The Snow Line Moves While You Watch
Ten days in the Kander valley waiting for a lake to melt, learning what a Swiss regional train costs, and walking above the cloud on a Tuesday.
Switzerland is where the no-flying rule stops feeling like a constraint and starts feeling like the point. You come through the mountains at eye level, slowly, on a train that has been engineered to a standard bordering on the absurd, and the landscape is delivered to you in the correct order.
The Kander valley is a dead end. The road stops; the railway keeps going, into the Lötschberg tunnel and out the other side in the Rhône valley twenty minutes later, and cars are loaded onto flatbed wagons to be carried through. Standing on the platform watching a family sit inside their hatchback while a train takes them under a mountain is the most Swiss thing I have seen.
The mathematics of a Swiss stop
I need to be honest about money, because this leg broke the budget. Ten nights at CHF 96 with half-board, roughly €1,020 all in with local transport. The equivalent ten nights in Portugal cost me €385. A coffee is CHF 4.80. A supermarket sandwich is CHF 6.20.
What made it survivable: half-board guesthouses, where dinner is at a fixed time and is a soup, a main and something with cream, and you eat what arrives. And the regional transport pass for the valley, which was CHF 42 for a week and paid for itself in three days. If you are travelling slowly, buy the local pass, never the day tickets.
Waiting for a lake
Oeschinensee sits at 1,578 metres in a bowl under the Blüemlisalp, and in early May it is still partly frozen — a plate of grey-white ice with meltwater pooling turquoise at the edges. I walked up on my second morning, before the gondola opened, and had it entirely to myself for about forty minutes.
Then I went back on days five, seven and nine, and watched the ice go. That is genuinely what I did with the middle of my week. By the ninth morning the lake was the impossible milky blue that appears in every photograph of it, and there were eleven people on the shore, and it was better and also somehow less interesting than the grey plate.
There is a version of travel where the goal is the postcard, and a version where the goal is watching the postcard assemble itself. The second one takes ten days.
Above the cloud
On the Tuesday there was a temperature inversion: the valley socked in at 900 metres, grey and cold and dripping. Everyone in the guesthouse looked out of the window and rearranged their plans downward.
I took the little cable car up to Allmenalp instead — a six-person box on a wire, CHF 28 return, operated by a man who checked the number of us and said the weather up top was "better." At 1,700 metres I came out of the cloud into direct sun with a floor of white below and the Bernese peaks standing out of it in a row. Four hours of walking, one other person, one restaurant serving Rösti the size of a hubcap for CHF 21.
The word he used was "better." It was the single best day of the trip so far.
Notes for the Lötschberg
The train south through the base tunnel takes about twenty minutes and you see nothing. The old mountain line over the top — Kandersteg, Hohtenn, Ausserberg, on a shelf carved into the north wall of the Rhône valley — takes an hour and is one of the great railway journeys in Europe. Both cost the same. Take the slow one; it runs less often, so check the timetable the night before rather than the morning of, which I did not.
Italy tomorrow, and a city built entirely under arcades.