The Train du Chocolat

On one of our days in Switzerland we drove into Montreaux to board the "Train du Chocolat" which was an all day trip from Montreaux through Montbovon onto Gruzeres and then to Broc. The train was really nice, first class according to the brochure, the engine was metallic gold with the name on it and there was only four carriages and they were like the old fashioned trains, actually they were old train carriages, but had like upholstered lounge chair like seats and carpeted floors and lovely big clean windows to look out of. The actual train journey was very scenic and relaxing, especially for David who could sit and enjoy the scenery as he didnt have to concentrate and drive! We arrived at the village of Gruyeres where we did a tour of the factory that makes the famous Gruyuere Cheese, I thought it would stink like other cheese factories we have visited in the past but it was all behind big glass walls which was excellent!! It was really interesting walking through the factory and seeing the huge copper vats full of hot milk and how they made the cheese, after the cheese is put into the moulds for a couple of days, they then dunk the cheese in vats of salt for another couple of days before storing them in a big cellar and turning them regularly. We got some samples to take home which were very handy as we had them on toast for tea that night!! After the cheese factory tour we had a couple of hours free to wander around the village of Gruyeres and check out the Castle of Gruyeres which was good but to tell you the truth we are a bit "castled and chateaued" out by now!! But it had great views of the surrounding countryside. The village was nice we had lunch at a cafe with good views and I had a ham and cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, and it was really good!! Most other people seemed to be eating cheese fondue, which looked way to cheesy for me!! We then boarded a bus to be transferred to the village of Broc to the "Maison Cailler-Nestle" Chocolate factory. The tour through the factory was interesting enough, but the free tasting (which was really why everyone was there!!) was excellent, they had all their range on the testing plates, but there is only so much chocolate you can eat in a few minutes!! They also had a factory shop with everything on sale. We then took the train back through the mountains to Montreaux. It was a great day, really enjoyable and relaxing.

Hiking in the Swiss Mountains

The weather has been great whilst we have been in Switzerland, it is around 15 degrees with sunny patches, so even though there is that crisp feel to the air it is not that cold considering we are surrounded by snow capped mountains. After we had a day of rest to recover from the drive up here we decided the next morning to go for a hike in the mountains. The lady in the information centre upon us enquiring about a walking map, told us of a good walk to a lookout up in the hills behind the resort, I was slightly worried about the steepness of the walk, but no according to her "it wasnt steep" (but as I bent my neck back to see where it was she was telling us to walk I thought "yeah well she didnt live in nice flat Birchip for 30 years!!). Anyway off we went, and it was very steep for the early part of the walk, but not too bad once we got up high as the track spiralled around the mountain rather than going straight up. It was a beautiful walk, we didnt see another walker for the whole hike, it took us two hours to get up there and one hour to get back down. The tracks were good, either through forests with nice soft leaves on the ground or gravel tracks and a bit of bitumen road as well. We saw a couple of para gliders as we passed the spot where they jump off the mountain, we came across a paddock of cows high up in the hills, it was so nice to as we walked near to them to hear all their bells jingling, they just look so cute with these huge bells around their necks!! David and I both loved the walk, just so different to anything we have done before and it was just so quiet, we passed by crystal clear running streams, absolutely beautiful views with only the sound of the gravel under our shoes, the birds in the trees or the jingling cow bells. A walk we will always remember.

