Switzerland is expensive. Really, really expensive. Krug Clos d’Ambonnay expensive. And, because of this, we were planning to conduct a token visit to Interlaken, before moving straight onto France. However, because the staff of La Primula was so busy imposing curfew, undertaking arduous five hour lunch breaks and having fun being nice, they failed to find any time to fix their Internet over the duration of our stay and we had no idea how we were going to get there.
We checked out of Hippy Central and made two stops: the tourist information centre and a café which offered 30 minutes free Wifi with every beverage purchased. The lady at the tourist information centre obviously subscribed to the Primula Art Corner’s way of living; seemingly deriving a great deal of pleasure from being lovely, she informed us that it would be much cheaper to catch a bus across the border directly from Menaggio to Lugano, and then catch a train to Interlaken from there. This would also allow us to avoid another Mad Hatter’s Tea Party-style bus trip back to Como, not to mention the probable arrest which would result from another of Kaitlyn’s xenophobic monologues. With bus tickets purchased, our second task was to find some accommodation, as the idea of arriving in Interlaken in the evening with nowhere booked was as appealing as La Primula’s “tea”. Fortunately, within minutes, we found and booked an inexpensive hostel, leaving us 20-odd minutes of free WiFi to catch up on three missed days of Facebooking, Tweeting and Instagraming. The hot chocolate was lovely and I enjoyed it immensely but, had I known then it was going to be the last edible thing I was to encounter for roughly 24 hours, I would have licked the remnants directly from the hideously tacky waffle-cone glass it was served in.
The bus stop was right opposite Piazza Garibaldi, which meant we didn’t have to hike our bags and shell more than twenty metres. Long trips usually mean a chance for me to update this blog so I can regale you all with engaging tales of our travels. However, that morning, I had woken up feeling marginally more poorly than I had the previous day and, by the time the bus pulled up next to us, all I wanted to do was sit down and spend the ninety minute trip doing nothing. With my shell unceremoniously dropped and pushed under my seat, I set my iPhone to “shuffle”, zipped it up in my bag and slumped down in my seat to enjoy the ride. It was four minutes and 27 seconds later when I became cognisant of my error. Before leaving Australia, I had filled up my phone with 4, 371 songs, all carefully selected to ensure I had an eclectic array of tracks to perfectly accompany every disposition or occasion which could possibly transpire. Amongst these 4,371 songs were the twelve tracks from Adele’s album 21, including the infamous “Someone Like You”. I am of the opinion “Someone Like You” is a spine-tinglingly brilliant song, but it appeared all of Europe shared this belief and we had heard it almost as many time as “Party Rock Anthem” since we had arrived on the continent. We had even heard (and danced to) a dub-step version of it in a club somewhere. So when the first track to start playing on my phone was “Someone Like You”, I sighed heavily, but let it play. Four minutes and 27 seconds later, it started playing again. Apparently, I had accidently set my phone to repeat. I realised that,
in theory, all I needed to do in order to rectify this situation was to un-slump, get my phone out of my bag, unlock it and change the track. But, at that moment, I was feeling much the way I imagine Charlie Sheen would feel the day after banging seven gram rocks were he not a warlock comprised of Adonis DNA and Tiger Blood – moving from my comfortable position was not an option. And so it went on. I didn’t keep count at the time, but my mad maths skillz conclude I listened to that song 21 times in a row.
By the time we were stepping off the bus in Lugano, I was thoroughly miserable and had concluded that, seeing as agony is the bedfellow of love, love is simply not worth it at all. Thanks, Adele. Although I was feeling emotionally wretched, it was nothing compared to how I was feeling physically. I felt the way Adele will feel if her ex’s current wife gets her alone in a room with a machete. We asked the bus driver if he knew where the train station was and he pointed down the road behind him. We started walking down the road…and we kept walking down the road…and there was no train station. We may have crossed the border, but it appeared that Italian-speaking Swiss had the same approach to direction-giving as Italians: we have no idea, but we’ll point in a random direction and make it look like we do. We walked around in circles for days, eventually stumbling on a couple who spoke enough French for us to ascertain which direction the station was in. When the gentleman mentioned “la montagne”, I assumed his French was a little rusty, or
he liked to exaggerate as much as I do. I soon discovered that his French was in no way oxidized, and we indeed had to travel up a mountain.
