I think Liechtenstein has it in for me, after the comments I made about it being a small and boring country. I reluctantly camped just outside of Vaduz last night, not wanting to wander into Switzerland until the next day. I was still feeling a bit homesick and had found a campsite and a McDonald’s, and thought it best to wait until the morning. And so as you know, I setup camp at the foot of the mountain, and I truly did get off to a pretty decent start. After ample faffing about, I was on the road by about 9am, and literally at the river that borders Switzerland within minutes. I stared up at the mountains before me with some excitement, anticipating the sights that lay ahead. And as I pootled off across the bridge, the scene was set for the day, and I got my first flat tyre…
OK well it was actually my fault, but it started off a chain of events that would prove to be a hellish couple of days. The sun was already high in the sky and the weather looked like a repeat of the last five weeks – blue skies, stifling temperatures and all in all a marvellous 35 degrees Celsius. Marvellous, that is, unless you plan on taking a fully loaded touring bike up into the Swiss alps! I had only travelled about 3km to the border bridge, and the bike was feeling sluggishly slow, and it didn’t bode well for the day in my opinion. There must be something wrong with the bike, or the road has a sticky surface, or something like that. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I came to learn that this is called a ‘false flat’. I was actually going uphill as I crossed the bridge, but it didn’t look like it; I thought it was a relatively flat road and couldn’t understand why my bike wasn’t just rolling along. Turns out there are many situations in Switzerland that are false flats.
So anyway, I stopped right on the bridge, pulled over and did a once over of the bike, checking the wheels, a few bolts, oiling the chain and pumping up the tyres. I was just putting the finishing few strokes into pumping the rear tyre when all of a sudden, air started gushing out of a new hole I’d created with the force of the pump, near the valve stem. It was probably nearly worn anyway and I’d just added the finishing touch. Well, I was prepared with a couple of spare tubes, and immediately went to work replacing the inner tube. I think I was pretty upbeat at the time, thinking that even though I’d had a flat, it was my first since starting the tour 6 weeks ago, and only my second since owning the bike. That’s a pretty good track record! I was back on the road within about 25 minutes, and was about 4km down the road, cycling through my first Swiss town, when the same tyre blew again. It was then that I realised that this rear wheel was going to cause me a world of pain…
I took out the tube, and upon inspecting it, realised immediately that something was wrong with it. The tube had blown up and distorted in shape, and it was now about 1/5 larger than it originally was, or needed to be to fit my wheel. The drongo at the bike shop in London had sold me the wrong sized inner tubes! Fantastic, so even though I had another spare, I was now forced to find a bike shop to get a new tube. It was at this point when two things occurred to me. The first, was how awesome it was that there was a free water fountain nearby to have a drink and wash my greasy hands in. The second was how helpful the Swiss people are. Seeing me sitting under a tree putting the old tube back in, no less than three people stopped to inform me that just up the road there was a bloke who fixed velos (bikes), and also, in the opposite direction was a department store that I could buy inner tubes. Fantastic!
I decided that with the right parts I could fix it myself, so opted for the department store. There was more than one it turned out, and I approached a shop called Manor, which is like the equivalent of MYER. The shop assistant didn’t have tubes, but one of the staff decided that he would take a ‘ciggie break’ and head outside with me to show me the directions in which I could find a shop that sold them, within a ten minute walk. All of the floor staff at the shop seemed quite interested in my cycling adventures, and this actually set the tone again for the rest of Switzerland. Everywhere I went, people were keen to know what my story was.
Anyway, I found the department store he was referring to. If Manor was the equivalent to MYER, then the Coop superstore was the equivalent of Big W, and I realised the tube that I bought wasn’t the best quality but it would have to do until I found a better bike store. I grabbed some lunch, changed the tyre again, and was finally on my way.
So much for the early start. I should have been nearly half-way to Zurich by now, but instead I had dicked around for about 3 hours, I was barely 7km from where I started in Liechtenstein, and still had over 100km to cycle before the day was out. Still, it was the middle of summer, the days were long, I wasn’t exactly tired, just a bit frustrated at being held back. I followed the valleys, dwarfed by mountains that kept getting bigger and bigger as I went on. I cycled along the shores of a lake, parallel to the railway lines, and then came across my first ‘mountain pass’. It wasn’t that big in the grand scheme of things, but it was certainly a bit of a rude shock.
I’d never climbed over a mountain pass like this before, especially not with 40km of luggage dangling off the side of my bike. But I was mentally prepared for it, so I thought. I just wasn’t prepared for the sun which was beating down, along with the super-humid air that was making everybody sweat like a dyslexic in a karaoke bar.
I had to break up the pass into about six stages. On average I would take about three switchbacks, gaining about 70m at a time, then find the next space on the side of the road to pull over, There were numerous opportunities to rest, and at one point they even had another cool water fountain which I was eternally grateful for, because I was only half-way up the mountain and had already used all my water.
