Stopover in Copenhagen

August 30, 2022

Our flight home had a 23 hour layover in Copenhagen. The highest point in all of Denmark is only 561 feet above sea level, so hiking was not really an option.

Having a late lunch outdoors, we heard trumpet heralds and looked down the street to see horses on parade. According to our waiter, the queen was returning from sailing today (1). My wife disappeared down the street to see the show, while I stayed at the table, not wanting to dine and dash.

The sunset kayak tour was more organized (and less dangerous) than our paddle through the busy and narrow canals of Venice. Copenhagen harbor and the adjoining canals are larger and quieter that Venice. Our guide, Ida, pointed out various buildings, many in the modern Danish style with lots of glass and wood (2). On the paddle with us was a doctor from the Netherlands studying juvenile epililepsy in pursuit of a PhD (in addition to her MD).

(1) He actually said "sailing and smoking." He mimed a long drag in a cigarette. During her  New Years address on "the telly," she used to smoke as she addressed the nation.

(2) "Do you see that?" She asked, pointing to a modern bridge.

"Not really, I lost my glasses the other day." I said.

"We already ask whether guests are 18 and can swim. Maybe we should add a question about whether they can see!" the guide replied.

Royal procession and parade

In Copenhagen

Copenhagen Harbor.

Kayaking in Venice

August 29, 2022

Venice was founded (so the story goes) when the Roman Empire fell to Germanic invaders in the 400s. The population on the mainland at the head of the Adriatic retreated to the islands in the Venitian lagoon. Apparently, the Germanic tribes were rubbish with boats, so the remnants of the Roman population were safe on the islands that became the city of Venice.

A short train ride from Verona, the canals (and our return plane flight) beckoned. A kayak "tour" (1) wended through the busy canals at dusk. The window at the hostel overlooked the lagoon, and we fell asleep to the sound of the vaporetti's diesel engines while watching Jupiter rise over the water and islands.

(1) While we did have a guide, he said nothing about the history or culture of Venice. Instead, he just led us around the canals without commentary.

View of the lagoon from our window at the hostel

Canal where the kayak tour started

Dusk

Aida at Roman Arena di Verona

August 28, 2022

The local Swiss train took us to the border at Chiasso. I tried to buy a coffee at a machine, which would neither dispense coffee nor return my money. An Italian woman stopped by and hit and kicked the machine on our behalf, all to no avail. A late arrival from Chiasso necessitated a dash through Milano Centrale station (that might quailfy us for the Olympics) to catch the next train to Verona.

Verona is home to a Roman Arena (circa 100 C.E.) that hosts an opera festival each summer. While dining by the Arena, we spied a group of women in stylized Egyptian dress walking through the square, presumably after a rehearsal. They wore backpacks and were noodling with their phones. We strolled over the two Roman bridges in town spanning the Adige river, which was flowing fast and muddy around town, suggesting recent rains upriver (1). 

Romeo and Juliet was set in Verona. A house in the center of town is touted as the location of the balcony scene in Shakespeare's play. The courtyard also contains a bronze statue of Juliet. A 30ish German couple approached us: "Did anything actually happen here?" "I doubt it, the story is fictional" I replied (2). The guy seemed to think it was a clever move of the homeowner to claim his home was the site mentioned in the play and to charge admission to go inside (3).

Back in the main plaza, we wandered around to the east side of the arena to discover we were basically backstage amid disassembled sets for other operas. While holding 30,000 spectators in Roman times, half the arena is now the opera stage, so current capacity is about 15,000. 

When the performance of Aida began at 8:45, our attention alternated between the action on stage and the light show to the north as frequent vivid lightning flashed among the clouds (4) (5). Thankfully, the storm stayed to the north. The opera was quite a spectacle, with enormous sets, and vibrant costumes. The singers projected their voices (with no microphones) all the way up to our ears at the top of the arena, a tribute both to their voices and to the Roman's knowledge of acoustics in designing the arena. The performance ended at midnight.

(1) Coincidentally, the headwaters of the Adige are at the interesecting point of Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, where we had planned to hike yesterday, but.went elsewhere due to the expected rain storms.

(2) Although an acquaintance of mine renewed her marriage vows on the balcony in June.

(3) There is even a supposed tomb of Juliet in town.

(4) We scored seats in the back row at the top of the arena, so we had a fine view of the lightning.

(5) There is a protocol to postpone the performance up to 2 1/2 hours in case of rain.

Verona City gate

Roman-era bridge

Roman road below current grade

In the town

"Juliet's balcony"

Statue of Juliet. 

