A ‘minor’ detour via Switzerland

Sunday morning!

Yep, we’re still in Provénce… This isn’t a dream…

But it’s time to hit the road again…

It’s about 9 am and the beautiful weather of the last couple of days has turned. Dark clouds loom beyond the hills and there’s that smell of rain in the air.

The breeze has become stronger and the dry leaves are being blown about. It’s getting more overcast, although it remains warm and dry at the moment. This doesn’t stop us from having tea under the shade in the garden and soak up a last bit of Provencál atmosphere…

It’s time to go though…

There’s 700 km’s ahead of us and we want to get there before dark. The plan is to make a ‘slight’ detour towards Switzerland. After all we’re in the area (ie: Europe south of Paris)…

The roads are still going to be busy as ever and we have no idea what to expect from the traffic… After a quick goodbye we settle into the car and key in the TomTom.

The fastest route on offer is naturally on the ‘Peage’ and a cross-check on our roadmap atlas by the ‘Senior Navigator’ (sterling job every time) confirms a huge loop down towards Marseilles and up again to Lyon after which we’ll swing right towards Genevé.

You guessed it: Route du Soleil again…

We start off by heading through the town square of Cotignac where (appropriately) a massive antique market is in full swing – think: carboot sale but everything is original and at least 300 years old! Or looks that way… I wonder if that old leather lounger would fit into the back of the car?

We get onto the highway and join in the masses heading the other way. Back north towards home. Slow going and hold-ups where three lanes converge into two, and inevitably at the tollbooths.

A thought goes through my mind as we sit waiting in the middle of nowhere: if it weren’t for the fact that the french government was intent on milking every possible franc/ euro from the good citizens of olde europe, we would have BEEN there by now instead of in a series of queues half a kilometre long waiting for someone at the front to get his credit card out of the bag at the bottom of a pile in the boot! Ah, the great pleasures of travel…!

We pass Aix-de-Provence and a mountain that inspired a new wave of painters to explore their art within the geometrical context of the french countryside.

We put our berets on (mentally) and try to imagine what they would have seen all those years ago. Surely not at great speed on the highway? Probably on a donkey or maybe even a bicycle. Imagine carting all your paint around with you everyday? And an easle?

The rolling hills go on and on….

After a while all you see are caravans, campers, trailers and roofboxes. Impossibly loaded cars struggling up the road filled with bags, pillows, packets of stuff, boxes, suitcases and all the other little things that we seemingly cannot do without for a couple of weeks at the coast.

It reminded me of the Great Trek in South Africa where the cars were ox wagons and a span of oxen dragged you and your family and all your possesions over the mountains to the ‘promised’ land beckoning beyond…

A lot has changed since then and right now what was beckoning us was the Swiss Alps….

Half a day later we arrive suddenly at the Swiss border.

A couple of men in uniforms pull us aside and our wallet becomes € 29,00 lighter. Moving off again we stick the vignette on the windscreen above last years’. Welcome to Switzerland (frightfully expensive for those unprepared…). We stick to the plan and follow the TomTom routing on the highways. Our schedule is once again “out-the-window” Thanks to the traffic! But naturally in the Alps, even the highway is beautiful.

It is still drizzling a bit and the view of the mountains is partially obscured but the dramatic, sweeping, rolling hills get steeper and we pass through more and more tunnels that get longer and longer…

Incredible….

Enormous viaducts and massive roads that have been hewn out of the rock and seem suspended against the mountainside. The engineering is awe inspiring, winding tunnels that curve through the rock and dramatic views as you exit with a steep cliff to one side and a steep drop off on the other…

Our destination is a town called Lauterbrunnen, a small town near Interlaken.

It isn’t in our TomTom memory (old map) but we recall having been there before last year in another lightning visit on the way to Italy (but that’s another story…). After a major wrong turn and a couple km’s up the wrong valley (sorry honey… my memory is a bit vague these days..) I defer to the “Holder-of-the-Map and Therefore-in-Charge”…

We head back out the other side of Interlaken and up a two-lane road flanked by a river. Our instructions are quite simple: Campsite (the lower one…)

And that’s it! Alrighty then…

I put my faith in my Navigator and we get to the town station and follow the main road (the only road). The mountains loom overhead as we pass a cableway and the quaint houses and hotels. There are a lot of hikers and bikers and the restaurants are flying the little swiss flags to attract customers. The buildings are mostly of wood and the setting seems like something out of as postcard. Out the other end we head for the campsite (not the upper one..) and manage to get a tent spot for the night.

In the top-field we finally meet our cousins who have been there a week already.

It is an idyllic patch of grass. A couple of other tents, a 4×4 and a small VW camper and that’s it! This is the way WE-like-to-camp”.

Not the crammed version with row upon row of mobile homes barely a metre apart or a thousand tents on a space made for five hundred, tripping over ropes and screaming kids, screaming adults, strange smells and stranger conversations from the fourth tent down over there…

Nature? What nature?