Near one of the steepest parts of the climb, my bicycle nearly became bogged when the scorching sun had literally melted the tar on the road. It was all over the place, melting in the heat and slowly running into pools which were unavoidable. One area of newly paved bitumen was like cycling over fly-paper. I couldn’t cycle any longer and I had to walk my bike up to the next shady patch by the side of the road. Checking my bike, I could see that the melted tar had filled into the tyre treads and the surface had gathered a sticky residue from the tar. Bloody fantastic, how the hell was I supposed to get that off?
On the positive side, I was only a couple of turns away from the peak, and the view was fantastic. And what always comes with a huge mountain climb, is a gloriously, speedy descent down the other side! The buzz of flying down the mountain after all that hard work was truly amazing. I was braking nearly all the time, but the luggage was dragging the bike down faster than normal, and I was reaching speeds of nearly 60km/h down the windy bends. It was awesome! I reached the Zurichsee in no time at all, and was probably about 20km out of Zurich, when I felt the familiar collapse of the rear tyre as the shitty tube I’d purchased that morning kicked the bucket. Fortunately it was a slow leak and I was able to pump it up, and cycle around 10km before needing to pump it again. I could get to Zurich on that tube and fix it in the morning when the shops were open. What I didn’t expect was the sudden northerly wind that picked up, literally blowing a gale. It was stronger than any wind I’d cycled into since those horrible winds in northern France, and it took me nearly an hour to cycle 10km. I never made it to Zurich that night, my legs being shot from the hill climb and the wind nearly forcing me backwards. I pulled into a campsite 3km from the centre of town, and called it a night. That was a great decision, because the moment I arrived, it started bucketing down. I had expected it, given the humidity and the heat. In Sydney, these would have been the ideal conditions for an afternoon thunderstorm, and sure enough, the front came through and cooled everything down a lot. The rain only lasted about one hour, and I was able to crack a few tinnies and check the email whilst I waited, before setting up the hammock.
I made a tactical decision to write-off the next morning of cycling in order to get the bike fixed properly. I pumped up the old tube again so that I could do a quick reccie of Zurich. Checking out the city was lovely, and I enjoyed it’s elegance and charm, especially by the river and lakeside. I went around taking photos of some of the ‘private banks’ that I’d been reading about in a fiction book “The English Assassin” not for any other reason but out of curiosity. Though I did manage to draw unwanted attention to myself when some of the bankers at these ‘private banks’ came up to ask (as politely as possible) what was I doing taking photographs of their buildings and the name plates near the doors. It was not an easy explanation, even though my intentions were innocent enough, but I played dumb tourist “Nein spreichen zee doitch”, and got the bloody hell out of there before they sent the security heavies around to move me along for good.
I jumped on a train, not the cheapest option, but certainly the only way I was going to be able to fix my bike and make the planned distance in the one day. Wandering around Zurich I had not seen a single bicycle shop, which surprised me. I guess they were located further out into the suburbs, not in the central part of town. So I thought I’d train it half way to Lucern, and try my luck in Zug.
It literally only took about 30 minutes to travel to Zug. The train cut through a mountain that no doubt would have caused me a couple of hours of pain. I dropped into the centre of town and did a complete lap of the shopping district, without any luck at all. Heading back to the train station, I was tossing up my options, when I stumbled across a backstreet bike workshop, that was the answer to all my problems. It was a fantastic store, having all the parts that I needed, plus a workshop if you required any additional tools, which I didn’t, but it was all there just in case. I bought the new inner tubes, good quality ones. I showed the bike store owner the tube that I had left over from London. He seemed convinced that it was not the wrong size, I should be able to use it. So I’d been wrong about the bloke in the shop back in London after all, maybe it was just a defective tube? But in fitting the other spare, it did the same thing – blew up out of all proportion, looking like a python snake that had just swallowed a wallaby, before eating its own tail! We put it down to the heat – it was possible that after sitting in my handlebar bag for 6 weeks, it had probably become deformed from the constant heat it was subjected to. I would have to keep an eye on that from here on in, especially heading into hotter climates like Italy, Greece and then down to Egypt. I also decided to replace the entire back tyre, the tread having significantly worn down. It also possibly had something to do with the punctures and I didn’t want to risk it.
There’s nothing better to blow your budget than to go shopping for bicycle parts in one of the most expensive countries in Europe. But that’s what I did, and the upshot was that I rolled out of the workshop with a reliable rear wheel, and my confidence in Bessie restored. It was definitely worth the money! Three hours later I was in Lucern.
