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The Grand Tour of Switzerland
At a shade over 1,000 miles with 650 road signs to guide you, the ‘Grand Tour of Switzerland’ offers a curated route around the Confoederatio Helvetica, (the CH abbreviation on Swiss number plates), and its 26 cantons.
I chanced across it when I saw one of these road signs - a striking red shield depicting a winding road - on the grimy outskirts of a town near Konstanz, returning from Austria in February 2020, and was intrigued. The Swiss Tourism board’s glossy website promised 46 top attractions, including 22 lakes, five Alpine passes, 13 UNESCO World Heritage sites and suggested around eight days to make the trip. In other words, perfect for a tour later in the year and an ideal way of discovering a country I’ve visited numerous times but know very little about, other than the usual tropes of chocolate, time-keeping, banking secrecy and Roger Federer.
Other stereotypes include an obsession with cleanliness. Combine this with remaining steadfastly outside the EU while being slap-bang in the middle of the continent, meant Switzerland was one of the last countries to open up after the pandemic lockdown that took grip a week after I returned from Austria.
So, two years later and with unrealistic expectations in tow, we shoot across France for an overnight stop in Besancón. Next day, we puncture the irregular bubble that makes up the route in Neuchâtel, perched on the lake of the same name. The route first takes us through Gstaad, a town synonymous with sybaritic, tacky, Eurotrash excess but otherwise unassuming. Only the juxtaposition of every luxury brand known to man in quaint little chalet-like shops is an indication that this is no backwater, but where serious money goes for R&R.
In the very heart of Switzerland lies the Jungfrau region or Bernese Oberland. The nearest notable town is Interlaken, sandwiched between Thunersee and Brienzersee. It’s a lot more buzzing than I remembered from thirty years ago, on a train journey of three ever-decreasing size trains from Zurich to Wengen. The staff - and the old chap particularly - at the Hotel Rössli, the only halfway affordable place to stay, are welcoming beyond expectations.
En route to dinner, we stop in at the Altes Hüssi, a craft ale pub with excellent beers and buzzing with young locals and walkers/campers alike, BO from this later group wafting across the outside bar, mixed with the fug of tobacco smoke. Parodically expensive pizzas on the terrace at Sapori, the casual restaurant of the Victoria Hotel, are more than compensated by the view of the sun setting on the Jungfrau glacier. It’s weepingly beautiful and my iPhone photograph can’t do the scale and spectacle justice.
We are staying two nights in Interlaken and had toyed with taking the train to the top of the Jungfrau. Opened in 1912, this impressive feat of engineering cuts its way from Kleine Scheidigg through the north face of the Eiger - the Nordwand - to the Jungfraujoch summit. But three weeks out, the weather forecast is looking decidedly dodgy and the prospect of a five-hour return journey, only to stare out at cloud at the top, starved of oxygen and £200 poorer does not really appeal, so we decide instead on a trip up the Schilthorn instead to ‘Piz Gloria’.
This is the fictional, mountain peak home of Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp in Ian Fleming’s 1963, James Bond novel 'On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. It famously appeared in the 1969 film adaptation of the same name. You can buy a lunch-inclusive ticket so at least you get fed if it's covered in cloud by the time you navigate the three cable cars required to get there. We were lucky and the weather held out long enough to take in the views of the Eiger, Jungfrau & Mönch (Oger, Virgin & Monk) before freezing rain closes in. A novelty buffet lunch in the revolving restaurant follows before wandering around the extensive visitor centre, dedicated to the fifty-three-year-old film. We descend to Mürren where early summer has returned.
The Hotel Alpenblick in the pretty village of Wilderswil boasts a diminutive Michelin-starred restaurant and is Swiss perfection bordering on cliche. The restaurant is warm, welcoming, and very unstuffy; the food is traditional and superb. Yvonne Stöckli, who runs the Alpenblick along with her husband Richard, is a charming and helpful guide around the wine list, recommending one that was particularly memorable: a 2015 Paien by Simon Maye from Chamoson in the neighbouring canton of Valais. Let me know if you can find it online to buy as I can’t…
The following day is a circuitous route, north to Berne and then eastish to Luzern. It was all very pleasant, apart from angry Saturday morning traffic around Berne that makes weekday inner London look like an oasis of calm and civility. But I really can’t recall too much about the journey, other than it never seemed to get going: small, undistinguished towns every few miles and the overwhelming sensation of not going or getting anywhere.
I have developed a technique for whiling away the tedium of long motorway journeys: making up abusive, three-letter acronyms to describe other road-users. CIV’s, LMT’s and BAM’s are all examples I consider particularly apposite, but sadly can’t be expanded on in a refined and liberal organ such as this journal. The historic Rathaus bar, on the banks of the Reuss in Luzern’s old town, spawned a new one in the form of the ‘AYT’: Aryan Yuppie Tosser.
It was rammed with them: smug privileged thirty-something blokes, all taking out of their arschlöchers, no doubt doing something fascinating in the labyrinthine financial services industry that supports most of the region. One particularly irritating example had the volume turned all the way up to 11 and was enough for us to ask to be moved to a table some distance away. We sat with a genteel, older couple who winced visibly every time Rolf, Jurgen or whoever started honking off again in guttural German.
