Monthly Archives: August 2007

Water jets, parks, physics labs…

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Geneva has them all and more. I’m going to rush through everything here as I don’t have much more time to add to the blog before I have to set off. A shame as there’s so much to tell! There are a few videos on my YouTube "MoshTour" player so go to my default channel to enjoy them all.

Delphine flew up from Nice on the Saturday and together we toured the city centre and surrounds. One of the major sights is the water jet in the "harbour". This thing fires water into the air at around 200kph and has been running for well over 100 years. Impressive stuff. Also around the lake, you can hire a myriad of different boats or sit on an artificial beach. The botanical gardens are rather nice with some animals in one corner, fish ponds, art displays, greenhouses and the like. On the way up there from the city is the History of Science museum which was great aside from the lack of signs in English. OK, so I’m in a French-speaking country, but it’s quite annoying when around 25% of the exhibits are marked in English and the rest aren’t. It’s also mainly a shame as it’s such a good place to visit with tons of things to see. There are other gardens on the south (or "old city") side of the lake which are also worth a visit. More like a park than a garden, really, but relaxing and with some lovely flower displays with views over the lake that the Botanical Gardens don’t have. Getting around Geneva is moderately cheap with 1-hour and all-day passes available across the bus, tram and trolley networks. Watch out for the ticket machines, though – they don’t give change. If you over pay for a ticket, you can save the little bit of paper (it has how much you overpaid printed on it) and get the money back from an office. Apparently. I never found one. An alternative is the free bike service. There are at least four "depots" where you can pick up a bike for a 20 Franc deposit and a copy of your ID. For four hours, the bike is free and can be returned to any of the drop-off points. After that, it starts at 1 Franc per hour, so still remarkably cheap. It’s even cheaper when you hire three and return them at different times and they give you the deposit back twice over… But, the coolest thing is that Geneva is home to the main offices of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. As well as being the headquarters for the largest nuclear accelerator on the planet (a 27-kilometre ring situated 100m underground and crossing into France for a fair part of that), it’s where Tim Berners-Lee drafted and tested the WWW. In fact, I’ve seen the first ever Web server, encased in glass in the Microcosm exhibition. And I am sad enough to admit that I was awestruck by a fairly crappy old PC. We went to CERN three times. The first on the Saturday as there is a free demonstration / lecture at 3pm once a week where a mad professor-like guy does stupid things with liquid nitrogen (like making ice cream which is scrummy). We didn’t get time to finish our walk around the Microcosm museum, so we went back on the Monday to finish it off. There is also a 3-hour daily tour around the facility, but it’s a different language each day and all the tours are booked up for 10 months in advance. We settled for buying geeky t-shirts and playing cards instead. That is, until Delphine invited a friend of hers over for fondue at it turned out over conversation that he works at CERN! More to the point, he could take visitors around… Not in the same capacity as the official tours, as he has to fit it around work, but all the same we leapt at the chance. Thomas was a great guide. We started off with lunch in the canteen (steak and beer!) before he took us to see the CMS Project, part of the enormous LHC ring. This thing is phenomenal, made up of parts weighing upwards of 800 tons each. These are all assembled and tested on the ground and then lowered through a tube into a chamber 100m down – the tube is barely 10cm wider than the parts themselves, so it’s precision work just getting the parts assembled underground. Our little trip was barely an hour, but definitely well worth the bus ride out (and Delphine almost missing her plane home). Just to feel the scale of the thing is something that can’t be achieved without standing right next to it. Well, as I said, Delphine flew back to Nice and I caught up with all this stuff while Daisy, my kind host, was out for the evening. The dogs kept me company as I watched us lose to Germany (on BBC1… in Switzerland!) and I finish typing this at 4am when I should be in bed! I think tomorrow will be a fairly short walk.

…and on to Geneva

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The next couple of days were more of a blur as I walked on single-personned. I strolled off west through Morges and Rolle, making it to the cute Nyon by the end of the 16th. Here I was to make another slight diversion to my plan, in a bid to provide variety and to add miles.