The town of Lucern was pretty cool, and I was nearly about to stay the night but I decided against it at the last second. I managed to cycle around and see all the sights relatively quickly. The most obvious attraction was the old medieval bridge. A fantastic construct, it spanned the river by the lake, and I believed was constructed back in the 1300’s as part of the town defence, as well as a way of crossing the river. It was all made of wood, decorated with flowers all along the sides and on the inside, each archway was decorated with an original artwork. Back in 1993 (I think) there was a massive fire which destroyed the entire middle section of the bridge. It has since been restored and you only notice the restoration because it was pointed out in a sign near the bridge entrance, but all of the original paintings were lost during the fire, so there’s a gap without paintings in the middle. A shame to lose such history up in smoke like that. I hiked up the city walls, around through the old town where the facades of many buildings feature elaborate paintings and decorative patterns, and then back down to the bridge.
At the spur of the moment, I decided that I was not content to stay in town, and would be happier doing some ‘free’ wild camping if possible, to try to recoup some of the costs of the bike parts I’d purchased that morning. I cycled out of town, tentatively heading towards the large mountain pass that I would have to climb in order to reach my main Swiss destination of Interlaken, but with the intention of stopping at the foot of the pass for the night and again tackling it fresh in the morning.
The next three hours were possibly the most enjoyable (in terms of cycling) of my entire trip to date. I fell onto a proper cycle path, found a clearly marked route that would take me all the way to Interlaken, and followed it as it wound past three lakes and along the valley floors. It was an easy cycle and extremely beautiful, and I was making excellent progress ahead of schedule, since I had left Lucern without staying the night there. At one point, I came across some road-works, but instead of it being the shit-fight that I thought it would be, the Swiss had build a ‘floating highway’ on the side of the lake, complete with a separated cycle path. It was supported on floating booms, and as I cycled along, I could see the excellent progress that was being made with the construction work in creating a permanent roadway with accompanying cycleway, as well as a new tunnel. One thing that was becoming very clear (and was confirmed by a couple of Swiss people that I met along the way) is that the Swiss go to extraordinary lengths to build everything properly. Swiss engineering is a bit of a marvel and something that the country should be quite proud of. Basically if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, and the roads, railways, cycle-ways, buildings, houses, everything in Switzerland is constructed efficiently, though definitely not necessarily cheaply.
And so I made fantastic progress that evening, cycling until it was nearly dark, before stumbling upon a beautiful lake near a town called Giswil. I found a campsite which was right by the shores of the lake, complete with its own beach, excellent facilities and a kiosk selling beer, so figured I’d not wild camp and spend the night here with the facilities. I went up to the front reception desk to find it closed, but figured that I’d be able to find a few trees to string up the hammock, then sort it out in the morning. A swim in the lake was exactly what I needed, and I had a pretty chilled out evening. I even did some washing in the stream near where planned on stringing up my hammock. Once again it was going to bucket down for a short while before the storm front cleared the valley, so I didn’t set up the hammock until just before I went to bed, in the only place I could find a couple of trees suitable for it to be hung. It was about as far away from the reception desk as you could manage, and I have to admit, the thought definitely crossed my mind that if I got up early enough, packed quickly and quietly and hit the road, I might be able to sneak out without even paying for a tent site. All good to claw back the budget!
I did just that, waking up at around 7am before there was much movement in the camp. Thinking to myself how good is this, but with the niggling thought in the back of my mind that of course this is the wrong thing to do, and something is bound to happen that I won’t get away with it. And I was right. I had very efficiently packed my backs in complete silence, not waking any of the neighbours. I go to wheel my bike out through a back gate, and then I find that some bastard has ‘clamped my bike’. Somebody had come along at some point in the night and put a small cable lock around the front wheel and the frame to stop it rolling. I’ve never had that happen before, and I was immediately alarmed. With cable cutters I could easily have got it off, but that’s not the kind of thing one carries around on a bike tour. There was no way I could move my bike. Cripes!
So I marched on up to the front desk, dobbed myself in for having stayed the night (but then in my defence they had not been there to pay the previous evening). Though the guy didn’t speak any English, he knew what it was about once I explained that I owned a bicycle. I paid their extortionate ransom fee for the campsite and with wounded pride, ambled back to my bike where I found it had been set free. But seriously, it was worth a try. I mean apart from paying through the nose for a beer the previous night, they hadn’t exactly provided me with anything but a couple of trees for 6 hours. Camping in Switzerland costs more than a bloody hostel in Germany, or a private room in Poland. It’s a complete rip-off, but still the cheapest way to do things unless you wild-camp (and don’t get caught!). Anyway, Karma caught me. We were once again even.
Today is my third day in Switzerland, and I’m now heading towards Interlaken. There’s a pretty big mountain pass to climb to get there I think, so I’ll let you know how that one goes, and I should be able to catch up with uploading these when I’m chilling out in a hostel for a couple of days.
Auf Veidersen!
