I had hedged my bets about whether a possible couch surfing opportunity in Fribourg would come good. Staying in Bern with Peter for a night meant that I would miss it if it did, not that it mattered anymore.When I left the next morning heading towards Montreux, I did actually cycle through Fribourg and stayed for about an hour. Checking my emails the following day, I got a response finally. The couch surfing host had acknowledged that they were unable to host me as they weren’t in town until the next morning. But they did actually mention that they had probably seen me in the market at Fribourg as I passed through. “We saw a cyclist on a bike in the markets, with an AUS automotive decal sticker on the bike, and we thought that was probably you. Sorry to have missed the opportunity to meet, and good luck on the tour!” Well, again I just thought that was amazing that they had noticed me, then checked their emails and put one and one together. Brilliant!
Anyhow, the cycle from Bern to Montreux was fairly quick, and I was motoring along especially keen to beat what looked like a massive thunderstorm which threatened to catch me out. It would have been the very first time I’d encountered rain during my cycling time, since starting my trip. As it was, I got into St Legier, a suburb just a few kilometres out of Montreux, in very good time – about 4 hours of dawdling bike riding through the country and some lovely hills – rolling ones with roads through the valley, not the shite type with steep roads going pointlessly over the top. I would have made it in plenty of time to my host’s house, but Garry Garmin, my GPS, decided to take me on a bloody detour around town, and apparently knew some roads that didn’t seem to exist. Well, as I pulled into Chez Beattie, it absolutely bucketed down, in a wonderful storm of the likes I hadn’t seen much of since leaving Sydney. Go the ol’ Sydney arvo summer thunderstorm!
David Beattie was a yank who had been living in Switzerland with his family for a short time, transferred out there by the pharmaceutical company that employed him. His family were still away, but David was kind enough to take me in on request of another Warm Shower’s host that I’d contacted. The house was enormous, and David literally used probably only about 1/3 of the total space. It had a swimming pool, which we found ourselves in about 15 minutes after I arrived, beer in hand whilst the rain bucketed down. It was still quite humid so it was lovely to be in the water!
I had the entire upstairs to myself – there was a brand new bed, an ensuite bathroom and everything. David was very hospitable, and when I’d messaged him earlier, he’d excitedly mentioned that he’d just caught his very first two trout from the river down the road, and by the time I’d arrived, he’d gutted and prepared them for dinner too. Can’t knock that hospitality at all!
I mentioned that I’d like to check out the Montreux Jazz Feastival. I’d only found out by chance that it was actually the last night of the festival on the night I’d been staying in Montreux – what awesome luck! David was more than keen to take me down there. So after trout and a few beers, we cycled into town (after the rain had cleared) and checked out the festival. What can I say about it – awesome is a great start. But surprisingly, there wasn’t actually a lot of ‘Jazz’. The line up of bands could have been from any respectable street music festival. In fact most of the music was modern experimental stuff, rock, hip-hop and international stuff (like the Baltic Stage for example). To see any Jazz, you kind of had to see the headline acts which were in all the paid venues. Worthwhile, but I didn’t exactly have that organised. Some of the bigger names that had played this year included Diana Krall and Herbie Hancock. Anyway, I had a deliciously spicy Thai green curry for dinner, and busted the daily budget by going a few rounds of beers with David. We found ourselves in the late night ‘Jazz Cafe’ venue listening to some local Swiss rock band. Not sure what they were getting at, but they could have been influenced by Pink Floyd, experimentally crossed with any top 40 rock song. It took a while but eventually they grew on me, but eventually we headed back outside to another free stage. Now hip-hop has never really been my cup of tea, but listening to a Swiss hip-hop group that you can’t understand is something altogether weirder. I mean, half the point of hip-hop music is the clever, intelligent lyrics. Without that to impress you, there’s very little left but the bass line that seems to just grate repetitively over and over. None-the-less, we did enjoy it quite a bit. The female bass player especially grooved, and I got into the skill showed there, not often you praise the bassist for being probably the most musically talented in a band, at least obviously.
The cycle home was up an enormous hill (David’s house was about 400 metres above the level of the lake I think) but we managed it. A lot easier cycling Bessie when she’s not fully loaded! Sweating from the ride up the hill, we hit the pool again and had another chat before hitting the sack for the night. I found out a couple of interesting things. The first was that it turned out that David’s house had a bomb shelter underneath it. Apparently this is a feature of many Swiss houses built in the not too distant past. They were seriously concerned about the risk of a nuclear attack or war or something, so it was mandated that houses be build with proper bomb shelters. Sure enough, I saw it the next morning – a pretty decently sized concrete room with a very think, reinforced steel door. David was using it for general storage these days, but still it was there and you could tell it was purpose build for protecting the house occupants. Strange!
The second thing we discussed was the nature of the Swiss people when it came to law and order. I got onto somehow explaining to him about having my bike chained up twice in the past week, and the fact that as nice as the Swiss people were, I felt that everyone was looking at me as if there was some vigilante streak in the entire population. I wasn’t far off the mark – abiding by the law is Swiss national pastime, and David has learned to expect that if you are doing something wrong, you are probably going to find sooner or later that somebody will take you up on it. “I can’t even mow the lawns on a Sunday without the police turning up to tell me the noise is too loud. And it will have been my neighbour that called them” he said. That explained a lot about the feeling or the ‘vibe’ that I got around Switzerland. People weren’t out to get me, it was just in their nature, that if they saw something that was out of place, they reported it. Like a national neighbourhood watch. The fact that my bike had been chained up twice was simply that people wanted to make a point that I’d parked it in the wrong spot and that they wanted to set me straight. There was no malice intended. In fact, thinking back to the campsite, had I parked my bicycle in the bike parking area in the first place, and not left it near my tent, then they probably wouldn’t have even noticed that I was there. Or then maybe they would have… who knows. The fact was that I would have found it extremely difficult to wild camp, as the first person to find my hammock strung up wouldn’t have just ambled on by, but probably called the police, or security, or their neighbour or whomever it concerned. Well, at least it was a safe country, better than having criminals running riot all over the place.
I hit the sack and the next morning, was up feeling not too bad, ready to cycle the pleasant route along Lake Geneva towards, well, Geneva. David reminded me of something I’d forgotten – that the area between Lausanne and Chamborne, near Montreux, was a UNESCO World Heritage location, due to the amazing terraced vineyards constructed by monks centuries ago. To this day it produces some of the best wine in Switzerland, and is an amazing site to behold! Apart from the slight uphill detour to check out the roughly 20km of hillside vineyards, the rest of the trip was a casual meander along the lake into Geneva.
I was staying one night in Geneva with another host, a couple by the name of Dafna and Laurent. They had a lovely and comfortable pull-out lounge that was one of the best sleeps I’d had in ages. They didn’t drink a lot, but they offered anyway to take me down to the local bar downstairs and we sampled a couple of bottles of the local brew. During the day, I’d managed to fit in the United Nations headquarters building and a few other sites around town. Geneva really is the capital of the world, with so many organisations having their headquarters in town, including the Red Cross, World Health Organisation, UEFA and others. In the morning, it was time to catch my train to Nice.
And so ended a lovely eight days cycling through Switzerland – amazing scenery, awesome cycle ways, lovely (and stringently law-abiding) people and the most expensive campsites I’ve ever come across. But I’m glad I did it. Switzerland has definitely been one of the highlights of the trip so far.
So far…
