Category: Travel

We’ve been back for a week, but I’ve been a bit distracted with this pesky CFA exam. For the record, I felt like there were less people in London writing it, than in Toronto, which surprises me given the amount of financial geeks there are in London. The procters are far more polite in London too. In Toronto they were quite militant. But, like Toronto, London’s CFA exam day was quite the sausage party. Thankfully, the convention centre was air conditioned. This is a legitimate concern in London!

But, back to the Swiss. For our 2nd May bank holiday (why are there are two bank holidays in May, I’ll never know, but I would like to smack the government worker who came to this decision up side the head! Could you not push out until like October, when we could use a day off to perhaps enjoy some turkey and pumpkin pie?! ) we decided to go to Switzerland. The long weekend was immediately after my birthday and I chose Switzerland because I’m slightly obsessed with this country since my visit almost 5 years ago, and have been dreaming about going back ever since! Thankfully, Switzerland did not disappoint.
I’m not sure what it is about this country that has me so infatuated. Perhaps I can chalk it up to the crisp mountain air that makes me think crazy thoughts like buying a cute little swiss mountain cottage and retiring to the alps. (i’ve been working for 5 years, surly it’s time to retire…)

On Friday we grabbed an evening flight to Basel from London’s Luton Airport. Luton, had the joy of experiencing a computer glitch that shut down their check in systems right around the time that oh… about 14 different Easy Jet flight passengers are trying to check in! Pure chaos. Of course, that just made us appreciate the Swiss infrastructure efficiency even more. It truly is wonderful. Never have I seen such punctual trains. They’re on time to the bloody minute!

On Saturday morning we took a train to Altdorf and rather than switching to a local bus, walked the 5km to Attinghausen, the start of the long hike. Not much to report about this town, it has 2 hotels, 3 restaurants and 1 grocery store. Clearly, it was a pretty happening place to be on Saturday night. At least it’s quaint.

Early Sunday morning we packed up are things and headed off. Knowing full well that we were in for a long hike (estimated at about 7.5 hours) we decided to spare some early pain and take the well placed cable car up to Brusti:

The weather looked promising. Given the forecast of heavy rain, we were a bit concerned. We actually had wanted to sleep the night in Brusti as the Lonely P. hike suggests, but a few weeks earlier while making our hotel bookings we learned that when the Swiss say that the hiking season starts in June, they mean it. If you show up on May 26th a mere few days before June you’ll find most guest houses closed for “holidays”. There’s that punctuality again.
Fine. No matter, our sleeping arrangements down in Attinghausen worked out well.
So off we go on our hike:

I will admit, hiking in late May which we now know is the off season, brings you some lovely solitude. For over 3 hours we hiked alone, just us and the cows … and their nosy bells (which are huge! but the sound is actually soothing, at least to me. I don’t know how the cows feel about giant heavy bells the size of toasters around their necks).

As we climbed higher we hit some snow which delighted us, snow in late May! How cute:

But a few hundred meters higher, the weather turned and the snow didn’t seem so cute anymore!

As visibility got worse, and with the normally frequent trail markers covered in snow we were VERY thankful to have GPS with us. Hiking season starts in June, INDEED!! For a good 45 minutes we were stuck on the side of the pass ankle deep in snow, without any visible trail markers!! About an hour later (along with some cursing and wishing for snow crampons) we managed to hit the top of the Surrenenpass, about 2300m altitude. Shockingly, on the other side of the pass the weather was glorious. The snow magically disappeared, the grass was visible, and there were actually a few hikers out and about on this side! Bizarre:

This was also the side of the pass where we stopped for a cheese break (see post below), before making our final decent down to Engelberg. We started at 8:20am. With time to take photos, get lost in the snow, eat some cheese, and take more photos, we cruised into sunny Engelberg just before 6pm. A far bit longer than we anticipated, and our feet screamed in agreement.

Reminiscent of Spain, we were asleep before sunset.

Monday morning I pulled open the curtains of our hotel room to find it was snowing outside! What happened to our sunny lovely spring weather the day before?

