Switzerland
COOL RUNNING
Legendarily beautiful, obsessively tidy, alarmingly punctual and wallet-meltingly expensive, Switzerland is, for me at least, the stuff of nightmares. Not for any of the above reasons, you understand… It’s the cheese that does the damage.
Most Swiss national dishes invariably involve the consumption of enough suitably hole-ridden cheese to drain an entire dairy herd at a sitting. Since I adore cheese, this wouldn’t constitute a problem but for two small inconveniences: Firstly, and entirely contrary to popular wisdom, I just can’t resist drinking red wine with a fondue. And this, with all the alacrity of a sip of lemon juice slooshed round a mouthful of Bailey’s Irish Cream (a hideous prank drink called a Cement Mixer), instantly curdles the contents of the stomach into a solid mass so dense it feels as if I’ve just inadvertently inhaled a basketball.
Secondly, and rather more alarming, I’ve also discovered that if you eat a mountain of cheese shortly before bed-time, you’ll sleep fine, but the resultant cheesy dreams will be liberally laced with the most appalling nightmares. The solution, clearly, is simply to target the more dangerous Swiss tit-bits for lunch time consumption. Trouble is, after eating a basketball of cheese, all I want to do is potter to the nearest lay-by for a good snooze. Which brings us smartly back to the realms of nightmare once more…
The long haul across France en route to Geneva affords plenty of time for such mousetrap sponsored musings, and also, just as we’re searing past Dijon in the late afternoon, highlights another potential pitfall in our quest to unearth the coolest examples of all things Swiss: It would, of course, be entirely foolish to contemplate an early spring drive across the breadth of Switzerland without the added security of a set of snow chains, even if it does take half an afternoon, a pot of Germoline and an entire thesaurus of bad language to fit them. Happily, we have planned accordingly. Sadly, they’re still shuddering about atop the spin dryer in the outside shed at home. So, with reports suggesting that all the major alpine passes are still closed to traffic, we’ll have to be careful.
It’s dark by the time we cross the Swiss border on the outskirts of Geneva and, having been fleeced for the obligatory Motorway Pass, head for the city centre. There’s something gently unnerving about arriving anywhere after dark (it always feels so much better to roll up with a hint of daylight remaining to help you get your bearings) and a large city like Geneva is no exception. Mercifully, local knowledge culled from years of Motorshow attendance yields the vaguely affordable Hotel Capitole slap bang in the centre of the city which, even if the bedroom carpets do look fractionally more tired than the man who has just scaled Everest without oxygen, boasts both a lively, deliciously bohemian bar and close proximity to a Geneva must –the Café de Paris.
Settle into this bustling, clamorous, wood-panelled, one-room restaurant and the waiter won’t ask you what you want, merely how you want it cooked. There’s only one dish on offer –steak and chips. Ask for it rare because, accompanied by a mountain of hot, salty fries thin as rag doll hair and slathered in an absurdly more-ish secret recipe butter sauce, it comes sliced on a salver which is perched on a burner at your table to cook on to your liking.
Geneva seems to specialise in doing wonderful things with bits of cow, because the other well-kept culinary secret I must let you in on is dished up to visitors of Le Grizzly, an unassuming establishment lost in the outskirts near the airport. Here, the chef has clearly been raiding stately homes the length and breadth of Europe for medieval weaponry, because the steak comes in succulent chunks skewered onto the searingly hot spikes of what closely resembles the fearsome mace once wielded by knights in armour, suspended from a mini gallows. Presumably constituting something of a fire hazard back in the big-hair days of the 70s, the whole, known as a Potence is then doused in whisky and ignited, the juices dripping onto a bed of rice lurking below.
Asked to invigilate between the two dishes in the sublime taste stakes, I’d be hard pushed to chose, but can at least guarantee an entirely cheese-free outcome when it comes to getting your head down.
No trip to Geneva would be complete without a modest drenching at the hands of the city’s famous landmark fountain, the Jet d’Eau. Ours will have to be, however, because the man tasked with switching it on this morning has clearly overslept. An adjacent traffic jam sufferer assures me it will erupt at 9.00 am, so we wait. 35 minutes later, I’ve learned that the 140m fountain is not, as I’d believed, gravity fed, but merely a massively upgraded version of the 30 metre high effort which, dating back to 1886, once served to relieve excessive water pressure built up by power generating hydraulic turbines on the river Rhone after the city’s craftsmen had closed the valves in their workshops and gone home.
