On A (Swiss) Roll

I’ve been on a few coach tours now, and I still have something of a love-hate relationship with them. For a start, they tend to be more than a little contrived - take the happy, dancing villagers of Malaysia, for example. Then there’s the fact that you are tied to someone else’s schedule, so if you’d rather go and take some nice pictures of, say, the local wildlife rather than comparing snowglobes in the giftshop, well, that’s just your tough luck. At the same time, though, it’s a handy way to cram in as much as possible in a short space of time, not to mention an easy option for travelling around in places where independent travel might be difficult to arrange (take the West Bank, for instance.) In reality, it’s arguable the Switzerland doesn’t really qualify for either of these justifications. After all it’s rather small, and you don’t have to negotiate an armed guard to go from Zurich to Rapperswil. Various opposing factions underwent a furious inner monologue: “You don’t see the real country from a tour bus,” said the sneering, middle-class, well-travelled part of me. “You’ve eaten chicken feet in Hong Kong; you’ve spoken to nurses from behind the wall in occupied Palestine. What use is a tour bus to you?” “Well, actually, “admitted the less well-travelled, working class part of me, “If I’m honest that was all a bit of a fluke. I can’t believe my luck, really. Center Parcs used to be the limits of my comfort zone. I don’t really trust myself to explore on my own. I’d only miss things. Best let the professionals help out.” “You raise a valid point,” agreed my other self, adding, with a touch of pride, “you can afford it, after all, so why not? Treat yourself. After all,” (surreptitiously) “you don’t have to tell anyone, just make sure the tour bus isn’t in any of the photos.” “OK, that’s decided then. And it isn’t too expensive...” added my Inner Yorkshireman, forever watching the pennies.
Sign on a Zurich tram

And so we set off into the Alps, indeed into the Kingdom of Liechtenstein, a whole other country, complete with Marcello the Tour Guide, Zurich’s very own caricature. Marcello (a name that didn’t really go with his outfit or indeed his accent) arrived in what were unmistakably leiderhosen, and the sort of hat you normally only see on elderly gentlemen at Lords on test match days, and proceeded to interrogate his clientele.

“Where are you from?”

“The USA.”

“I’ve worked there.”

“Whereabouts?”

“New York.”

“I live in Vegas.

Not to be outdone, Marcello replied that he’d worked there too. Victoriously, he continued down the bus, and got to us.

“Where are you from?”

“England.”

“Whereabouts?”

“London.”

“London?” He looks nonplussed. “I’ve been to London. I stayed in an apartment in the British Museum. I had access to the whole museum AT NIGHT. And I worked for a while in Newquay,” he added, for good measure.

He got to an Indian couple who said they were from Chennai. He trumped this with “I love India. I worked for a while in Calcutta, helping street children.”

His reputation confirmed, he announced that we would first be embarking on a guided tour of Zurich. Having tramped the streets of Zurich for the previous two days, we were interested to see what we might have missed. Not a lot, it seemed. He imparted such words of wisdom as:

“On your right, this is the Walhalla Hotel.” All eyes turned to the right, and a big sign on the building confirmed this to be true. “It is a big hotel,” he added. We all nodded sagely.

“On your left is the UBS bank.” We looked. There it was.

“And this is the Zurich Insurance building. It is a big insurance company. They provide insurance for a lot of people.” Who were we to argue?

We trundled along in silence for a while until we came to a huge, sparkling stretch of water, at which Marcello announced “And here is the lake.”

After the “city tour” we made our way to Rapperswil, a gloriously pretty lakeside spot that you might expect to find people discussing in a Noel Coward play. Marcello did his bit, marching us up a hill to a big building with a turret and proclaiming “this is a castle” before pointing out that below us you could see a McDonalds. Everyone else trudged off, and my husband told me all about the Habsburgs, whose crest was above the door, and who had owned this and many other castles across this part of Europe during their glory days. Looking back, a happy medium between Marcello and my husband would have been just right.
Underwhelming Castle

After lunch (not in the McDonalds) we carried on through the mountains to Liechtenstein, on what would have been an uneventful journey had the man from Las Vegas not decided to be sick half way through. Announcing he didn’t feel well, Marcello responding by shouting across the whole bus “Vould you like a bag?” to make sure that everyone was aware of his plight. Afterwards, Marcello offered him some water... and charged him for the bottle. I can only assume it is this level of gall that makes the Swiss economy as vibrant as it is today.

