrow, deep canyon gives you the image of the fairy-tale land of Mordor.

Our next attraction was supposed to be a visit to an internet cafe (you know we are addicts). After my experience from Thailand where the net was available at any tourist-infested village, we did not expect any trouble in Grindelwald, which was saturated with Japanese. Approximately in the middle of the shopping zone was a large sign saying INTERNET - so we headed for it. Hesitatingly, though, for a door led to a strange store, a combination of a tobacco shop with souvenirs & collectibles. And yes, we were at the right spot, for they offered internet... a lone computer crouched in a corner, occupied by some female, and another corner harbored a greenish, pimpled, bored-to-death teenager - he was, no doubt, waiting for the woman to let him take over. This unpretty place with a single, miserable machine was in fact the only public hookup in the whole vast alpine center. We estimated the teenager to desire at least six hours of uninterrupted porno-chat and gave up. Nothing beats coming to a "technologically advanced" country that prides itself on communications infrastucture.

	A glacier through a station window

	Almost by-the-book example of a glacier surface

Our view from our dining room, where we ate our breakfast the next day, revealed a blue sky with a few playful clouds, and we merrily rushed to buy train tickets. I believe Sid got a full share of the train, eventually, but let me start from the beginning: first part of the way up, we could sit on the car, with practically no company, taking pictures of mountains slowly passing by. That lasted for about forty-five minutes, and was fun. The train disgorged us, however, at Kleine Scheidegg station, right in the midst of the real tourist meat-grinder. Picture a tiny station, overcome with rolling hordes of Japanese groups, other groups, and singular pilgrims. Everyone is clutching a backpack, a camera, those aspiring rough ones also wielding walking poles (very handy to provide support on paved platforms). Everyone keeps running up and down chaotically. Add untellible ruckle of station's public annunciators. We immediately felt compelled to step out to catch a breath, and hiked a little hill above the station, taking pictures of Eiger, virtuously wrapping itself in clouds.

We still had a full half of the way up ahead of us. Most of it goes through a tunnel inside Eiger, and if you consider all those people compacted in the cars, you could reproduce it during any rush hour in a city subway. Only you would hopefully not need to endure it for almost an hour...

Our ride was interspersed with stops. The annunciator told us before the first one that we were about to experience a view to mountains, okay, we could see that. Coming back to our car we found that some nonchalant group took our seats. We grabbed others and went on. At the second stop, the train speaker tape promised us "our first, spontaneous, encounter with a glacier". I don't know how the glacier felt, but I was not too spontaneous through an unbelievably filthy double glass window pane.

	A view to Kleine Scheidegg

	A view to a glacier from Jungfraujoch -- those two little ticks inside a circle (on the enlarged picture if you click) are two tourist groups, one with two, the other with six people.

To our relief, we arrived at the terminal. The train released us inside an underground station, which looked about as friendly as an iron mine. We stumbled through a tunnel into a central repository of wanderers - a huge room that did not have any obvious exit (things were marked up with small indistinctive signs), but one would have the opportunity to purchase cute souvenirs there (no doubt only genuine Swiss-made, from guarranteed Swiss-originated materials). Sid turned on all his orientation senses (and nonsenses, as his height allows him to look over all those Japanese women to the other end of the hall), and we fled the maze through another tunnel out, onto the glacier. The weather was superb, visibility like on a travel catalogue cover, and yes, there are really such bands of gravel on the surface of the glacier, which look like giant rails from a distance.

Given Sid's medical condition, we were unable to perform any serious hiking on the glacier, so we returned to the tunnels and queued up for an elevator to an observatory (they have no accessible stairs there, as they would be too much for all those alpine mountaineers around us). We grabbed a sunny place on a porch overlooking the mountains, ate a snack, and sunbathed.

My Hippo took pity on me and agreed to accompany me inside an ice palace. A maze has been carved in the glacier, very pretty, as long as you can avoid perplexed Indian families tumbling down to the floor under your feet (the floor is made of ice, too).

	... a mountain paradise ...

	Claustrophobic tourist turned mad

Hippo's fading signaled us to return back, through the tunnels onto the terminal platform. A thick crowd awaited us there, indicating, as we thought, the train's imminent arrival. Wrong, only the crowd quadrupled while we waited. When our only vehicle out became ten minutes late, people got really nervous. Well, they say you can right your clock by Swiss trains - and if you do, and let them control your arrivals to work and meetings, you'll soon get rid of many worries -- mostly all those duties to be ANYWHERE at all. Or perhaps the Swiss train delays are a part of a sofisticated conspiracy, which should remind you that your watch is a piece of junk, and you ought to buy a new one, a genuine, Swiss watch. I got nervous too, however, for we were in the midst of a rumbling, nervous crowd, and to be trampled to death is a miserable way to go, even at the highest located underground cog railway terminal in the whole Europe. Finally, a puny train arrived, and we were permitted to rush through a system of guardrails and rotating tourniquets (I felt like cattle driven into a slaughterhouse) -- which snapped shut right before our noses (those tourniquets have built-in counters). The train hied away, another being planned 45 minutes later. I sensed tourist mutiny in the air.

An official appeared and allowed our local portion of the herd (hoooray!!!) into another, reserved train. I began to understand. Most of the cars were reserved for groups, sometimes several trains in a row, and solo pilgrims -- those could wait, right???

Situation was the same at Kleine Scheidegg - half-empty trains with "groups" vanished into the valleys, apparently unsuccessful in loading their designated companies, for our "free public" car got stuffed with additional fifty souls belonging to an organized Japanese expedition. It was a sensation - we managed with Sid to defend one emergency seat near the door, I sat on a half-butt, my arm wrapped around a rail at the door, the other stuck somewhere behind Sid's back, balancing a backpack on my lap, in some sharper turns accompanied by two Japanese women (who may have felt like home, only those guys who stuff people into their trains were missing).

	Eiger and Sid

The train did not stop at any of the stations on its way downhill and all those people are probably still waiting there, unless they died by now. I must say that our experience with riding on a cog train in Switzerland will remain one of our deepest. Like a scar.

	Carol gazing at Eiger

The next day, we had to congratulate ourselves for already having taken the trip - a steady drizzle was pouring down from a leaden sky. It's quite likely there were fewer people on the trains that day (solo tourists were certainly flexible enough to put their journeys off until they would see more than fog), but pre-arranged groups had no choice.

We agreed perfectly on this being the best time to leave, while we held on to remains of our sanity. Not wanting to trail back through Austria, we intended to take advantage of German Autobahns. We did not know, though, that a major exodus was in full swing there. Subject to countless jams, our driving equalled to an aggressive computer game. Nevertheless we pushed through to Nürnberg with no loss of life (no bumper points either), having gained only on hysterical quiver. Our strenghts got ultimately depleted in Weiden, where we overnighted with the plan to continue to our old homeland on Saturday. Those of you who are familiar with Weiden's whimsical distribution of traffic signs and road directions, may already have guessed how it went - chamotically (= towards Cham -- another middle of nowhere town about 50 miles in south-eastern direction ). I think that a divorce was avoided only by the fact that our only chance to get out of there was staying together in the car, after going through a hassle with a car stereo - but that is yet another story, which we will keep for next time.

Copyright © 2001-2005 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.