Chilled to the bone and now a little less than convinced of that legendary Swiss timekeeping, I’ve also learned that a freezing cold north wind can whip up a substantial swell down the enormity of the lake, which is why it isn’t unusual to see cars parked along the lakeside here in mid-winter encased in lumps of solid ice.
Being trapped inside such a car might run an igloo a close second as the coldest place on earth, but we’re here to visit the coolest place in the entire universe.
Ironically for a city sporting the slowest traffic lights in the world, Geneva also plays host to the fastest objects on earth. Welcome, if you can find it, to the CERN laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider.
Given that the LHC has a circumference of some 27 kilometres, it’s remarkably difficult to locate. But this is because the world’s largest particle accelerator is buried between 50 and 150 metres below ground on the border with France just north of Geneva, the only visible signs of its existence above ground being a ramshackle assortment of administrative buildings crammed with boffins from all over the globe, and a giant wooden dome which serves as an exhibition space to enlighten visitors into the mysteries of the installation. As one who inevitably records Celebrity Pets Singing on Ice rather than the intended movie on my video player, I’m not entirely convinced I’m any the wiser after my visit, but here goes anyway…
The LHC is designed to produce head on collisions between two beams of particles of the same kind, either protons or lead ions. The beams will be created in CERN’s existing chain of accelerators and then injected into the LHC -which looks for all the world like a high-tech oil pipeline running through an unimaginably squeaky clean underground railway tunnel- where they will travel in a vacuum so absolute that it boasts 10 times less atmosphere than the surface of the moon. It will also be a tad chilly in there, -271 degrees C, which is about 240 degrees colder than a domestic freezer, and even colder than outer space. This is, literally, the coolest place in the universe.
The reason for the cold is because the particle beams are both guided and accelerated round the world’s largest hoola-hoop by some 1800 superconducting magnet systems, which work four times more efficiently in brass monkey conditions. Each beam will consist of nearly 3000 bunches of particles and each bunch will contain as many as 100 billion particles travelling at within 0.0000001% of the speed of light. At that simply outrageous speed, circumnavigating the LHC’s 27 kilometres 11,245 times every second, each proton still only boasts the energy of a flea in motion, but the entire beam has the energy of a 400 tonne train travelling at nearly 100mph.
The particles are so tiny that, when the contra-rotating bunches cross in each of four vast detection chambers, there will only be about 200 collisions among 200 billion protons. However, bunches will cross about 30 million times per second, so the LHC will generate up to 600 million collisions per second.
So, why? Well, in truth, my brain melted at the point where they create the particle beams in the first place. But the premise is that, with thousands of new particles being created, the collisions will recreate conditions that existed less than a billionth of a second after the beginning of time itself; the Big Bang. Scientists will be able to peer deeper into the fundamental structure of the universe than ever before, and unknown atomic particles may appear. On the positive side, there seems to be the potential to create enormous reserves of energy to compensate for the future absence of oil. On the negative side, I just hope they know what they’re doing, and I for one will have my fingers jammed firmly in my ears when they switch the LHC on for the first time this summer.
All this science has given me an appetite for cheese, and where better to find it than Gruyeres, birthplace of the essential ingredient for a fondue? Perched on a hilltop some 20 kilometres north of the eastern end of Lake Geneva, the stunning medieval fortress of Gruyeres dominates the surrounding countryside. Cars aren’t allowed within the fortified walls and the only sounds puncturing the tranquillity of these ancient, cobbled streets are the nasal enthusiasms of American tourists (‘I just love history… It’s so old’) and the demented ticking of hundreds of cuckoo clocks lining the walls of the souvenir shops. Woe betide the visitor caught inside on the hour.
Raclette for lunch; this being the name of the stout block of cheese melted at your table under what looks like a one bar electric fire stolen from your auntie’s parlor. Scraped of the block to flow like anemic larva over cornichons, pearl onions, assorted cold cuts and potatoes, this is wonderful, basketball-inducing grub, and we can scarcely muster a subsequent stagger in search of coffee.
