Tag: Switzerland

Lake Brienz

 

CLOUDY THIS morning and from the gondola down from Männlichen we spotted only one marmot by its burrow.

When we arrived at Grindelwald we found that the Tour Suisse had arrived and the small town had taken on a festival atmosphere. We decided to leave the bustle behind us and we took the next train to Interlaken Ost, then decided to get off at Wilderswil to walk alongside the river to Bönigen on Lake Brienz.

12.55 pm, Lake Brienz, or Brienzersee, from the ferry landing stage at Bönigen. Compared with Lake Windermere, England’s largest lake, the water is turquoise with the surrounding hills rising to about three times the height.

Drawing this view reminded me of the song Bali Hai sung by Jaunita Hall in her role as Bloody Mary in the musical South Pacific – a film that I saw only once, one torrentially wet day in Ayr in 1959, when the windscreen wipers of our Standard Vanguard estate broke, being unable to cope with the force of the deluge on our Scottish summer holiday. I’m surprised to see on Google-Street that the cinema – a rather forbidding-looking grey blockhouse of an Odeon on its ‘own special island’ – still stands in the middle of town and the garage where I remember us stopping half a century ago is still there, now a filling station.

The craggy island in the film is shown in glorious Technicolor ‘floating in the sunshine, [its]head sticking out from a low-flying cloud’.

I also remember a large hotel in Ayr where we sat drying out with a tray of tea by a fireplace decorated with tiles depicting the Greek myths. I kept pestering my mum to tell us the story behind them, such as the one of Hippomenes who threw down three golden apples to distract the huntress Atalanta in a race.

Wonder if the hotel too has survived and if so whether the wonderful fireplace survived the era of ‘modernisation’ in the 1960s and 1970s.

I’d be about 8 years old at the time and I’d already taken drawing books on previous holidays but that Scottish holiday was the first on which I remember trying to write and illustrate a holiday journal. I went for a magazine format, folding up some reject offset paper my dad had brought back from work (disadvantage; it had the yellow separation of a colour photograph of a woman in fur coat printed on it at regular intervals). My cover drawing was of a Scotsman in a kilt, carrying his bagpipes through a glen and stopping to smile at a sheep. The back cover featured the Edinburgh Castle Tatoo but I think that was about as far as I got with it and unfortunately I lost it long ago.

2.45 pm, Japanese Garden, Interlaken

Snowfinches

4.30 pm, on the return journey we see four marmots in what I’ve come to think of as the lower colony near the stream but none in the upper colony near the gondola station.

We get good views of a couple of Snow Finches, looking down on them as our gondola approaches the upper station. Appropriately one of the finches lands on a patch of snow and starts pecking about. The book says ‘often seen foraging at ski-resort restaurants’.

Until I looked up this bird in the book when I got home, I’d assumed that these were Snow Buntings, which I’ve seen in the Cairngorms and Iceland but in the Alps they’re replaced by this similar but not very closely related species.

The Marmots of Mannlichen

As we came up above the treeline on the gondola from Grindelwald to Männlichen bahn (2225m) we saw plenty of marmot holes amongst the rough moorland but it was several minutes before Barbara spotted one walking – or waddling – over the turf, as if it was wearing incoveniently oversized pyjamas, raising its head to peer up the slope.

A few minutes later, I spotted two marmots which appeared to be smaller than the first one, scampering along to a low mound. A third marmot ran towards them and was soon involved in a fight (or a boisterous greeting) with one of the pair while the other looked on.

4 pm; At the top near the summit at the Männlichen Berggashaus, a restaurant run by the family Kaufmann, we share a slice of Studentenschnit, a traditional iced Swiss cake made with lot of ingredients and a Nussgipfel, a pastry croissant with nutty praline in it.

On the journey back down we thought that we’d passed back descended out of marmot territory when I spotted two by a stream. One flicked its tail as they encountered each other – like the other two we’d seen – and they greeted each other with a ‘hug’ – in this case it was less of a tussle.