After a passable night’s sleep on my bedrolls, I checked out the boat times and just caught one at the last minute over to Yvoir on the south bank. This is on the little “peninsula” near Geneva that I was going to cut across further inland had I stuck to the original route. It’s also a stunningly beautiful little tourist trap (I swear every voice I heard was English) on the country/lakeside road to Geneva.

This is the road I followed, arriving in the city centre around 5:30. I had a couch waiting for me with a lovely lady called Daisy just outside the city somewhere so I used the tram and bus to get there.

Her house is way out of town with very little near it, but I wasn’t short of entertainment with 9 dogs to play with! Not to mention the guinea pigs, fluffy cat, chickens, ducks… There was another couchsurfer in residence as well, who arrived later in the evening and we had a great chat before we all headed to our beds.

Around Lausanne

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As I had company, I decided to stay an extra day in Lausanne and be a tourist. There’s not a tremendous amount to see (the self-guided tour on the free map takes around 20 minutes if you don’t stop to take too many photos) but it’s pleasant enough. The only real downside is that it’s built on probably the only hill in the entire area!

We walked the loop, saw the cathedral and some other old buildings and then headed for the beach… which turned out to be both artificial and expensive to get into. Instead, we wandered along the road a ways and I sunbathed while James sploshed into the lake.

Overall, a relaxing day and something I should do more often on the walk.

Plodding along Lake Geneva

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Not so smart… I seemed to be infested with bedbugs overnight, which was particularly annoying as I’d spent money on a hostel to ensure a good night’s sleep after the recent camping. Instead, I was up and around at 3am trying to find another bed to sleep up, covered in insect bites. Not good.

The breakfast, though, was superb and was “help yourself” so we did. A lot. We still managed to set off at 9:30 with Lausanne our target destination for the day. After conferring with one of the staff at the YHA we’d decided on the north shore as we were promised the view would be better. It’s also a longer distance than the south shore so would help me add more miles.

We had been well informed, and the view was indeed wonderful. Mountains over the lake to the south and vineyards to the north. Little railways ran through them for the picking machines (I assume) and every couple of hours we would pass through a delighful little town by the lakeside where we could park our bums for a while.

At one such place, I think possibly Villette, there was an exhibition of tableware at a local museum. We didn’t go, but instead just marvelled at the huge fork that was just jammed upright into the Lake to advertise it.

The weather was good – perhaps a little hot – and we were weary by the time we got to Lausanne (around 5:30) where we located a hostel and bought dinner from a supermarket.

Recruiting followers

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I’d been warned about the mountain roads round here so was tempted to get the bus up to where the old road began prior to the St Bernard Pass. Thing is, I’d been told the wrong bus stop so the thing thundered past me without so much as pausing.

I returned to the campsite to rethink my timetable and got talking to a young lad from London who’d pretty much exhausted his backpacking money and decided to try and get home for as little as possible. Well, what’s cheaper than walking? Together, we made it up to the old road and we split up, James intending to get a lift through the tunnel and on as far as he could go towards Geneva. I started hiking up the old road.

Half an hour or so later, a black VW Golf pulled up and James jumped out. It seems the roads ahead weren’t as adviseable to walk on as I’d been led to believe and the German driver insisted I accept a lift. Well, I don’t want to get knocked flying off a cliff so I agreed.

I’m glad I did. Our driver was a Schumacher wannabe and he wasn’t the only one on the road. There was no safe walking path except at th very rare picnic / viewing spots. In fact, there were no barriers of any kind and walking on the inside of the curves would have been tantamount to suicide as cars squealed round the turns.

I jumped out to take a couple of photos at the pass on the top before jumping back into the car for the equally hairy downhill section. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have got squished on that road, plus I’d have struggled at the bottom as there are two long tunnel sections I couldn’t have walked through.

Our driver was heading for Frankfurt and said he could take us as far as Montreux. James definitely wanted to get as far as he could and I was desparate for company after the lonely days in Italy, so I reluctantly decided I’d reroute elsewhere to gain some miles and skip Martigny.

In Montreux, we booked into a nice YHA which included breakfast in the price and popped out for a beer and a burger for dinner. It was great to have the company.