Famous these days for more than mere cheese, Gruyeres is also home to one H R Giger, creator of undoubtedly the coolest creature ever to stalk the sci-fi screen in Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’. And there’s an outrageous café decked out in the style of the Alien space ship opposite the entrance to Giger’s museum, which proves quite unnerving for the man who was so busy hiding behind his hands (and, on occasion, the complete stranger sitting next to him) that he had to watch the film three times before he got the plot.
From Gruyeres, a diminutive, but thankfully snow-free road leads uphill to the Juanpass, our route to Interlaken. The landscape is stunning at this time of year; the surrounding hills still have snow at the top, but, like a photograph that fades from full colour at the bottom to black and white at the top, it has melted from the lower slopes to reveal the green pastures beneath. At the top, clad in conifers dressed thickly with snow, the hills hugging the pass hunch into the underside of the cloud like startled black-tie wedding guests under a collapsed marquee. And the only colour anywhere is the orange tips to the roadside posts marking the way for snowploughs after a serious fall of snow. Not now. Please.
Interlaken is the perfect place for an overnight stop. The water in the lakes which blockade the town on either side is an extraordinary turquoise green, like the sea off a tropical beach at the point where the cautious snorkler turns back. From my bedroom window in the comfortable Hotel Hirschen, replete with a vast helping of another Swiss staple, Rosti, the view up a cavernous glacial valley to the distant Jungfrau massif is magnificent.
Next morning the cloud has finally lifted and, though we’ll have to leave the Laguna in the valley floor, the offer of a clear weather encounter with the Eiger, Switzerland’s coolest mountain, is impossible to ignore. From Lauterbrunnen, still in the deep, chilly shadow of the vertiginous cliffs which flank both sides of the valley, a diminutive railway claws its way up the precipitous slopes to Wengen, a picture postcard-pretty ski resort perched precariously on a ledge halfway up the cliff. So steep is the ascent that the train climbs with the aid of a central, cog and ratchet style rail, and the carriage seats are built to be level when the train isn’t, so sitting at the station feels most odd.
The scenery is little short of glorious; Switzerland at its unimpeachable finest. I don’t know why, but these gigantic vistas over alpine pastures always remind me of the most painstakingly detailed model railway layout created by the perfectionist whose saucer-eyed children will never, ever be allowed to play with it. Perhaps it’s because the landscape is so unexpectedly vast by English standards that, from high on a mountain pass looking back down into the valley, entire villages look ‘N’ gauge minuscule. And, of course, there are hilariously punctual trains bumbling across the landscape everywhere you turn, even up the sides of the mountains.
Opposite Wengen, on a similar toe hold cut into the adjacent cliff face, is the town of Murren, founded by Englishman Arnold Lunn. Before he got the package holiday business underway with Lunn Poly, he introduced the sport of downhill skiing to the Alps. This put more than a few noses out of joint since, until then, the locals had always considered that ski racing should take place on predominately flat surfaces, which is, of course, a ludicrously tiring idea.
From Wengen the railway bumbles gently on up the hill to Kleine Sheidegg, a one horse hamlet in the shadow of the north face of the Eiger, perhaps the most impressive of all the alpine mountains. This daunting, impossibly brutal, 6,000ft sweep of crumbling, near vertical limestone never sees the sun, and is considered Europe’s greatest climbing challenge. Since the first ascent in 1938, it has been scaled by just 700 people. And 60 have been killed. You don’t climb the Eiger in a day, so you’ll have to find a ledge wide enough for your sleeping bag half way up and do your best to get some rest. Turning over in your sleep is, however, inadvisable. Rumour has it that two Italian climbers have been hanging, frozen, from the mountain for years now. No one can reach them to bring them down.
Carry on up the railway and the train disappears into a tunnel cut through the core of the Eiger for the 50 minute ride to the top of the Jungfrau massif, becoming Europe’s highest railway. The train pauses halfway up the Eiger’s intestines for a five minute view through a giant window out across the Alps. Strangely, this feels nothing like as spectacular as standing in the shadow of the mountain, because you can’t see down. Mercifully. Get to the very top and all would be marvelous but for the fact that, firstly, the clouds have rolled in to utterly obscure what should be one of the world’s finest views and, secondly, there’s so little air up here at nearly 12,000ft that the previous train-load of tourists appears to have used it all, and any attempts at strolling instantly leave me panting like a fox on boxing day.