And here I must pause to talk about Liechtenstein. The part of me that was relatively untravelled until the age of about 25 was secretly rather more excited that she should have been about this little foray into yet more unchartered territory – another nation to nominally tick off in my “places what I’ve been to” list. So I was a little disappointed when we arrived in Liechtenstein and were told we had 45 minutes before we had to get back to the bus. 45 minutes, we all protested? But this is a while country.

“You vil only need 45 minutes,” Marcello assured us.

So we set off through Vaduz, grumbling and muttering that we should have got the train. We walked to the end of the street and wondered where to go next. This seemed to be the end of Liechtenstein. We turned back on ourselves and found the tourist office, which on closer inspection seemed entirely devoid of any tourist information, but for 5 Swiss Francs they would stamp your passport with a Liechtenstein Tourist Office stamp.

Liechtenstein looked a bit like Butlins but without the swimming pool and the kiddy disco, or, to put it another way, like Butlins but less good. Vaduz, as far as we could make out, consists a huge red square that looked a bit like imitation astrotuft appeared to make up the centre of town, flanked as it was by the "Rathaus", and surrounded by some underwhelming, amost temporary-looking cafes selling ice creams made by Nestle, and two gift shops within a hundred yards of one another were selling all you could possibly want in national flags and novelty fridge magnets. Branches of H&M and an Espirit brightened things up a bit, but not a lot. Periodically a small, brightly-coloured train - the sort you might get to ferry children around seaside resorts, would trundle past. There is an unremarkable castle up on the hill, but you can't visit it because the chap in charge of Liechtenstein - the unimaginately named Count von Liechtenstein - still lives there. From his castle he can see his whole country. Frankly, I'd settle for a lego collection or a decent trainset over this. We learned from Marcello - so I would question the validity of this information - that there are 37,000 people living in Liechtenstein; a further 30,000 have post boxes at the town hall, that is to say they are registered here for tax purposes. Of the total 67,000 this lot are by far the most sensible.
Liechtenstein

Twenty minutes after being deposited in the centre of Vaduz we were standing in the sweltering carpark clutching our freshly-stamped passports and wondering where the heck the bus had got to.

But the grand finale still awaited us. The trip we were on was known as "Heidiland", on the basis that we were going to...Heidiland. Yes, actual Heidiland. The area aroudn Maienfeld where the Actual Heidi lived.
Heidi's House: "The Original"

Except she didn't, did she, on account of being fictional. It isn't even the land where the Actual Shirley Temple played Heidi in the movie - that was filmed in California. What Heidiland is, then, is a neat little bit of tourist opportunism, a successful cashing-in on visitors' gullibility and skewed nostalgic memories, forgetting, for a moment, that actually the appallingly-dubbed and seemingly endless TV drama of the early 80s was actually hugely tedious, and took up precious airtime that would have been much better used showing "Round the Twist".

I can't report on the delights of the Heidi House ("Heidi's actual house!") as I chose to spend my CF4 on an ice cream instead, and while all the others were having their photos taken with unconvincing waxworks of Peter, Heidi, Klara and Grandfather in the "authentically-furnished" house, we taunted the goats, sniggered at the Heidi lego in the gift shop, and made the most of the beautiful scenery, which seemed to have gone unnoticed by everyone else.
Posing Goats

I don't have a witty ending for this post. Like the trip, it seems to have rather petered out. After the excitement of Heidi's House, which was clearly too much for us all, we went to sleep as we were driven back to central Zurich, where we saw this:
I will leave you with an explanation of what this cake, made in celebration of the Six O'clock Bells Festival, represents, which is possibly even more humorous - and a tad sinister - than the picture itself.

"Following the parade of the Zünfte (guilds), the climax of the holiday is the burning of Winter in effigy, in the form of the Böögg, a figure of a snowman prepared with explosives. The custom of burning a ragdoll called Böögg predates the Sechseläuten. A Böögg (cognate to bogey) was originally a masked character doing mischief and frightening children during the carnival season."

Jolly good.