This spot is perfect. Quiet and fresh. A slight slope so sleeping will be a bit of a challenge, but the view…. Steep cliffs on both sides and in the distance the valley stretches to some high peaks with some snow. The chalets are out of a brochure built on the slopes up the moutainside. Swiss flags everywhere, even on the side of the cliff next to the waterfall two hundred metres up. How did they get that there? The grass is green and wet and in the drizzle we decide to make camp.

Now… setting up a tent in the twilight can be tricky to get it taut and waterproof. But if it is already raining then it becomes a bit of a laugh.

Trying to keep the dry stuff, er… dry, is… difficult… Priority one is managing to keep the pillows free of humidity. I think we somehow get the sleeping bags in without too much dampness. After a hectic twenty minutes our camp is set and we can settle down for a well earned beer…

Our ‘hosts’ have cooked a meal for us on the gas and we are entertained by their accounts of journeying up the Jungfrau mountain to the ‘top-of-Europe’. This is on our to-do list next time around. Apparently awesome views of the whole Alpine region from up there, even Mont Blanc. Long walking trails in the snow and over glaciers… We are already impressed even by the searchlights lighting up the waterfall in the fading light. Surreal as the moonlight casts a glow through the valley as the clouds clear a little. We sleep well that night with the sound of the water in the background.

The next morning we awake… to overcast skies. Drizzle is in the air as we take some tea and toast off the gasfire standing on wet grass. Somehow it seems to fit the mood as we then roll up our wet tent and throw it in the car. No time to waste as we have another 900 km’s to get home.

A hasty tactical meeting decides on us taking the B-roads all the way to the autobahn in Germany.

This turns out to be a good move because we end up in some stunning little roads. Not much traffic and only some farmhouses dotted about. Very much off-the-beate-track and some beautiful views!

It seems that Switzerland is a land of mountains and valleys. Awesome countryside. The lake we pass first-off is incredible as the road winds along almost at water-level. A clear almost-luminous blue-green colour…

Near the cities it becomes busier as we remind ourselves that it is a Monday and a workday for everyone else in the country…

The swiss are, it seems, never in much of a hurry. The speed limit is rather low and most adhere to it strictly. Pretty relaxing if you don’t have a punishing schedule!

We pass tractors laden with haybales, ancient farmyards and huge barns with their overhanging roofs. All made of wood and with some rather intricate woodwork and carvings for something so utilitarian…. Some towns have incredible modern buildings and flats with centuries old houses next door. People emerge from the chalets causing us to think: ‘yes it IS real and not a photo. It is all very clean and tidy everywhere. In stark contrast to the ‘shabby-chic’ that the french do so well… We are quite content to amble along in the half-drizzle but all too soon the border has once-again appeared and we cross into Germany.

Land of the autobahn!

We attempt to gain some time but the speed is restricted for the first hundred-or-so km’s.

It is also nearly as busy as the French side. Holiday makers – also returning from Italy – and farther afield. As we stop to refuel – both our trusty steed as well as ourselves – we remark that the German countryside, as seen from the highway, is rather a lot more boring than everything else we had seen that weekend.

Naturally these roads were built for rapid movement of men and materials and we return to do battle with our fellow motorists to claim a piece of tarmac…

Luckily the pace “hots-up” a bit and soon averages over 160km’s. Any faster and the traffic becomes unpredictable.

It seems that ‘pulling-out-into-the-fastlane’ is interpretted in German as ‘yank the wheel as hard and as quick as you can to change direction with no warning whatsoever…’

You can fill in the rest – expletives optional!

Extremely frustrating and at times incredibly dangerous. Either a deliberate tactic to hound the foreigners or some kind of game to stave off the boredom or they really don’t have a clue. If it wasn’t so blatant and prevalent then it would have hardly received a mention.

And then we hit the Ruhr-gebiet. Talk about busy…

Due to our ‘exploration’ of Switzerland we had managed to arrive in the middle of…RUSHHOUR!. Those one-hundred km’s took about two hours to navigate. A comical tortoise-and-hare exercise with stalled traffic for a few kilometres followed by a dash at high speed to the next interchange with more jams. This carried on for a long time…

A really long time….

Once past exit “number nine” though (according to my navigator) the worst would be behind us. So we were able to light up the “burners” and clip the last hundred to the border in a high speed burst with hardly any traffic. Terrific! And somehow it almost seemed to relieve the endless waiting in the traffic jams along the way…

Almost…

Getting into Holland again felt as if we had been away for a month! The flatness of it all was unfamiliar after the huge vista’s we had encountered on the way to and from the south.

Also very welcoming getting back to our town! This sort of reaffirmed why we love Holland as well despite it being , literally, as flat as the proverbial pancake. No, really, it is!

A lot of the countries we have seen in Europe have hills and sometimes huge mountains. Long valleys, winding roads that snake into the distance, steep mountain passes, narrow country tracks leading up to a lookout point. Awesome views over a mountain lake or down on to the seaside from a cliff…

Not here though…

And that’s how simple it is! We always enjoy these simple things, like a hillside that you wouldn’t have noticed if you saw it everyday. It’s always an adventure, somehow, to discover landscapes that we don’t have here at all.

But what we DO have is big sky. BIG sky! Just ask any of the old dutch master painters….