Stazione di Lugano is situated on a very steep hillside, high above the city. While I imagine a person could walk up to the station, there is a funicular which travels between there and the city centre. Of course, we had no Swiss money on us, but there was an ATM right opposite. We requested the smallest possible denominations, but the sadistic ATM still spat-out 100 CHF notes. (The Swiss Franc is roughly on a par with the Australian Dollar…only 1 CHF buys you what $100,000 would buy you in Australia.) I realised it was a long-shot, but we took our money over to the funicular attendant. He took one look at my 100 CHF note and laughed in my face, a demonic cackle terrifyingly similar to Vincent Price at the end of “Thriller”. It was a Sunday, and nothing is open in Switzerland on Sundays, so we couldn’t exactly pop into a supermarket and buy some bread and water to break our notes. We braved a very nice looking hotel and, although the guy maintained an expression of constipated disgust throughout the entire transaction, we had one note swapped over for smaller notes and Vincent was forced to provide us a lift up the hill in the funicular.
When we arrived at the station, we made our way to the ticket counter only to discover that the train we needed to catch was leaving in four minutes from a
platform far, far away. It wasn’t actually that far, but with all of our stuff it felt like we would have to travel across countless galaxies to get there. I didn’t fancy our chances as, at this point, I felt so rotten I couldn’t even muster-up the energy to get my shell on my back. To this day, I am still not sure how she did it, but Kaitlyn swung her pack onto her back, picked up mine and started running with them both. I don’t know whether she’d been popping ‘roids when I wasn’t looking, but without her impressive feat of super-human strength, I am not sure we would have made it to the train before it took off.
For reasons I am not entirely sure of, the route we took involved taking the first train to Zurich and swapping to a second train there which took us to Interlaken. If you are unfamiliar with the geography of Switzerland, this is similar to travelling from Melbourne to Bendigo via Shepparton. If you are unfamiliar with the geography of Victoria, it’s just really stupid. But this is what our tickets dictated we must do, so travel to Zurich we did. I measure my sickness by hunger and, even though there were moments when I could feel my body giving in, they were outnumbered by the moments where I wanted food. Of course, with the frantic train-dash we had to make, we had no opportunity to source edible reinforcements for the journey. We had nothing except a dozen blocks of 39 cent Italian chocolate which, while tasty and of excellent value, weren’t food. The gods were obviously in cohorts with the lady sitting opposite us, who
seemed to take great pleasure in feeding her young child a delicious looking gourmet sandwich and he took even greater pleasure in spitting 80% of it onto the floor. That impious infant looked me right in the eyes as he expelled every bit of that sandwich onto the ground, smiling at us like Wednesday Addams when he’d finished. When we got to Zurich, we only had minutes to swap trains and, as day turned to night and our chocolate supply dwindled, I was starting to worry Kaitlyn might go Hannibal Lecter on me. I obviously was ill because by this point, I wasn’t even hungry. I know, right?!
It was about 8.30pm when we disembarked the train at Interlaken Ost, the one of the town’s two train stations which wasn’t fifty metres walk to our hostel’s front door. We had walking directions which stated it was twenty minutes by foot, but it was dark and I was dying, so I used my shell to forcibly ram into (and maybe knock over) the people heading over towards the lone taxi parked outside. I shoved the address of the hostel into the driver’s face, offered to bear his children if he’d take us there and, just like that, we were at the Lazy Falken Hostel. When we walked inside, it smelled quite strongly of pot, the guy running the place so completely redolent of cannabis I was surprised to look up and not see Snoop Dogg standing there. I am not sure whether it was our dishevelled appearance, the THC, or a combination of both, but he took one look at us, removed my shell from my back, led us to our room and told us to not
worry about properly checking-in or paying until the morning. Nicest guy ever. The dorm we had booked was a five-person room, but we were the only ones in it. There were a set of bunk beds, but also a massive bed in the middle of the room which Kaitlyn and I chose to spoon in together - and we had free WiFi and our own bathroom! We crawled into bed and that was it.
When I woke up the next morning, I thought the end was near. I felt absolutely wretched and even the promise of freshly-baked bread barely provided enough of an incentive to get up. I don’t know whether it was because I was sick, but good Lord, it was freezing. I feel the cold so easily that I routinely wear a jumper in the middle of an Australian summer, so I really struggled that day. Interlaken is probably best known as a base-camp for adventure sports (or, as people apparently like to call them, EXTREME SPORTS): sky-diving, paragliding, bungee jumping, canoeing, skiing, hiking, etc. I’m sure you would agree no two people in the world scream “EXTREME SPORTS” more than Kaitlyn and I. As well as being a base for partaking in these activities, Interlaken is what I consider to be the most quintessentially Swiss town: mountains, lakes, fondue on every corner, cows with bells. Yes, it’s incredibly touristy, but scenery-wise, it’s one of the most breathtaking and spectacular places I have been to. Because we would have had to sell tissue and/or organs on the black market to be able to afford most official things, we spent the morning wandering around the town, perusing the plethora of souvenir shops in Höhenweg, the main street, deriding the posters of the various political campaigns plastered everywhere and trying to stave off frostbite.