Apparently, It's a thing to take a selfie touching her breast, hence the shine on that part of the statue

"Backstage" at the opera

The arena

The spectacle of Aida

On the walk back to the hotel

Lake Lugano

August 27, 2022

Lugano is a short train ride south of Bellinzona. I had found a place online to rent kayaks and planned to paddle across Lake Lugano to Campione, an Italian enclave. Upon arrival at Lake Lugano, we found a place that rented stand-up paddleboards (SUPs), who told us the kayak place was gone. They tried to find us somewhere else on the lake to rent kayaks with no luck, so we rented SUPs instead. 

While fun to poke about in, SUPs are not actually useful for going anywhere. I tried kneeling with limited success, so I sat, then lied down on my stomach. Emboldened by my wife's success at doing so, I attempted to stand up; the water in the lake was very refreshing and I'm sure some fish with impaired vision deep in the lake finds my glasses useful. After returning the SUPs, I put a comb through my snarled, wet hair. "Ready for the disco!" the rental guy said.

A few thunderstorms had cleared up by late in the day. Toward sunset, we took the funicular up Mont San Salvador to watch the sunset over the foothills of the Alps.

At Lugano

What to do with old Fiat 500?

Make a Gelato stand.

Campione, Italy surrounded by Switzerland

Up the funicular

Sunset over the foothills of the Alps

Tibetan bridge in Ticino Switzerland.

August 26, 2023

Plan A for today was to take a series of trains and buses across Switzerland to the border town of Nauders, Austria. The next day, we planned a day hike in the Alps through three countries: Austria, Switzerland and Italy, and to visit the tri-country boundary marker. However, the weather forecast for Nauders  was for rain today with colder temperatures and severe thunderstorms tomorrow. 

The weather forecast south of the Alps was for sunny and warm weather, so we headed to the Italian-speaking Canton of Ticino (tee-chee-no) in Southern Switzerland. We opted for the narrow guage, part cog, route through central Switzerland via Andermatt (1). A connection to the mainline route to the south through Gotthard tunnel involved a short cog-rail connecting train that descended from 4,715 feet in Andermatt to 3,629 feet at Göschenen in just 2 1/3 miles. The nearby auto road included a long series of short switchbacks.

A hotel in Bellinzona, the Catonal Capital, had a room available. While the city has three medieval fortresses (2) you can hike to, a brochure in the hotel lobby beckoned us west to Monte Carasso where a long suspension bridge on a hiking trail was built in 2015. 

A helpful bus driver pointed us in the right direction, and we began climbing. We soon encountered two mothers out walking with a boy and girl. They stopped at a small water drinking fountain just before we got there. A metallic clatter drew my attention to the girl lifting the heavy cover off the underground water valve enclosure. She soon turned the water all the way up, sending the water arcing into the air and spraying 25 feet away, which the kids thought was fun to play in (3), (4).

The boy, noticing that I was waiting to fill my bottle, proceeded to take the bottle from me and try to fill it, while the girl kept turning the water up and down to make the filling process more difficult. The mothers noticed we were taking this all in stride, so they allowed the show to continue. The girl turned the water up again to spray us as we walked by to resume our hike.

The steady climb up went by old churches and a gondola station. The trail was well marked and maintained, with many sections lined with stones to limit erosion; some of the stones were formed into rough steps in the steeper sections. 

After about 1,800 feet of vertical rise, we turned left/south and hiked down to the "Tibetan" suspension bridge. Built in 2015, the bridge spans 885 feet and is 426 feet above the deep gorge below. Guy wires attached to a parabolic cable anchored to the gorge's sides limit the sway of the bridge in the wind (5). The slats on the bridge floor were the perfect size for a mobile phone to fall through, so I kept a tight grip while taking pictures.

South of the bridge was some more climbing, but we soon began our descent to St. Defense. From here, the trail descends back to the main road, frequently crossing a small sinuous mountain road. Back at the main road, a bus soon came to take us back to town. Total vertical rise about 2,000 feet and about 6.5 miles.

(1) We had an all-access day pass to the Swiss rail system, so we could go wherever we wanted. We chose a town near a border (Italy) to avoid having to buy an expensive Swiss rail ticket tomorrow.

(2) The city is located at a strategic point where the Ticino River valley (the main route north) narrows. Fortifications were all over the town.

(3) The kids had obviously done this before.

(4) While many of the water sources on the trail are fed by mountain springs, this one was apparently connected to the municipal water system. 

(5) Or when someone stands in the middle of the bridge and tries to get it swaying, as a teenage boy was doing when we arrived. He was disappointed. 

