Interlaken to St Gallen

It’s been a while between posts. Here’s a post covering most of the rest of my time in Switzerland- from Interlaken, through Zurich to St Gallen and Bodensee/Lake Constance on the eastern side of the country.

I’m finding it pretty tough to find time for everything to align to do a blog post- time to process the photos, a decent internet connection to upload them, and then time and an internet connection to create the blog post.. So my apologies. If it’s any consolation I’m posting a bit on my Facebook page which also feeds through to Twitter so subscribe to those and get more immediate updates. I’m trying something different this time- writing the post offline and then posting it later. This seems to mean the post is a bit longer as I’ve got more time to write it- I hope you like the format and added content. So it’s being written on Monday April 23- I’m not sure when I’ll get to post it.

After a lot of rain, I left Interlaken to some rain showers, heading along the lake on a great cycle route (with some little hills). It was pretty picturesque, with some nice little towns and buildings on both sides of the lake.

The clouds were pretty atmospheric, as I rode along. It was also rather interesting to have some fighter jets fly low overhead, circle and land nearby. Although Switzerland is famously a neutral country, they’re by no means a de-militarised country. This was evident earlier when a guy rode past on a motorbike with an assault rifle over his shoulder. Initially my thoughts went straight to him being a hitman (thanks to movies and video games!), but then I realised he was off the practice at the nearby shooting range.

From the valley I climbed up through the forest into the cloud (and some snow on the ground). This was still all on a National Cycle Network route- but some of it was quite steep- proving it’s not all about following the rivers!

I got some nice views back down to the valley and the lake:

Once over the pass it was a good descent past little lakes and through nice little towns. I had to take it pretty slow on the descents though, as it was wet and I was worried about wearing through my brakepads completely (I’ve since replaced them as I’ll explain later).

I followed the shore of a pretty big lake to Lucerne where I stayed for the night. There are some interesting rock formations- the main roads and railway go through lots of tunnels, but the nice scenic cycle routes follow the shoreline!

From Lucerne it was a medium day to Zurich where I’d arranged to stay with the Warmshowers hosts Andrea and Marius, both of whom are journalists. They tipped me off about a nice little regional cycle route through a side valley instead of following the busy road around Lake Zurich. These were the sort of scenes I rode through:

By the time I made it to Zurich my rear wheel was really making a heap of noise, and it had so much play that I could wiggle it about 5-10cm. So before going to my WS hosts I tried to find a bikeshop. In the end I went to one called “2”. Unfortunately I realised later they seemed to focus on “cool” bikes like fixies and singlespeeds, rather than touring bikes. Anyway, they tried to sort it out- repacking the bearings etc, but when they opened it up they found it all so bad that (as far as I understood) the bearings were chipped, and the thread on the hub was stripped. So I had no choice but to buy a new wheel from them. Unfortunately all they had was a Deore hub for 100CHF (about 150NZD) – with a hole for a Schroeder (sp?) valve instead of a presta one. This is a lower quality hub than what I had, but fingers crossed it’ll last me to the UK where I can get a good quality touring wheel built for Asia. Switzerland was probably the worst place it could happen in terms of price- I was really hoping it’d make it to Germany!

Anyway, afterwards I rode on to my hosts place, and outside Indie met a cargo bike!

Flavie and Marius were great hosts, and we had some great chats about touring in different places- they especially gave me some good info for SE Asia where they’d toured before. We also talked about gadgets for documenting a trip as they’re journo’s and are thinking about a big trip in the future. They’re currently in Morocco doing a mountain-biking tour!

I spent two nights in Zurich, and checked out a good museum about the history of Switzerland that included explanations in English! (And French, German and Italian!)

I rode out of Zurich on some nice bike paths towards the north.

Striking north, I hit the Rhine for the first time! This is one of the major rivers of Europe, and I’ll meet it again in a couple of months in western Germany/east France/Benelux.

Further upstream is a quite popular tourist attraction- the Rhinefalls. These have a rock in the middle that a boat can drop you off on for a closer look! I didn’t take them up on the offer..

After staying the night in Schaffhausen I rode east along the Rhine towards Bodensee/Lake Constance (everything has multiple names here). One of the interesting things about this part of the ride is that I crossed the border between Germany and Switzerland several times in a couple of hours. There’s even a part of Germany completely surrounded by Switzerland! Here’s one of the (pretty lax) border crossings:

It was a good ride, with low traffic numbers (when I was even on a road), and good views to towns across the river.

One of the great things about the cycling infrastructure in Europe is how accessible it makes cycle touring to families:

I passed through a little town where most of the buildings are ornately painted, I’m not really sure why..

I didn’t really want to get out more Swiss Francs- hoping I could make it through with the cash I had, so I stopped at Konstanz, a German town on the border for lunch. It was a really nice town that felt really youthful. Unfortunately I got a flat tire just after this photo (my second of the trip and the first on the back wheel).

After riding on to Romanshorn for the night (and staying in a crappy hostel), I saw this cool little two-seater electric-assisted enclosed pedal-trike. I want one!

Then it was up towards St Gallen- a climb of a few hundred metres, which is surrounded by hills:

On the way I got another flat tire on the back wheel. As I was coming into town I stopped at a bikeshop which turned out to be my favourite bikeshop ever! It’s called Veloplus, and it didn’t really sell many actual bikes. What it sells is pretty much everything else you could think of related to bikes- from all the parts, to sleeping bags and mats for camping, to clothes and racks and heaps and heaps of Ortlieb cycle luggage. They even had a satchel bag partly made out of an old Schwelbe tire! They had two NZ brands that I could see- Icebreaker (which is everywhere in Europe) and Freeload racks, which was great to see a little NZ brand doing well around the world. I spent quite a bit stocking up on stuff I’d been meaning to buy for a while (especially because they had good brands of things like Kool-stop brakepads). I then discovered that they had a fully stocked workshop that you could use for free! This was great timing for me, and I spent a couple of hours working on the bike- cleaning chain and running gear, changing the brakepads and re-adjusting them, changing the tubes out for thick new ones, patching the old tubes, and giving it a general good clean! There were lots of people interested in my trip and bike, so I handed out quite a few of my business cards. They even had free coffee! So thanks very much Veloplus!

In St Gallen I’ve been staying with two kiwi’s- Kim and Lennon. Lennon works for Leica Geosystems, a survey equipment manufacturer that I’ve come to visit. Kim and Lennon have been super-accommodating to me, and I’ve met several of their friends (most of whom also work for Leica), and I’ve really enjoyed my stay and have felt at home.  Today I visited Leica, and had a great day meeting talking about geeky/cool (depending on your perspective) survey technology and equipment. Then at the end I got a tour of the factory with a retired employee called Hans. It was amazing seeing how this very precise equipment is put together. We often don’t think about it when using a GPS or Total Station, but so much effort goes into getting it right.

St Gallen is currently celebrating it’s 1400^th year! It was founded in 612 by an Irish monk. Apparently he talked to a bear or something- I’m not sure. Google it. Here’s a photo of a replica of the first buildings he built.

So it’s been a great week or so (apart from the lack of sun) through eastern Switzerland. From here it’s briefly across Austria and into Germany proper. It looks like there’s some great cycle routes through Bavaria so I’m looking forward to getting on those. I’m heading via Fussen to Munich, then on towards Salzburg where I’ll hopefully catch up with a friend from university who happens to be passing through at the same time.

Update: I decided to stay in St Gallen for another day. This is partly because I’m a whimp and it’s raining and I just cleaned my bike so I want at least one fine day of riding with it. Also it works better with the Warmshowers hosts I’ll be staying at on the way to Munich.