h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I got back to Bath last night and am back at work today. The last few days have been really wonderful. I had a really great time in Switzerland and I didn’t want to come home yesterday. But we got so much done and there’s so much to write about I hardly know where to start.

As I said, Thursday was the last day of the conference and was another short day. One thing worthy of note was that they announced the prizes for the poster presentations and two of the guys in my group won five hundred Swiss francs for their poster. After the conference had finished I went and found our hostel for the night and dropped my bag off there, then I caught a train to the airport and met my girlfriend off the plane. We spent some time wandering around the Old Town again and had Italian food and a nice bottle of wine in a restaurant there.

One thing I forgot to mention about Geneva in my last entry is that it is positively crawling with cows. Not real cows of course, that would just be too weird, but fibreglass cows that have been painted and modified and chained to the pavements roughly every hundred yards around the streets of Geneva. I have a theory about the cows… I think that in a strategy that is nothing short of brilliant the local city council installed them as a decoy to boorish British tourists. Drunken Brits concentrate their overzealous attention on the cows, climbing on them and vandalising them to their hearts’ content and Geneva’s actual attractions are left unscathed. Maybe they should try this in some British cities, think about it.

We got up on Friday morning and caught a train to Vevey, a cute little town on the shores of Lake Geneva. It’s quiet and unassuming and was a welcome change from Geneva. The town is surrounded by vineyards and (like most of the Vaud area around Lake Geneva) there are some wonderful views of the French Alps across the lake. Apparently Charlie Chaplin lived there for a while (there’s a statue of him on the waterfront) and Ernest Hemingway spent some time in the area.

In the early afternoon we caught a boat to Château de Chillon. The castle featured in a poem by Lord Byron called The Prisoner of Chillon which was about François de Bonivard, a monk who spent six years chained to a pillar in the dungeon there. There is a sign next to the pillar Bonivard was chained to and there is a frame attached to another pillar where Byron scratched his name while on a visit to the castle (see what I mean about British hooligans abroad!). Approaching the castle by boat was supposed to be awesome, but personally I thought the views from the shore were much more impressive. Somehow the imposing walls seemed smaller from the decks of the ferry and it was easy to believe that castle was just an outsized and elaborate manor house.

We spent a few hours wandering round the castle then walked back along the lake to Montreux, Vevey’s slightly snootier neighbour. It’s most famous for the Montreux Jazz festival (which we missed by a matter of days) and apparently Freddie Mecury lived there (again there’s a statue of him on the waterfront). Montreux seemed a little too full of itself and somewhat overrated (they fancy themselves as the Swiss St Tropez), but there wasn’t all that much to see or do. Nonetheless it was a beautiful afternoon to walk and eat ice-cream and after taking a photograph of the Freddie Mercury statue we headed back to Vevey.

In the afternoon we went for a swim in the lake again. It was far warmer than in Geneva; I spent a good deal longer in the water without any ill effects (or maybe I’m just getting toughened up). Then in the evening we took a look round Vevey’s Old Town and ate dinner in another nice restaurant.

After dinner we made an abortive attempt to walk part of the “Poet’s Ramble,” a walk round Vevey and Montreux where you find your way from bench to bench and listen to quotations of poetry related to the area, recorded and played back by little metal boxes bolted to the undersides of the benches. We had apparently walked past a number of these benches during the afternoon on our stroll from Château de Chillon to Montreux without noticing them and we thought it might be a fun way to spend the evening and see a little more of Vevey. The first bench we found didn’t seem to want to talk to us (chewing gum in the buttons or something I imagine). Then, after a spooky fifteen minutes spent searching around a graveyard, we were unable to find the second one. We scored a hit with our third bench and were rewarded with a long and rather dull story about a guy painting a picture for another guy and the subsequent overly polite and sycophantic discussions of the fee. By this time it was getting dark and we decided to finish on a high and quit before we became totally disillusioned with the whole episode.

On Saturday we had to move on again to stay in Lausanne that evening, but before we got too far away from Montreux we wanted to take a train ride up into the hills to visit Gruyère. We got up early and had a wonder round the local market in Vevey and ate some breakfast (and drank a couple of glasses of wine) before catching a train on the Golden Pass Line (hailed as being the most scenic rail journey in Switzerland, they even have special panoramic trains with enormous windows so that you can enjoy the view) to Montbovon and then a connecting train to Gruyère.

Gruyère is a little castle village famous for cheese making. We went on a tour of the cheese factory (of course) and then took a walk up the hill to look round the village itself. It’s very picturesque and the views are pretty amazing, but unfortunately it was rather full of tourists when we got there. We only spent a couple of hours there so we didn’t have time to go on the castle tour though we took some photos from outside. Neither did we get chance to see the H. R. Giger Museum, he’s the graphic artist who designed the Alien in Ridley Scott’s movie so that would have been nice to see, but there’s a bar next door decked out in the Giger style so we went for a drink there before we left.

We went back to Montreux and then to Vevey to pick up our bags and then onwards to Lausanne (Swiss trains are wonderful, and extremely cheap, especially if you buy a rail pass) arriving in the late afternoon. We had time to wander round a little and look the place over. Lausanne is supposed to be the Swiss San Francisco and is supposed to be the sexiest city in Switzerland. I’ve never been to San Francisco, so I suppose I shouldn’t really comment, but Lausanne didn’t strike me as having that colour and excitement that I think we all associate with San Francisco. What it did have is steep hills; Lausanne is built on at least three hills and walking around the place certainly keeps you fit.

In the early evening we took the metro down towards the lake to look round Ouchy. Ouchy is officially a separate entity to Lausanne, the two merged a long time ago, but Ouchy is just managing to retain a separate identity. It’s a lovely little lakeside resort town, less brash than Montreux, but perhaps not as unassuming as Vevey was. We sat in the last of the afternoon sun and admired the view over the lake before catching the metro back up the hill into Lausanne for dinner.

As this was the last night of our holiday we decided to get a bit dressed up and make a bit of an occasion of it. We wanted to eat some real Swiss cuisine before we left, so we found a lovely restaurant which served local specialties. We had a fondue to share and also a kind of Swiss cheese on toast involving something like Camembert (though it’s probably sacrilegious to say so) and a lovely bottle of local wine. After dinner we found our way to a local Salsa club and had a bit of a dance before we went back to the hotel.

We spent yesterday morning looking round Lausanne. We’d planned to have a look round all of the bits of Lausanne that we’d missed on the previous evening and then do a little shopping for souvenirs and presents for people back home. Unfortunately we discovered that Lausanne is almost completely closed on Sundays. The streets were eerily quiet and we struggled to even find somewhere open to get a cup of tea. By early afternoon we’d exhausted our interest in the ghostly streets and closed shops and decided it was time to make our way to the airport.

The flight went quickly and we were back at my house by half past six. We spent a quiet evening eating pasta, watching a movie and later the highlights of the German Grand Prix. All in all I had an excellent week and today I’m crashing back to Earth with a bump. It was a struggle getting myself out of bed this morning and I’ve spent most of the day trying to remember what I was up to before I left. Later on I’m going to go to the gym and I imagine it’s going to hurt. I think I need another holiday.