As the train to Luzern descended out of the mountains the snow quickly turned to rain. In retrospect, we had been quite lucky not to have this rain during our hike.

We made a lunch stop in Luzern (a very pretty Swiss town):

… before continuing on back to Basel.
It’s not all football hooligans in Basel, the core of the city is very pretty:

And with that, our 3 days in Switzerland were over.

And the dreams of when I will go back start again.

And I thought British Footie Hooligans were bad!

Look at this from Basel Switzerland:

We think FC Basel (Football Club Basel) beat Zurich.. but we’re not sure.

After returning from the pure bliss that is Swiss transportation efficiency, we discovered first hand that Easy Jet is barely marginally better than Ryan Air.
Look at this boarding mob:

Stupid! More stupid was First Capital Connects train from Luton Airport to Kings Cross that was over an hour late. Sitting at the platform they updated us on their tardiness every 3 minutes by simply stating that the train we are waiting for will be 6 minutes, not 9 minutes, no 12 minutes… etc.. .delayed. And of course they appologize for any inconvenience they may have caused. Seriously?! The train is only coming from Bedford, 15 minutes away. And it’s after midnight. Either you know where the train is or you don’t! Just tell us you have no bloody clue and get it over with!

But Switzerland was awesome, so it’s almost worth it.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a certain level of suckiness when you voluntarily fly a budget airline. I understand that I’m not issued a seat number, that instead it’s a first come first serve frenzy of a free for all scramble onto the plane to get those precious exit row seats. That’s fine, with that kind of motivation to get on the plane we actually take off on time. I also understand that they won’t feed me, provide me with a seat pocket in the chair in front of me and choose to outfit their planes in the cheapest (and ugliest) fixturings imaginable. I also acknowledge that when they say they fly to Rome, Glasgow or Venice, what they really mean is the tiny shit airport a solid 55km away from the real airport that real airlines fly into. It’s like saying I’ll fly you to Toronto, but what I really mean is Hamilton. It’s a bit of a lie but I’m used to it.

But then there are some things that RyanAir does that are just plain stupid. For 2 extra pounds you can pay to upgrade yourself to a priority check in. This means that they’ll give you a yellow card and board your impatient self first. Sounds like a good deal, no? And for only a measly 2 quid! So you do it, patting yourself on the back for being so clever. Ya, you and about 80% of your fellow passengers! We flew to Spain on Ryanair and pretty much everyone had that special yellow card. So when they announce the priority boarding everyone swarms to the front in giant glob, each person thinking they should be boarded first. It’s pure chaos. People, what happened to the land of queuing?! I’ve seen better crowd organization a passport embassy of a former Eastern-bloc country. And that’s what really pisses me off about this airline. Not only does Ryanair not bother to complete the logistics in this £2 sham, the staff don’t even pretend to try to control the mayhem. They just don’t care. Instead, they let the mob do it’s globular thing and just check in who ever happens to be standing in front of them, yellow card or not. Of course as the mob gets bigger there is always one self important jackass who struts around the blob to the front of the crowd waving their yellow card.
Lady! You and everyone else!

(For the record, no, we did not pay to have the priority boarding. It’s only a 2 hour flight, I think we’ll survive if we nap in seats that aren’t next to each other)

And then when you actually get onto the plane, you get the joy of them trying to sell you crap the entire way. Food, drinks, perfumes, lottery scratch cards. I’m serious, scratch cards. How bored are you?! And each round of sales involves a long winded announcement over the intercom, in multiple languages if you’re lucky.

Flying Ryanair very quickly goes from tolerable to a test of your patience. From start to finish there is nothing pleasant about flying them. And it makes you wonder just how stingy are you to put up with this crap?

I got off that flight from Spain vowing to never fly them again.

Today they announced their latest tactic in the war on airfares. A whole new offering of £10 flights (including taxes!).
How stingy am I?
As I scroll through their list of available flights the answers it seems to be clear. Apparently, very.