Kleine Scheidegg

THIS MORNING, for the first time, we’ve taken the uphill train from Wengen to the terminus at Kleine Scheideggat the top of the pass, a station that reminds me of the Tintin stories, with mountain railway trains, some of them charmingly vintage, arriving from three directions and a constantly changing cosmopolitan throng of people embarking and disembarking, some of whom I could imagine having walk-on parts in Hergé’s comic-strip adventures of the globe-trotting Belgian boy-detective. The absent-minded Professor Calculus and the comically but heroic Captain Haddock might appear at any moment. The dapper ticket inspector shepherding passengers onto the ‘Top of Europe’ train would be perfect in a cameo role and these Alpine horn players might add a touch of local colour.

They set up their 3 or 4 metre long instruments on the hillock behind a large tepee which serves as a beer tent. The calm, mellow notes of the horns carry well in this mountainside setting. There’s a subtle play of harmonies when you hear two horns together. It’s a reflective, nostalgic kind of sound, with a hint of sadness about it to my ears; not the audacious bull-roar that you might expect from such a monster of an instrument.

Alpine Chough

If this was one of Hergé’s stories, by now Snowy (or Milou, as he’s called in the original Belgian version), Tintin’s dog, would have slipped away from the performance to team up with a St Bernard in the beer-tent to drink the contents of its brandy barrel. Thieving magpies feature in one of the Tintin stories but in this mountain setting their place is taken by streetwise Alpine Choughs, one of which surprises Barbara as she’s sitting writing her journal by flying down to the table, right beside her, to check for scraps.

Alpiglen

We walk down from Kleine Scheidegg towards Grindelwald, the holiday village in the valley below the Eiger, photographing wild flowers as we go. Alpiglen, halfway down, is perfectly placed for our lunch stop (Goulash Soup, right).

Through the window, beyond the window box filled with geraniums, there’s a view of the lower slopes of the Eiger. The peak itself towers way out of sight above the window and, this afternoon, is lost in the clouds.

Most of the roofs in the small hamlet of Alpiglen, and many elsewhere in the area, are clad with wooden shingles, often with a metal ridge along the apex.

Fieldfare and Swallowtail

This thrush-sized bird has us puzzled. In my notes, I record it at 2.20 pm by broad-leaved woodland edge (we’re well down the mountainside now) by a meadow with Globeflower, mallow and trefoil. We’ve seen it several times but it wouldn’t be until after our holiday, when I looked it up in the bird book at home, that we realised that it’s a Fieldfare. I assume that when I noted that its breast was ‘white’ I was getting a partial view as the breast of a Fieldfare is spotted. In Britain Fieldfares are winter visitors, in the Alps they can be seen throughout the year.

The swallowtail butterflies are easier to recognise.

Apple Fritters at Brandegg

Our final stop before getting on the train for the rest of the journey is at Brandegg, where the restaurant makes a speciality of apple fritters. We sit outside and I draw this view looking north across the valley towards the hamlet of Bussalp, perched amongst the high meadows above those limestone cliffs.

A Buzzard circles high above the valley to the west, descending into the forest. A Redstart, with a breast the colour of ‘rust washed with saffron’ according to my note (I’ve been adding the colour later to these bird note sketches), sings from the gutter at the corner of the restaurant. Cow bells ring like a laid-back gamelan ensemble in the surrounding meadow.

As we walked down the track between Alpiglen and Brandegg we heard a noise as if a train was coming towards us along the nearby track. It built to something more like thunder or distant gunfire. We looked up to the north face of the Eiger to see an avalanche coming down, funneled into gullies on its way so that you might mistake it for a waterfall but it was more like the sand in an egg-timer. As it came down from one terrace it built up a pile – as an egg-timer does – below. When this became unstable the avalanche continued down to the next level, sometimes forking to descend down two gullies.