One of the things which makes Interlaken so visually magnificent is that it is presided over by three mammoth, majestic mountains: the Eiger, Mönch and the Jungfrau. In the town itself is Interlaken’s “Home Mountain”, Harder Klum. Or, as I refer to it, Tick Mountain - the place which nearly killed me. A few years ago while in Interlaken, I embarked on a hike up this mountain. (I will give you all a moment to try and imagine me hiking. And another minute to enjoy that image. And we’re done.) The condensed version is this: on the hike a Lyme-infected tick took residence on my person, I got sick, then I got sicker, then I got really, really sick, then I nearly died. Fun times. And it all started on Tick Mountain. Neither Kaitlyn nor I were physically capable of walking up to the summit, but the first little look-out affords beautiful views of the town and Lake Thun, so we attempted that. It was really quite an odd experience for me to go back there. Because it was quite some time after being there that I even realised I was sick, I hadn’t even considered that I would make any associations between the mountain and what happened next, but I did. Fortunately, I didn’t instantly lose 13 kilos or develop any chronic pain, but I was momentarily overcome by a barrage of memories and emotions from being sick, and the life-altering shit-storm that ensued. Had I been healthy, I think I would have charged up the mountain in an attempt to break away from the existing entanglement which had suddenly materialised. And maybe belted out some "Destiny’s Child" to really stick-it to those menacing ticks below. As I was barely able to stand, I settled for taking a few moments to revisit my trauma and then crack a series of pathetic jokes such as imploring Kaitlyn to enjoy the sublime view, enquiring why she hadn’t complimented me on my attire, and asking her if we should sort out our next lot of train tickets before or after we sourced some breadsticks for lunch. My schtick got old pretty quickly.
By this point I was feeling so sick I actually had to go and lie down. I felt horrible because we only had one day in Interlaken, one day in Switzerland as a whole, and I didn’t want Kaitlyn to have to spend it getting passively high in the hostel watching me sleep, so I sent her off to sight-see alone while I passed out for a few hours. When she arrived back, I was momentarily horrified to discover she had run-into myfuturehusband, Roger Federer. It turned out to only be a life-sized cardboard version, but God knows we’ve successfully worked with less in the past. By this time it was getting quite late and, although I wasn’t hungry (!), food was necessary. The Lazy Falken had a kitchen, so we walked around to the supermarket to buy some supplies. Since we’d arrived, we hadn’t seen a single person in the hostel, even at breakfast that morning, so we were surprised to find the kitchen packed with people. And not just any people, people into EXTREME SPORTS. Kaitlyn and I were the only two females in the room and the only two people who weren’t trying to “out-extreme” each other. We had to sit there patiently and wait while they tried to out-do each other with various tales of near-paralysis, the words “radical”, “dude” and “adrenaline” used so many times I wanted to poke my eardrums out with a fork. One guy, who had deluded himself into thinking we were impressed with his extremeness, provided this insightful pearl: ‘I’m a self-reliant guy, you know.’
No, I don’t know.
‘I’m very independent and I’ve never really, you know, gotten into team sports.’
No, I don’t know and I don’t want to know.
‘But I’m still competitive, you know. And I am competing- I’m competing with myself.’
How profound.
After dinner, we escaped back to our room and decided to take advantage of having our own bathroom. As I was getting out of the shower, I realised I could hear voices, and deduced that we now had roomies. I hadn’t even taken a full step out of the bathroom, when I looked over at one of the newbies and said, ‘I know you.’
‘I know you too.’ We just kind of stared at each other for a minute. She was so familiar. American, I obviously didn’t know her from home, so we started to back-track through our respective trips and quickly established that we had both been in Salzburg. I looked at her again and realised that she had been standing behind us when we checked-in to Jufa. It was just really odd because her friend wasn’t at all familiar to me, nor I to her and Kaitlyn didn’t recognise either of them, nor did they find her familiar...and yet the two of us instantly recognised each other. The next morning the four of us had breakfast together and managed to establish that we had actually stayed in the same dorm in Salzburg - something we were able to determine by identifying the presence of Jufa Granny in our dorm. Katie and Lara were also hitting up Nice in the next week, so we made plans to try and meet-up and bid them farewell as they departed for the Jungfrau.
With one last inhale of cannabis-scented air, we headed off to Interlaken West to board our next train. France, here we come!
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