Reunited with the Laguna and lungfuls of real air, we learn that both the Sustenpass and the Grimselpass remain closed to traffic, effectively cutting off our intended choice of routes east. So what should have been a joyous hour-long potter across the roof of Switzerland becomes a motorway slog round three sides of a square to reach Andermatt, where we’ll have to put the car on another train through the Oberalppass.
Luckily, there’s just one space available on the next train, so it’s simply matter of shuffling onto a flatbed goods wagon and, with one wheel chocked like a parked aeroplane, putting the handbrake on somewhat firmly and shivering hastily to the nearest carriage. The Oberalppass railway offers fantastic views of Andermatt as it climbs, and there’s still so much snow in the pass I can’t even make out where the road is under this blinding blanket. In the absence of ski-lifts and the accompanying plethora of anoraks in primary colours, there’s no sign of human life here; the pass is strictly for the birds -a pair of enormous eagles soaring dispassionately amongst the peaks, and the occasional squabble of the ubiquitous and somewhat dubiously dubbed Alpine Chuff.
There’s a heart-stopping moment as we step off the train in Sedrun, since it promptly sets off again, and it isn’t until every carriage has clattered by that we can see they were actually kind enough to disconnect the flatbed bearing the Laguna before departing.
From Sedrun, the road runs down a decidedly unlovely and clearly unloved valley by Swiss standards, and it’s a relief to leave the main road at Ilanz for the 20 kilometre drive up to the small town of Vals, where spring water chuckling out of the ground at a heartening 32 degrees C has kept the locals rosy-cheeked since the 12th century. We’re staying at the Therme hotel which, perhaps uniquely, is 100% owned by the local community. The original Therme complex was self-evidently built in the 60s, but has recently undergone a comprehensive refurbishment at the hands of local architect and well-known typing error, Peter Zumthor.
Out of some 60,000 slabs of locally quarried quartzite, Zumthor has fashioned a new spa at Therme. It may look like a giant WWII machine-gun nest from the outside, but inside it’s a delightfully tranquil environment, a sleek, sensual haven of water, wood and warm stone. After supper, hotel guests have this warren of tropical humidity to themselves, and slither in hushed reverence between a serious of ante-chambers surrounding a central pool, each housing a plunge pool of varying temperatures from far too hot to much, much too cold. Lob a fabulous, cheese-free, 6-course meal from an entirely chic black and red dining room with a silver ceiling and a bewildering choice of therapies and massages into the equation, and the sleep of the dead is guaranteed.
Now, it transpires that there is more than one corner of a foreign field that is forever England. In St Moritz –a stout two hour drive from Vals and right on Switzerland’s eastern border- there are 10, which make up the infamous Cresta Run. English as a wasp in a jug of Pimms, the Cresta run was first built in 1884 by one Major Bulpetts, and is rebuilt annually by the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, which runs the show. Fortunately we’re a little late in the season now and the run is closed, otherwise, I suppose, in the interests of bringing you the story, I’d be hurtling head first down an icy, 60mph chute with spikes like grizzly bear claws strapped to my boots panicking wildly about the fact that I forgot to take out any health insurance for the trip.
As to the rest of the town… Well, ever since first hearing of this jet-set venue in Peter Sarstedt’s one hit wonder ‘Where do you go to my lovely?’ I’ve had a yen to sip Napoleon brandy without getting my lips wet in St Moritz. Truth is, however, the season’s pretty much over, the resort isn’t especially beautiful by Swiss standards, it’s almost deserted, I don’t need a new Prada handbag just at the moment and the weather’s turning nasty. The Julierpass is quite high enough to be a problem even without snow chains. Time to leave.
It takes so long to creep back downhill through atrocious weather that we’re no further north than Lucerne as night falls. Which is a good thing, because, hemmed in on all sides by snow-capped peaks, this is a fabulous city. The comfortable Hotel des Alpes is slap-bang on the riverfront, overlooking one of the wonderful roofed-in, timber built bridges that amble across a river littered with a particularly hardy species of swan. From here, myriad cobbled streets amble through an old town rich in colourful architecture and bustling café society. Give me this city over Geneva anytime.
