Today was the day of border crossings. We left Munich and headed south out of Germany into Austria, to Switzerland, into Liechtenstein, and then back into Switzerland. Of course these are just the crossings that we were aware of, we may have wandered in and out of various countries without knowing it, there is no way of telling these days, apart form the occasional disused border control checkpoint, and the colours of the flags in the villages that we pass through.
The south of Germany is a beautiful part of the country with a lot more pasture land than we have seen before. Dark fertile land, herds of cows, and lots of horses. The houses adopted a more Austrian feel the closer we got to the border, with huge barns for wintering their stock, and with the re-emergence of huge stacks of firewood, but without the artistic stacking ability displayed by the Austrians.
Our first stopover today was close to Germany’s border with Austria, it was the Schloss Neuschwanstein. This is the castle that was built by the rather lavish King Ludwig II. This is the castle that appears in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, numerous calendars, and also the castle that the Disneyland and Fantasyland castles are modeled on. It really is a picture perfect castle, out of every little girls dream. After walking the required 30 minutes up the hill to the castle, then along the track onto the swing bridge behind the castle for a better vantage point for photos, we found that that whole side of the castle was under wraps for renovation. That seems to be the way, almost every church and castle that we have seen during our travels has had a large portion obscured by scaffolding. It’s like they have suddenly decided throughout Europe that after a few thousand years that “Hey! It’s time we cleaned the old girl up.” But then I imagine that it must be an ongoing maintenance issue.
Our next stopover was Vaduz in Liechtenstein. This was a mere novelty visit really, just to see what a country that is 6 km wide by 25 km long, is really like. What we found was a country that seemed to fit in seamlessly with its Swiss neighbour, beautiful. Stunning landscape of pastoral lands, scattered with mountains, forests, alpine chalets. Vaduz, the capital, seemed from what we saw, quite a wealthy city, although a little trinkety. But that could be due to the procession of tour buses that stop for precisely 17 minutes for their passengers to disgorge, buy postcards and leave. Although we aren’t in a position to pass judgment as we didn’t do much more than that ourselves.
Now for some amusing trivia, the Liechtenstein army was disbanded in 1868, but not before they had marched off to war (the whole 80 of them). No one was killed in their little foray; in fact they returned with 81 men, they had found an Italian ‘friend’ along the way to join them. And up until 2005 they fed their cows hemp to make them more ‘chilled out’ and produce better milk. Hmmmm … better? How I wonder, and for whom.
From here it was on to Lucerne in Switzerland, our destination for the day. The last leg of our journey down through Switzerland, was much as you would expect with huge craggy mountains, but what we didn’t expect was the haze and smog. We had been told about this, but you don’t expect huge walls of mountains, only a few kms away to be almost obscured. We have been told that it is better in the mornings, so hopefully we will see more tomorrow morning.
We are staying at a small Bed and Breakfast a few kms out of Lucerne in the countryside, in the middle of farmland. It is one of the old half timbered chalets (450 years old) that are all around here. The bottom floor is occupied by our hosts, the middle floor has a separate family comprising of mum, dad and three kids, and the top floor is run as a B&B. We share the 21 hectares with 150 pigs, 27 milking cows, 7 horses, ducks, chooks, 21 cats and 1 old dog. We have a double room with shared bathroom, kitchen, lounge, which we are sharing with three Hungarian guys, who are staying here for a month (working nearby). From what we can gather from the brief bridge between our language differences, one has left a wife and small daughter at home in Hungary to come here for a months work, the other two are single guys that he has brought along. What this means is that one is house trained the other two aren’t. The dad seems to be finding it hard being so far away from his family. But considering the exchange rate between Swiss and Hungarian, this is probably a pretty sweet deal.
We are looking forward to the next couple of days and whatever sights and sounds they may bring. But for tonight, we are glad to relax after our 400 km journey today. It’s time for a beer, and a toast to Switzerland.
No comments:
Post a Comment