A sparkly Sunday morning starts well enough, but an incident has closed the ferry at Vitznau across Vierwaldstättersee, so steps are retraced amidst irritable traffic. The alternative route around Zugersee is forgettable as is picking my way through the canton of Zurich towards St. Gallen as the weather gets steadily worse.
Ah well… Despite being sodden and frozen, I’m looking forward to luxuriating in a hot shower before a sumptuous Gasthaus meal. I’d specifically picked a hotel in Wildhaus with a restaurant open on Sunday, given what an issue getting fed on a Sunday in continental Europe has become. The only problem? It isn’t really a hotel and isn’t really a restaurant although the landlady did grudgingly agree to cook us something, providing we ate at 18:00. And so we did, surrounded by persistent flies that we could smell sizzling on the electric trap as we enjoyed our Findus Crispy Pancakes or whatever. We then got the full raised eye-brow treatment from our hostess when we asked if we could finish the bottle of wine in our room. I’d tell you what the place was called but they don’t take credit cards either and I’ve scrubbed the entire sorry episode from my memory, so piecing together the past from card statements is not an option.
This practice of hotels taking bookings, and then not providing the service they have promised, is becoming all too common. Last month in Portugal, a Michelin-rated hotel told us sweetly the bar was not open on the night we stayed and while we could have a beer, wine or cocktails were a no-no, a gin & tonic now apparently elevated to cocktail status. Poor show. And this, after they cancelled our dinner reservation in their one-starred restaurant two weeks prior when it was too late to find anywhere else decent… Whenever this happens, the bill is always exactly as advertised though…
Beating a hasty retreat from an area more like Albania (and I speak from experience), there’s a short, pointless tour of dreary Lichenstein before pointing towards Davos, the epic Fluelastrasse and then Saint-Moritz. The stunning route ‘3’ through Bivia is next, followed by an hour of fast, flowing motorway towards Bellinzona.
By the sounds of it, Bellizona should be in Italy and when compounded by the hordes of feral youths buzzing around on poxy scooters, the tinny, shite pop music in the local McDonalds where it took 20 minutes to buy two bottles of water; the hotel we had booked into (a place to sleep but not a hotel as we know it, Jim) opening two hours later than advertised, certainly fitted the mould. But only the comedically high prices and slightly above-average grub later reminded us that we are, indeed, still in Switzerland.
But after a quick blast north up the motorway the morning after and the magnificent Gotthard Pass, this minor disappointment fades. We stop at the summit for a quick lunch and a brief and very tasteful glimpse of the future. A bloke in bespoke leathers slings a leg over a sports bike that is (almost) a match for looks with an MV Agusta F4 750S and paddles it effortlessly backwards before taking off at an alarming rate without making a sound. I later find out it was an electric Energica EGO+ RS…
Assuming he hadn’t skimped on the extras, this is a thirty-five-grand toy. Not real-world stuff yet, maybe, but the first one of these things I really want to own. Looking at my K1600 GT, I wonder if BMW are toying with the idea of using the considerable scale and bodywork of this model to conceal the necessary gubbins to make an all-electric super-tourer. I accept that the DNA of the GS and RT dictate they can never be anything but petrol-fired, horizontal-twins, in the same way that Porsche has stated the 911 will NEVER be electric. But the design principles of the K-series have always been more fluid and should/would/could accommodate the paradigm shift to electric without ruffling too many feathers or grey-beards.
A final night in Neuchâtel is as comfortable and unremarkable as most of the previous six days but the best has indeed been saved until last.
The fading moments of the Grand Tour through the Parc du Doubs has it all: scenery, altitude, bends, solitude, immaculate surfaces and all of this a tantalising one-day ride from the channel ports. Like the Vosges, Alsace-Lorraine and Ardennes that were our route back, all of these regions are readily accessible from the UK, worth serious exploration in their own right, and are so much more than places to flash through on the way to the Alps.
The principal issue with the Grand Tour of Switzerland is a lack of expectation control on the part of the Swiss Tourist Authority. The best bits are stupendous and many readers will be familiar with the famous roads already and the other-worldly beauty of the Jungfrau region. But the conjoining tissue that makes up the rest really isn’t worth the effort, with the exception of the Jura which is a hidden treasure. For the most part, it doesn’t surprise and delight when off the beaten track in the way that pretty much every other region in Europe manages.
Give me fifteen minutes on Garmin Basecamp and I could cobble together a thousand miles in Northern Spain on better roads, less traffic and much better food before we even get to the thorny issue of value for money…
I realise the exorbitant cost of Switzerland has been exacerbated by the various, increasingly chaotic governments we have somehow ended up with, and the inevitable impact on the exchange rate. But even with a 20% improvement between Sterling and the Swissie that’s not going to happen anytime soon, the Grand Tour of Switzerland doesn’t really warrant a recommendation. As a place to pass through for a couple of days while you marvel at the cleanliness and efficiency of it all, Switzerland is just fine. And if you’re loaded and like welcoming, traditional hotels for skiing in the winter and walking in the spring before heading to Cap D’Antibes for the empty summer months, it remains just about perfect.
In a scene from Orson Welles’ ‘The Third Man’ the villainously charming Harry Lime remarks: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
And that’s the lasting impression of Switzerland; resting on its laurels. It might well be always at the top or near the top of the ‘Best Places in the World to Live’ lists but it just doesn’t generate enough passion or excitement for me. And as a 59-year old, first-time grandfather, I never thought I would type those words.