So our first real bank holiday. Easter doesn’t count, that’s a Jesus day.
We managed to successfully avoid the rain that London had by flying down to Almeria Spain (more on RyanAir later). After a mad dash to Stansted airport (including a mental note to leave more time for tubing it to the train station) we arrived in Almeria just in time for dusk. We took a quick cab over to the coastal town of San Jose. This part of Spain seems obsessed with Italian restaurants but we were pleased to find that even the Italian joints have their Sangria done right.
We awoke to this view from our hotel terrace:

We spent most of Saturday playing with our new GPS unit as well as hiking over to Las Negras, about 21km away (and praising our addiction to gadgets since as it turned out the Lonely P’s route description turned out to be junk):

Views were excellent, the weather (aside from one random brief stint of rain) was perfect as well.

About 5 and a half hours later we pretty much collapsed in Las Negras, I think our office worker legs are out of practice! The great thing with getting out of the UK is that everything seems cheap. Beers for 2 Euro? A steal! And free Tapas!?? I love this country!
Las Negras itself took a while to grow on us. At first I found it rather dull, even though it’s quite scenic:

I suppose I have to keep in mind that this is not the high season, so I really shouldn’t expect a raging Ibizia nightlife. But seeing some of the tacky bits of the Coba Del Sol touristy area west of Almeria a few days later (we were East) gave excellent perspective on how this is the ‘real’ Spain (real but with Italian restaurants… and yet no Cappacinos?! These people need to stop telling me they can’t make cappuccinos when I see them using the frother feature on their giant state of the art coffee/espresso/cappuccino machine to warm up milk. What? you don’t know how to make foam?! I need to learn the Spanish for that!).

On Sunday we hiked our sore limbs over to San Pedro beach a little over an hour away. This ‘town’ is a bunch of ruins being squatted on by hyppies. There are some tents, some solar panels, a bunch of people with long beards and most of them naked. Nice location though:

The bus back to Almeria for whatever silly reason runs only once a day. Every day at 7:30am!! So on Monday we arrived back in Almeria at 8:30am, and with plenty of time to kill, rented a car (learned to drive standard too!) and spent the day exploring nearby towns and the touristy coast west of Almeria.
Arriving back in London at 11pm that night we got to see first hand the bank holiday crowds, many tanned like us. And many looked as pleased with their holiday plans as we were.
Now if only RyanAir didn’t suck.
But more on that tomorrow.

We’re back from our weekend in Spain’s coast. It was fantastic! Despite some early concerns about the weather the rain in Spain stayed mainly on the plane this weekend and we had beautiful skies for most of our trip.

I have some comments about Ryanair I’ll make later.

I do love that Easter in the UK is a solid 4 day weekend.
We left painfully early on Friday morning, actually 7am probably hurt more because we were out a bit late the night before, which I learned is often called “Bad Thursday” over here. We had been out in Soho.

Anyway, since there are over 600,000 Polish immigrants working in the UK, flights back to Warsaw on a super religious holiday are a bit hard to come by, and we had to end up flying through Frankfurt, a silly layover considering that the flight from London to Warsaw is less than 2 and a half hours.
After weeks of fantastic spring weather we landed in cold cloudy Poland. I know.. I know… there’s snow in Canada, it could have been worse.
The weekend involved 3 planned family dinners, plus a spontaneous lunch at my grandmothers the day we arrived. Since 3 of those 4 meals were at grandmothers you can only imagine the amounts of food we were forced to eat (you just can’t say no to grandma).

But in between the feedings we got to see some of the sights.
The Old Town, which was essentially leveled after WW2 and impeccably rebuilt:

The classic image of Warsaw, the former Stalin Palace of Culture built during the communist occupation now simply called the ‘Palace of Culture and Science’. It may have been a gift from Russia with love, but generally the Polish seem to hate it:

These peacocks in the 17th century Łazienki Park don’t seem to mind the cold damp weather:

But of course, what I really love about Warsaw is the contrasts. Here you can see the convenience of family shopping. Dad visits the sex shop on the left, while mom is picking out her child’s First Communion outfit on the right. All this on Pope John Paul II Avenue!

We’re back from our 4 day Easter weekend in Poland.
Once we recover from the assault our innards took, we’ll write more.