The planning was to visit Switzerland for about a week so quite a bit of time was spent (mostly by Julia to be fair) on figuring out what to do and where to go. We were helped by a long email from Julian, a Swiss guy who lives in Colombia and who we met on the Carretera Austral in Chile with his wife. He is from the Gruyeres region, so we decided to at least go there and follow up on his tips. We also wanted to go to the Alps of course and Grindelwald seemed to be a scenic place. However we started off with a city; Lucerne. 

Lucerne is an old city in central Switzerland in a beautiful spot, on a lake and surrounded by mountains. We arrived on the campsite in the afternoon and it appeared to be not so busy. We were assigned a tiny piece of grass and went about setting up our tent. It was a hot day so a dive in the lake was tempting. There was a commercial beachy area right across the campsite, but we chose to go for a free piece of lake, where we mixed with the dogs. When we came back, we realised the campsite was filling up rapidly and we were going to be very close quarters with a lot of people, the perk of city fringe camping!

At night we followed the parks and pedestrian areas around the lake to the city centre. We had a coffee on a terrace looking out over the lake and heard live music, so caught the last couple songs of that. In the dark we discovered that Lucerne is a very nice city with a beautiful fully restored old centre, highlight being the Chapel Bridge from 1333, which did burn partially down but was rebuilt to its old glory. We had an outside drink and returned to the campsite reasonable late, hoping that rest would have returned, only to find out that right across from the campsite was a private open air disco which kept going till 5am, not much sleep was had.

Our second day started with rain, lots of rain, so we took shelter in the tent for a while and then went to the Imax to see a Meerkat movie. We like Meerkats but this was a bit of a fail as we had to wait in a long queue to buy tickets and then the person handing out the glasses was not at the entrance anymore. Eventually when we had glasses we saw 30 minutes of bad quality 3D movie for 15 euros/24 NZD a person, we felt pretty stupid for going there… The level of pricing was an ongoing issue, Switzerland is so unreasonably expensive! Two cokes and one fries with mayo, that’s 15 euro’s please! Campsites were also double the price of Austria or France.

As the weather kept being pretty poor and we wanted to have some warm inside time we decided to give the movies another go and went to see ‘Trance’, just because it was playing when we had finished dinner. It turned out to be a pretty interesting movie and kept us out of the weather for a couple hours!

After two nights of Lucerne we were keen as beans to leave the campsite behind, but happily would have spent more time in Lucerne itself. We packed up and drove to Grindelwald, where we found a small campsite with lots of space, score! There was also an inside room to shelter from the ongoing rain and to do your cooking. We got to know the other campers quite well and had a couple social nights hanging out with Dutch Peter and his son Jona of five years old who had been hiking and freedom camping in the mountains. We were quite impressed with the stamina and attitude of Jona, great kid. We also met a British family with two funny daughters, all of us filling up the bad weather room quite nicely.

The weather really impacted our stay in Grindelwald a lot. We explored the town a bit, sampling some local food from the market and watching a group of men marching with big cow bells, which was all interesting. But the reason we had come was to hike in the mountains. We did catch the cable lift up as it looked like the weather was improving, but when we got high up the cloud descended on us and we didn’t get to see much of the mountain tops. The country also looked more bare and less varied than what we saw in Austria. We finished a reasonable long hike, but regretted it a bit as the public transport (lift and two stops on the train) cost us about 70 euros…

Hoping for better weather at our final Swiss stop, we moved on to Gruyeres with a nice list of tips from Julian. The town had two campsites, but both of them looked pretty nasty, so we chose the least nasty one (or so we thought….). As it was pouring down again we went to the Baths at Charmey, which was great on a wet cold day. We tried all the different inside and outside baths and spent a lot of time in the various saunas. Funny thing was that the cold bath didn’t seem so bad to us, nothing seems to be ever colder than swimming in the Tararuas (or sea in Wellington for that matter)! Afterwards we went to the historic town of Gruyeres on the top of a hill to eat what Gruyeres is famous for; cheese. We found a nice restaurant with views over the ancient city walls and into the country side. We shared a cheese fondue and raclette. Both of us had this for the first time and it was a nice experience. You get potatoes, bread, gherkins and little pickled onions to dip in the cheese and eat. The raclette is a piece of cheese with a heating element above it that melts the cheese so you can scrape off the melted cheese onto your plate bit by bit. We were quite cheesed up after all this!

 

Our second day started with another famous ‘food’. Gruyeres is home to the Cailler Chocolate Factory, the oldest and one of the best chocolates in the world and they do factory tours and tastings. I’ve never seen a tour carried out with such efficiency. We paid on the till and were placed in an English group. There are monitors which tell you how many minutes left before your group is supposed to ‘check in’ and leave on a tour. Every three minutes a tour with a maximum of twenty people is leaving. The amount of people visiting the factory is crazy, but due to the good system, it works surprisingly well. The tour is fully automated, you move from room to room with automatic opening and closing doors and then hear and see the story for that room. Towards the end you can sample the raw products and see the production process. The final room is the tasting room! The most important thing and how classy was that room! We both ate a small fortune of chocolates before someone rolled us out of the room. Needless to say lunch was skipped this afternoon.

The rest of the day was spent in the old Gruyeres town. We loved hanging around here, cobblestone streets, the cutest buildings with flowers and nice colours everywhere. The two things we mostly wanted to do was visit the H.R. Geiger museum and the castle. We started with the Giger café, opposite the museum. The whole café was Giger’s Alien style, spines and baby heads galore! We then crossed to the Giger museum, which had a large amount of his work. It’s not for everyone as some of it is quite explicit or disturbing, but the detail and technique are brilliant. Quite the contrast to then move onto the castle that was built in the second  half of the 13^th century. It’s a great castle which you can explore with a self-guided tour. We took quite a few hours exploring it.

Keen to move on to a warmer, dryer and cheaper region, we left for France the next day!