The Andermatt-Göschinen Shuttle

Beginning our climb, Monte Carasso

Terraced vineyard

Finger post on the trail

St Bernard Church

The Bridge

Looking east across the valley

Looking west up the gorge

Trail south of the Tibetan bridge

Zmutt

August 25, 2022

At St. Gervais-La Fayet, a meter-guage rail line begins. The trains, called the Mont Blanc Express, climb up to Chamonix and beyond. The line begins at 580 meters and summits at 1,365 meters at Montroc-Le Planet, just east of Chamonix. Despite the steep grades (up to 9%) the line operates without cogs, although a rail is installed in the middle in the steeper sections to assist with braking. On the French section, power is supplied by a third rail. 

The train has extra windows at an angle high on the sides to help the passengers enjoy the dramatic mountain scenery. August being high season, the train was jam packed with people, getting more crowded as we approached Chamonix. Most people got off here, including a big group of kids, who were carefully counted by their guides on the platform. 

We changed to a Swiss train at Valloricine, the last station in France (2). The train switched on the fly from the third rail to overhead via a raised pantograph. I assumed this was a Swiss standard, but the line in Switzerland kept switching from overhead to third rail for power (3). 

The Swiss rail lines hugs the edge of a narrow gorge on the descent, with villages perched on narrow shelves above the river far below. As we began the steep descent into the broad Rhone Valley near the end of the line (20% downgrade and with cogs), my wife looked ahead and said "the track looks like it disappears off a cliff, I feel like I'm at the top of a roller coaster." At Martigny, we bid adieu to two French couples who seemed to share our enthusiasm for the ride, and caught a mainline train to Visp.

At Visp, we connected to another meter-guage, partly cog, train toward Zermatt. On the climb, a voluble man from Ülm Germany chatted with us. Pointing to a field with a few cows, he said "In Switzerland, 5 cows, in America, 10,000 cows." Due to a signal fault and short bus substitution, we arrived about an hour late in Zermatt (4).

A friend back home had a Zmutt sticker, which I said sounded like Zermatt. He replied that it was a village near Zermatt, which I thought was a joke (until I looked at a map). Zmutt is tiny village (about 20 slate-roof houses) perched about 1,000 feet above Zermatt. We hiked the Zmuttweg, a gravel bridal path up the valley to the village (5). 

We stopped at a Café in Zmutt (6) for a drink and to enjoy the spectacular scenery. We returned via the Eidelweissweg, a narrower,  more traditional mountain trail higher on the side of the valley. We enjoyed the flowers in the Alpine fields (7), heard cow bells clanging (8), and watched a marmot scurry about as we passed. The trail passes the oldest barn in Europe, dating to 1291 (9). As we descended to Zermatt, we heard the church bells in town chiming the 7:00 hour. About 6 miles and 1,100 foot vertical rise.

(1) The line was completed in 1908 and facilitated the 1924 Winter Olympics at Chamonix.

(2) The train sets are jointly owned by the French and Swiss Railways, but operated separately, at least at this time of year. 

(3) I tried to figure out the pattern. The third rail always seemed to be used with the cogs, but some non-cog sections also had a third rail. The train driver has a lot to pay attention to with different power sources and cog and adhesion sections of the line (a).

(a) I noticed trackside signs guiding the driver, with white circles for cog operation and a yellow diamond with a black bar through the middle signalling the end of overhead power.

(4) "How unSwiss," the hotel clerk said. 

(5) About halfway up, I sensed my blood sugar falling, so I plopped down on the side of the path for a snack I keep with me for such occassions. A friendly hiker stopped to ask if I were OK. I explained and she kindly offered me a snack, which she keeps with her for the same reason (b).

(b) Because of our late arrival in Zermatt, our lunch was limited to a bowl of yogurt.

(6) While the village traditionally housed cattle and sheep farmers, about 1/2 the houses now seem to be Cafés catering to day hikers.

(7) Apparently none of the flowers we saw were edelweiss. A guy at the hotel told us later that eidelweiss are rare and illegal to pick

(8) In the final movement of Mahler's 7th symphony, written while the composer was in the Austrian Alps, the percussion section plays an instrument that does sound like Alpine cow bells.

(9) I don't know who keeps track of these things or how they are sure no barn is older.

The Mont Blanc Express

View through the high windows 

Why it's called the Mont Blanc Express

Descending into Switzerland

Swiss village on valley side

Sign for cog engagement

Track about to end?

Valley of the Upper Rhone

On the train ascent to Zermatt

Milky green water from Glacier melt

Zmuttweg, the trail up to Zmutt

Views from the edelweissweg on the descent

On the Eidelweissweg

Marmot in the field