"I want shorter legs or a return ticket from Swiss." In the photo under this advertising slogan are breathtaking legs, slightly covered by a short skirt, taking up an entire magazine spread. This is how Swiss airline shares its pride in the comfort of its aircraft cabins. I don't know about models, but ordinary mortals really do have somewhere to put their limbs on Swiss company planes.
...From Zurich we travel across the entire country to the south, to the canton of Valais. The entire journey takes a total of five hours. Despite the comfort of traveling on Swiss railways in first-class carriages, getting a good night's sleep on the train is absolutely unrealistic. There are two reasons for this.
The first is our travel schedule, packed with transfers. At 8:45 we arrive in Zurich, at 9:40 we depart from the local airport by train to Bern, at 11:13 we arrive in Bern and transfer to another train. Nine minutes later, at 11:22, we depart from Bern to Brig, arriving exactly 1 hour 38 minutes later. And 23 minutes later we set off on another train to Zermatt, where we arrive safely an hour and twenty minutes later.
Around the station with a chronometer
The schedule, calculated with Swiss-watch precision (Switzerland is the country with the densest transport network in the world, and not only do people use this network, but a lion's share of freight is also transported on it—both domestic and transit), is not a clever PR stunt devised solely to impress foreign journalists. This is the so-called Swiss Travel System in action. It brings together railways, steamships plying the lakes, and even postal buses. The main achievement of the Swiss Travel System is the ability to get from any point A to any point B without spending more than an hour on transfers (as a rule, now no more than half an hour, and at some transport hubs even fifteen minutes). And this despite the fact that the travel system includes more than 250 transport companies (3,000 km of Swiss railways are owned and operated by Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), while 2,000 km belong to private companies). This is achieved, of course, through typically Swiss precision in drawing up timetables. Plus a system for bringing trains or buses to the station, honed with the same pedantry.
Competent train connections are just part of the grandiose plan to modernize Swiss railways, called Rail 2000. The country approved the concept of this project in 1987 at a nationwide referendum. By that time it was already clear that highways, which had absorbed budget funds for several post-war decades, would save neither the country's economy nor its ecology. And that high population mobility through private cars in high-altitude conditions and transalpine transit was nothing more than an illusion. In 1998, again by referendum, the country gave the go-ahead to invest in railways by the early 2020s no less than 30.5 billion Swiss francs (almost $23.5 billion). The Rail 2000 project involves the construction of new tunnels and stations, mass procurement of new rolling stock, and much more. Its first stage is completed in December of next year. By that time, all long-distance (by Swiss standards) passenger trains will run at half-hour intervals, and connections between cities will be even better, more direct, and shorter (for example, the road from Zurich to Bern, which took us 33 minutes, will be reduced to a quarter of an hour).
Which is, in essence, even a pity: traveling on a Swiss train is an incomparable pleasure (and here is the second reason why, if you find yourself in Switzerland for the first time, you will never fall asleep on a train). The views outside the window are too beautiful. By the way, the 'bourgeois' pursuit of comfort in transit has gone so far here that Swiss trains have not only special carriages for transporting bicycles, and you can rent a manipulator for transporting cars, and carriages with rooms for children's games, but also so-called quiet carriages, where you can sleep, read, or just gaze out the windows in complete silence, having first turned off your mobile phones and forgotten about your players. We accidentally hopped into one such carriage on the way back, on the road from Zurich to the airport. The ride was supposed to take only 15 minutes, so we decided not to change carriages. But can four women spend 15 minutes in silence? No sooner had we decorously taken our seats than one of us got a phone call. To our still quiet giggles, the phone's owner dashed out into the vestibule. At that moment Julia Diener from the Zurich office of Switzerland Tourism began to tell how funny her Italian friend reacts to quiet carriages (and to how seriously the Swiss take them), but the story was interrupted - now Julia's mobile phone rang in her handbag. A flustered Julia jumped up from her seat to our quiet snickers. Before I could rejoice in my own foresight (trying with all my might to behave in a European manner, I had silenced my phone as soon as I entered the carriage), I heard a loud buzzing of the vibration alert, which echoed in the silence of the carriage from my own bag. I, too, had to rush out into the vestibule, choking with laughter. On returning to my seat, I caught only one disapproving look. The lover of silence later turned out to be on the same plane as us.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The journey is only beginning. Outside the window flash the Alps, overgrown with yellow larches. A view of the Matterhorn, known the world over from postcards, calendars, and chocolates. We are in Zermatt, a fashionable ski resort.
Presidential set for a tourist
"On the edge of an alpine gorge sits a man, in front of him is a box of watches. Swiss ones. The man takes a watch out of the box, looks at it thoughtfully, and just as thoughtfully throws it into the gorge. He watches it go for a long time. Then he takes out another watch and does the same with it.
"What is this?" tourists passing by ask the guide.
- This is a new Russian. He's sad. Watching time fly.”