Switzerland

David and I left Lake Como on Sunday morning (Jenny and Joll stayed and were then heading off to a different area of Switzerland to us), we caught the train back into Milan and collected our hire car from the Railway Station, which was very easy, all we had to do was drive from the centre of Milan to a village in the Swiss Mountains called Torgon, which is not far from Lausanne and the bottom end of Lake Geneva. Sounds easy, doesnt it!!! And as I am not that great at navigating by my own admission, we got a GPS with the car and they gave us a map (just in case the GPS wasnt much good, we should have been nervous about then when they said that!!). And as we had the GPS and the map, and me navigatting we didnt ask the car hire man how to actually get out of Milan. Mistake Number ONE!!! We put the address in the GPS and it "appeared" to get the instructions, all was good, problem is it didnt move past the first instruction which was turn west in 1.1kms!!! So two hours later after stopping at a park and asking three different groups of people, none of which spoke English, we finally got out of Milan!! Our map was not detailed enough to show all the small towns and at one stage in northern Italy and there was this huge, really long lake in between us and the direction we wanted to go! So we stopped in this tiny village and I went into the icecream shop to ask the lady for help. She had a little bit of english and I showed her on the map where we wanted to get to she shook her head and looked worried and said "oh, long, long way" anyway she told us to go to a town called Verbania, about 30km away and catch the car ferry across the lake to save time driving around it. This was very valuable advice as after we crossed the lake, which was a beautiful lake, similiar to Lake Como we were able to get onto one of the autostrades (their motorways) and finally get out of Italy! The drive through the mountains at the top of Italy and into Switzerland ws scary but spectacular (I was glad I wasnt driving), huge mountains all covered in heaps of snow all around us, more winding roads, we passed through "the longest ice pavillions in the world!" An ice pavillion is like a verandah made with concrete pillars on the edge of the road where it drops away down the mountain and with a concrete roof. They are there to stop the ice and snow from the mountains dropping on the cars. The day we passed through there was quite a bit of water, melted snow we assumed running over the edge down into the valleys below. We went through many tunnels, underneath these huge mountains, one was two and a half km long ( I thought of you Angela!!) And of course all of this for poor David was driving on what to us is the wrong side of the road. We came out of the big mountains overlooking a big city way down in the valley, over an enormous bridge and into the city which was called Brig and then onto Sion and then not far from the bottom of Lake Geneva we turned off the Autostrade, went through Vionnez up the mountains again for 25 minutes to reach our resort in the Village of Torgon. After more than eight hours of driving, with one toilet stop, we didnt get lunch as the line up was too big at the shop, so I just grabbed two packets of lollies which I ate in about an hour due to the stress of navigating, we were VERY, VERY pleased to see our resort (and 10 minutes before reception closed for the night!!) Our apartment is on the 6th floor of a chalet type building and has great views over the little village of Torgon to the valley below and the huge snow capped mountains on the other side of the valley. It is so quiet here, we have only seen maybe a dozen people staying here and the resort is really big, they must have thought it was Christmas when I booked in two years in advance!!! The resort has a heated pool, jacuzzi room, steam room, sauna and gym for us to use, we just have to get the key, unlock the door and turn the lights on!!! The hills around the village are so green, there are lots of flowering plants, cute Swiss houses and the cows really do have big bells around their necks!!

Lake Como

After leaving Corniglia, we caught the train to La Spezia, then another one from La Spezia to Genoa, another one from Genoa to Milan, then one from Milan to Lake Como!! Our hotel was in a great spot, good views across a town square to the lake. We had lake view rooms on the fourth floor. After checking in we went for a wander and caught the funicular train up the mountain, it was very steep, 750 metres at 55 degrees in 7 minutes, but great views from the top. The next day we caught a ferrz on Lake Como to visit Bellagio (where George Clooney used to go to drink coffee before he sold his house on the lake). The lake is huge and the best waz I can think to describe its shape is that it is shaped like a pair of legs and a torso with Bellagio placed near the corner where the lake goes down the other leg (well that is probably the nice way to describe it!!) It is not that wide though and the ferry criss crossed to the various villages along the way to pick up and drop off passengers. We bought tickets that allowed us to get on and off wherever we thought looked good. The mountains around the lake were really high and very, very steep, not even any flat land much, even at the level where the mountains met the lake. There were hundreds of houses, most looked big and nice built around the lake, we assumed lots would have been hotels as well. We could see many small villages way, way up on the mountains, we wondered how the houses stayed there it was that steep. There was also one church that appeared to be miles from any other buildings, it was perched on the side of a mountain that to us looked totally inaccessible. It took two hours to reach Bellagio on the ferry and we were told that it would take most of the day to cruise the whole lake. Bellagio was beautiful, it had a flat promenade which was lined with shops and restaurants. There was another one or two small narrow streets that ran parallel with the promenade up the hill with a few narrow streets made up totally of steps connecting them. It was a great place to wander around, the weather was warm and there were lots of small shops, a lot of which sold silk scarves and mens ties as well as Murano glass, art galleries and shoe and clothes shops. We had a really nice lunch and enjoyed our visit to Bellagio. The town of Lake Como itself is nice too with plenty of things to do for the tourists, it was another beautiful town in a beautiful country. We all loved Italy.

