Day 37: Montreux To Aigle

Looking back towards Clarens and Vevey.

The challenging terrain means that the Swiss have had to become master engineers, both in railway construction and road building.

Montreux in the early morning.

The older part of Montreux the tourists often miss — so busy are they celebrity spotting in the casinos.

Yes, it's another quirky sign! 

I just can't stop . . .

. . . taking photographs of Lake Geneva, and have a hundred more you haven't seen (thank God, you cry . . .)

You've viewed this on a thousand calendars and chocolate boxes. It's the Château de Chillon, and the Via Francigena goes right by it. Naturally I went inside — it was 9 am, so there weren't many other visitors. I spent a happy hour or two there. This is a popular tourist destination, and I was lucky to see it so uncrowded.

Just look at that walkway! This legendary castle is associated with Delacroix, Lord Byron, Gustave Courbet, Henry James, Salvador Dalí and numerous other literary and artistic figures  . . . 

I love this humble strip of geraniums. Ok, it may not be mentioned in the serious historical literature and audio guides most of the visitors were hauling around, but, hey, I like these choses cachées et imprévues . . . 

This is positively the last picture of Lake Geneva (Lac Leman in French and Genfersee in German. Both French and German are spoken in Switzerland  — as are Italian and Romansh in some southern parts). You can see the motorway curving round on the left.

Oh, well, just one more. Here another paddle steamer chugs out of Villeneuve at the head of the lake. And it's that Swiss flag again!

In Villeneuve I did a very foolish thing. It was lunchtime, and I passed a Thai restaurant offering as much food as you could eat for 20 Swiss francs. I couldn't resist. I stuffed myself — soup, salad, spring rolls, pork, chicken, rice, noodles. I would regret this later. At 2 pm I took a cycle path through the woods and left Lake Geneva behind. I was heading up a wide, flat-bottomed valley dotted with farms and maize fields, the valley of the river Rhône. High, wooded hills rose sharply on either side. I would be following this valley for three days as far as Martigny. After negotiating a maze of farm tracks, I joined the route I should have taken according to my guidebook, the cycle track by the railway line. By the time I reached Aigle (meaning 'Eagle'), I felt very lethargic and had stomach ache. I was glad to retire to the Auberge des Messageries and a room with a comfortable bed. I vowed to eat less the next day, though I had lost weight during my trek. Highlight of the afternoon: a young grass snake coiling and uncoiling on the cycle track.

Day 36: Vevey To Montreux

The villa 'Le Lac', designed by Le Corbusier. I was not impressed. It looked more like a prison or a dilapidated shack.

A paddle steamer . . .

. . . approaches the landing stage at Vevey. Eight steamers operate on the lake, all constructed early in the last century. It's the largest Belle Époque fleet in the world, and the boats have been classified as Historic Monuments of National Importance.

An ice cream parlour in Vevey. What can I say about Vevey? I can mention the usual collection of bizarre museums: the Museum of Cameras, the Museum of Games and the Museum of Food. I can also mention the many famous people who have lived or spent time here — Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Charlie Chaplin, Graham Greene, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Gandhi, Freddie Mercury . . . 

We, however, had breakfast, and then moved on.

 As I've written before, I love quirky signs, and I was really amused by this one. 

From here to Montreux it's almost continuously built up. Old, rich people walk their fancy dogs along the lakeside promenade — which is pleasant enough, and festooned with exotic trees and gaudy flowers. There are many modern sculptures to be seen, such as the one above, which is a tribute to Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone. 

Moody sky over Lake Geneva.

Winter Escape

Postcard: view over Montreux and Lac Léman towards the seven summits of the Dents du Midi.  Out of sight to the west (the right) an intimidating chain of mountains — the northern limit of the French Alps — plunges precipitously down to the lake in a jumble of snowfields, cirques, bare grey slopes and glaciated valleys.

In a bid to escape the madness of Christmas and the mayhem of New Year, Sunday 1st January found me on a Eurostar train to Paris then a TGV-Lyria train to Geneva. I'd half intended to walk a few sections of the Swiss Chemin de Saint-Jacques/Jakobsweg, but in the end I did shorter, circular walks, and visited some of the historic towns and villages of Switzerland's south-west corner: Lausanne, Montreux, Sonzier, Glion, Fribourg, Sierre and Veyras.

Lake Geneva, or Lac Léman, formed the centrepiece of my stay. I was at once seduced by its ever-changing moods and colours. I saw it in rain and sunshine, mist and snow. From the hills above Montreux the Alpine panorama on the far side of the lake was magnificent, particularly the jagged peaks of the Dents du Midi, which loomed menacingly over the flat, broad valley of the river Rhône's upper reaches. This mountain chain, in the Swiss canton of Valais, has seven summits, or 'teeth'; and in October 2006, after several years of boiling hot summers and subsequent thawing, a huge mass of rock detached itself from La Haute Cime, the most easterly peak, causing a massive landslide.

One outstanding walk took me from the heights of Sonzier up the Route du Pont de Pierre, past skeleton trees and crashing waterfalls, over an old stone bridge which spans the Gorges du Chaudron, through Glion (the view of the Dents du Midi from the Buffet de la Gare's restaurant window is quite breathtaking) and back down to Montreux with its charming old quarter.

On fine days I watched a low sun progress over the French Alps, bathing the snowy peaks in a rosy light. On milder, mistier, rainier days the mountains, which dropped sheer onto the lake's southern shore, all but disappeared. Sometimes the orange glow of a streaky sunset lit up the western horizon. And by night a waxing moon trailed the sun across the sky, but following a higher orbit — silvering the lake, which, along its northern edge, already twinkled and shone with headlamp beams from the snaking autoroute and the lights of all the shoreside settlements between Montreux and Lausanne.

Occasionally a Föhn wind warmed the valleys, producing briefly an exceptionally soft microclimate. Buzzards yelped, and herons beat a slow, direct and airy course above the streams and rivers. Little railways twisted impossibly up steep, wooded slopes and around rock faces, connecting remote hamlets and farmsteads. Even when hidden in a gorge or cutting, you could still hear the screech of their metallic glide. And among new buildings and modern chalets were scattered older, eighteenth-century houses, painted green and gold, with slate roofs and wooden balconies, and tumbledown wooden barns, little changed for centuries.    

Postcard: view looking east from Lac Léman across Montreux. You can clearly make out the shadowed ravine of the Gorges du Chaudron.