Time, I feel, to shed those cuckoo clock preconceptions once and for all. Ancient, modern, animal, vegetable and mineral, Switzerland offers and entirely splendid selection of all things cool. I’ll definitely be back. And next time, assuming I can afford the accident insurance and there are no photographers lurking, I might even risk a quick ski.
The Driving Experience
We drove pretty much the first Renault Laguna Sport Tourer 2.0 dCi 175 Initiale to arrive in England, and I have to say that, over the course of a healthy 2000 mile round trip, we were nothing but relentlessly impressed with the car.
The first thing that strikes you on climbing aboard is just how exceptionally comfortable the effortlessly good looking new Laguna is. More importantly, over two 11 hour driving days at each end of our travels, it remained so. No creaking backs, no numb thighs; we consistently climbed out every inch as fresh as when we first piled aboard.
The cabin, laced with artful touches of timber marquetry and crisp metal finishes, is a stylish, uncluttered and thoroughly pleasing environment, and ridiculously well put together to boot. Entirely rattle, squeak and groan-free, the only noise at French motorway speeds is the gentle ruffle of wind over door mirrors and the muted thrum of the eagerly long-legged 2.0 litre turbodiesel.
Legendary Renault ride quality continues to astound aboard the Sport Tourer, but the Laguna subtly adds to the equation with a new-found handling poise and delightfully detailed feed-back from the helm. Swiss roads simply don’t do straight lines, and it’s a testament to the Sport Tourer’s agility that we never tired of snicking back and forth through the 6-speed gearbox as the stream of hairpins that hallmark Swiss alpine passes unfurled ahead.
Loadspace is predictably cavernous, and this is the first time I can remember travelling with a photographer who had no need to throw overspill gear from the boot onto the back seat and, once again, crush my best jacket into discarded chip wrapper status.
Unusually for one who all too often feels like wrenching the system from the dash and lobbing it under the wheels of a passing lorry, I must also save a word of praise for the Carminat satellite navigation system, which was little short of superb at all times. It’s no fun driving into the middle of a big city after dark in the hunt for a hotel, but, armed with a modest guide book to furnish addresses and a system CD which covered the whole of Europe, we cruised nonchalantly straight to the front door of hotel after hotel without putting so much as a foot wrong. I don’t quite know how it managed it, but the system even knew which of the Swiss alpine passes were open or closed, and directed us accordingly. On a trip such as this, such knowledge can save you many hours of fruitless driving.
There is, moreover, nothing quite like climbing into a car to see the on board computer predicting a range of over 500 miles. Stopping for fuel on serious, long-haul escapades always seems to interrupt the rhythm of the journey, so it’s pleasing to report that, despite being heavily laden with gear and driven rather faster everywhere than the local constabulary would deem appropriate, we effortlessly averaged well over 40mpg for the whole trip.
Places to Stay and Eat
Hotel Capitole
15 Rue de Berne
1201 Geneva
Tel: 0041 22 909 8600
Web: www.hotelcapitole.ch
Email: info@hotelcapitole.ch
Café de Paris
26 Rue du Mont-Blanc
1201 Geneva
Tel : 0041 22 732 8450
Web : www.cafe-de-paris.ch
Restaurant Le Grizzly
26 Chemin Sarrasin
1218 Grand-Saconnex
Tel : 0041 22 798 1011
Hotel-Restaurant Hirschen
Hauptstrasse 11
3800 Interlaken-Matten
Tel : 0041 33 822 1545
Web : www.hirschen-interlaken.ch
Email : info@hirschen-interlaken.ch
Hotel Therme Vals
CH-7132 Vals
Tel : 0041 81 926 8080
Web: www.therme-vals.ch
Email: hotel@therme-vals.ch
Hotel des Alpes
Rathausquai 5 / Furrengasse 3
CH-6004 Luzern
Tel: 0041 41 417 2060
Web: www.desalpes-luzern.ch
Email: info@desalpes-luzern.ch
Brasserie Bodu
Kornmarkt 5
6004 Luzern
Tel: 0041 41 410 0177
Fax: 0041 41 410 4135