Climbers on the Eiger prefer to set up camp and take a break during the afternoons to avoid the avalanches that are then likely to start.

This long-horned beetle flew onto the fence between our table and the meadow. It was about 2 inches long including the antennae.

Jungfrau

This is the view of the Jungfrau (4158 m., 13642 ft) from our balcony at the Bernerhof Hotel, Wengen. Most evenings it was partially, or entirely, lost in cloud.

Trummelbach Falls

WE WERE heading elsewhere but the view of the Lauterbrunnen valley – the valley of 72 waterfalls – as we descend on the funicular railway proves irresistible. After so much travelling yesterday, we’re ready to leave the station behind us and stroll in the sun towards the head of the valley.

It’s an easy walk, mainly along quiet lanes, from Lauterbrunnen to Stechelberg and the Trummelbach Falls make a spectacular break along the way. Not that there’s much to see of the Falls from the Trummelbach hotel where I made the drawing above, looking towards the top of the valley. A glacier-fed torrent from the Jungfrau and its surroundings has tunnelled its way down through the limestone, so you need to ascend by lift and hundreds of steps into the cliff to see – and hear – the spectacle.

I’d forgotten my watercolours, so my drawings today, including this one (above) from a shady bench across the valley from Trummelback, are in pen and ink. The jagged line at the bottom is the channel the Falls take, fed by the hanging valley as a gutter feeds a drain-pipe. Above the cliff-top line of trees in the distance there’s an ice-fall, or perhaps I should describe it as a small glacier. The summit of the Jungfrau is lost in cloud.

Mürren

We take a lunch stop at a kiosk cafe near the Stechelberg cable car station at the top of valley, sharing a local dish; Chäschüechi, a kind of mildly cheesy quiche with a pastry base and a light egg and cheese topping, seasoned with nutmeg.

We take the cable-car up to Mürren then the railway back to Grütschalp to descend via another cable-car to Lauterbrunnen. There’s a steady flow of people leaping from the tops of these cliffs and either making their way down gradually via parachute or, alarmingly, leaving it until the last possible moment to pull the chord, giving them just enough time to slow down before they reach the fields below.

Red deer antlers in the dining room at the Bernerhof Hotel.

Switzerland

6.30 am, Dewsbury station; WE’RE OFF on our travels again but this time heading west through the Pennines via Marsden Tunnel on the train to Manchester airport. I’m aware that our familiar moors aren’t going to compare in scale or variety with the scenery that we’ll encounter in Switzerland.We set off from Manchester airport at 10.50 am.

By 11.30 we’re reaching the coast of France at a height of 35,000 feet.

The fields in the this part of France are longer and narrower than most you’d see in England and, in this area at least, there’s more woodland than you’d see in most parts of our country.

Getting into holiday mood, I go for a Merlot from the Pays d’Oc and an Easy Jet in-flight snack-pack which consists of Belgian Ardennes paté, a triangle of Vache qui Rit spready cheese from France, not to mention biscuits from various corners of Britain; water biscuits from Carlisle, Hula Hoops from Ashby de la Zouch and Scottish shortbread from Aberlour on Spey, plus a packet of olives from somewhere in the Med.

12.10 BST and we’re descending between two layers of stratus to Zurich airport.

The first bird that we spot is a Heron flying over the river at Zurich HB station. The river is muddy – there was heavy rain this morning.

Raclette

I could get used to this kind of life. We even paid a modest premium to travel in the extra space and comfort of first class for our tranfer via Swiss railways, changing at Bern and Spiez, travelling most of the way on the upper deck of a double-decker carriage with panoramic windows.

No first class on the final stage of the journey via a funicular railway climbing 1500 feet out of the deep U-shaped valley at Lauterbrunnen to the little town of Wengen, which will be our base for the next two weeks.

Still in holiday mood, I opt for one of the Swiss speciality raclette. You scrape the raclette cheese as it melts from the top of the block of cheese onto your new potatoes, pickled onions and gherkins.