In Zermatt, jokes about Russians are not relevant yet. Most visitors are sports enthusiasts from Germany, Switzerland, and... the Far East (not ours). The popularity of this resort (as well as many others) among tourists from Japan and Korea has reached the point where brochures with routes and hotel advertising are printed here with information also set in hieroglyphs. And the stop announcements on the famous high-altitude railway to Gornergrat (at an altitude of 3,100 m above sea level) are made in German, French, English, Japanese, and Korean (or Chinese). These latter, unidentified announcements, very similar to meowing, produce an effect akin to mobile phone ringtones in a quiet carriage (suppressed laughter turning into wild embarrassment when it turns out that a bunch of tourists from the Far East are sitting behind us).
- But that's not politically correct! - I exclaim hypocritically.
- Come on, - the Swiss girls, continuing to giggle, wave their hands.
It is unknown whether the time will come when announcements here will also be made in Russian. Maybe. Switzerland is becoming increasingly in demand among our tourists. According to Switzerland Tourism, last year this country ranked third among the most popular winter tourist destinations for our compatriots (in 2001 Switzerland ranked fifth in the same rating).
I don't know what it's like in season, but in mid-November Zermatt is a wonderful combination of an artistic Alpine postcard and a quiet carriage. It is incredibly beautiful and very peaceful. There are no cars with petrol or diesel engines here.
Since the late 40s of the last century, only cars and minibuses with barely audible humming electric motors (like Carlson's) have been driving around the town. Idyllic Zermatt is cozily nestled in the Matter Valley, at the foot of the Matterhorn. Around it is a view of 38 Alpine peaks four thousand meters high. In summer, people go hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, and skiing (fortunately, there are plenty of snow slopes high in the mountains). In winter, of course, they go downhill skiing and snowboarding.
Italian Switzerland
From Zermatt we return to Brig, and from there we go to the Italian city of Domodossola. There we change to a train of the Centovalli company. Probably every route in this country is panoramic. But among them there are also special offers, the so-called classic panoramic routes. One of them is the Centovalli Express, a road from German-speaking Switzerland to Italian-speaking Switzerland, passing through the territory of Italy. The owner of this route, the Centovalli company, is a joint Swiss-Italian enterprise. The spectacle that opens from the train windows during the two-hour journey from Italian Domodossola to Swiss Locarno is difficult to describe. Rare was the passenger in our carriage who did not periodically grab a camera, trying to capture in the intervals between tunnels and lazily flickering posts outside the window a landscape consisting of snowy peaks, crimson-gold slopes, waterfalls, vineyards, chestnut groves, and viaducts. Along the way, palm trees unexpectedly appear. Have you never imagined Switzerland with palm trees? Go to Ticino, the Italian canton. Although when you do, you will understand that you didn't need to come here for the palms at all.
Italian Switzerland captivates at once with lean aunties who, gesticulating smoothly but still briskly in the Italian manner, will spend half an hour telling you in detail the contents of the à la carte menu, with incomparable views of Lake Maggiore, stories about the Rusconi and Visconti families who built another architectural masterpiece, huge plane tree leaves underfoot, and the inexpressible flavor of ancient Italy, felt in every stone and in the tracery of every balcony. At the same time, no doubt arises that you are indeed in Switzerland, although the German speech around you suddenly changes to Italian.
The capital of the canton of Ticino is Bellinzona. For tourists, it is primarily a city of three medieval castles, which have been under the aegis of UNESCO since 2000. One of them, Castelgrande, according to a local guide, serves as an example of restoration in the Swiss style: the ancient fortress was not restored, but redesigned. As a result, the walls erected in the 13th–14th centuries received high-tech filling, a frighteningly bare inner courtyard, terrible entrances in the form of giant loopholes, and even an elevator. Because of the radical redesign of Castelgrande, UNESCO for a long time did not want to take it under its wing.
- To redo everything anew instead of restoring it - this is typical Swiss style, - complain the Swiss.
- Oh, come to us, we will show you restoration, when everything is demolished to the ground, and then a copy is built anew on that spot.
- Why? - the naive children of the Alps are surprised...
Another pearl of Ticino is the city of Locarno, which during the Renaissance shared with Bellinzona (as well as with another city of Italian Switzerland, Lugano) the proud title of capital of the canton. It passed from city to city every few years. Until everyone got tired of it. Today Locarno is best known as the venue of the International Film Festival. But if I ever return here again, I will definitely not go during the festival time. To calmly walk along the old streets, peeking into courtyard-museums with bicycles parked there, walking around the remains of an ancient destroyed French fortress, and be sure to visit the Baroque church built from the stones from which that fortress was once made.
And definitely eat chestnuts on the street!
- Next time I will come to Ticino specifically.
- That's because you haven't been anywhere else yet...
Well, tell me, how can you remain silent for a whole fifteen minutes, especially when you're coming from Italian Switzerland?