La Terrazza Apartment at Corniglia

Here are some of the photos of our apartment in Corniglia which overlooked the main street, how nice is it! And the view from one of our windows over the terraced hills of grape vines and down towards the sea!

Haircuts at Corniglia!!

Jenny and I were both in need of a haircut and colour, so while we were having a rest day in Corniglia we went to the hairdressers to see about an appointment. The hairdressers was full of ladies getting their hair coloured black!! Of course the hairdresser had very limited english but we made scissor snipping movements with our fingers and somehow got her to understand that we wanted a colour or "coloure" in Italian. She then gave us a business card and eventually we understood that she wanted us to go to the cafe further down the street which her daughter Christiana owned and Christiana could speak english and she had to write down for us what we wanted and then we took the instructions back to the hairdresser!! So with a fair bit of trepidation we made our appointment for the next day. Jenny's appointment was first so I said to Jenny if she came out looking weird or with blue hair I wasnt going to follow!! Louisa was the hairdressers name and it was a bit strange spending over 2 hours sitting in a hairdressing salon not being able to understand what the hairdresser, the other old lady getting her hair done and what seemed like half of Corniglia who just calling in for a chat were saying! Anyway Jennys hair looked great with her cut, colour and blow-wave so that made me feel a bit better!! It was funny when she put the colour in my hair as I had been trying to get her to understand that I didnt want any red "rouge" tinges and the colour when it went on was bright orange, I must have looked worried as she said a couple of times "no orange, no orange" in her Italian way. Louisa had a resident cat called Lucy who looked very at home in the salon, she had a blanket on the couch, and she sat up on the bench in front of my mirror while I was having my colour done!! After all that we were both very happy with the results, as were the boys! Louisa had blow-waved mine straight and it looked quite glam (for a while). That was until we went on a long walk and got caught in the rain, I ran into Louisa in the cafe later that daz and she looked at my hair and threw her hands in the air as if to say "what happened to your hair!!". David went in the next day and had a trim as well so Louisa did fairly well out of the Australian tourists!! And yes ANOTHER cat Corinne!!!

Corniglia and Cinque Terre

We took the train from Rome to Corniglia which was the village where we were booked to stay for three nights whilst in Cinque Terre. Corniglia is the middle of the five villages. A lady who does relief teaching at one of the schools I work at in Brisbane gave me the name of an apartment to stay at called La Terrezza which was owned and operated by her two friends Marie-Angela and her sister Nadia. La Terrezza is right in the centre of the village and our apartment was on the first floor with three bedrooms, kitchen, lounge and bathroom. It was beautifully decorated with all sorts of knick knacks and had paintings on the doors, it was just so welcoming and nice. Our apartment had shutters on the windows and two balconies, from one we could look down to the rugged coast and the sea, the gardens below and terraced hills with grape vines growing on them. From the other we could look down over the shops and the street. It was just so nice to wake up in the morning and open the shutters and smell the fresh coffee waft up from the cafe below and listen to the locals chatting away in Italian, even if we couldnt understand what they were saying! Corniglia is the highest of the five villages and it was 365 steps up to the village from the train station!! The village was tiny, the main street was onlz a few feet wide, cobbled paths, it had a little town square (where David and Joll sat and watched the world go by with the other old local blokes, just like Birchip really!!), it had two churches, a few cafes/restaurants, a tiny little deli that sold a few groceries and above all, magnificent view.

Marie-Angela and Nadia were very welcoming and delivered beautiful breakfasts to our apartment. After breakfast on our first day we did the dishes and they were most upset as it was "their job". They also took all our washing and it reappeared the next day, washed, dried and ironed back in our apartment!! In the days before we had arrived they had had lots of rain so most of the walking tracks between the towns were closed, we did do the "del Amore" track which was lovely. David and I walked down to the Corniglia Marina one morning, which was really just a tiny concrete pier and we counted the steps back up, there were almost 600!! You have got to be prepared to do lots of walking of hills and steps if you come to Cinque Terre! We visited the five villages, all were very nice, we caught the ferry from the the first village Monterosso back to the fifth village Riomaggorie, a 40 minute trip that gave us great views of the coastline and villages from the sea. We all agreed it was a wonderful, relaxing place to stay, a pleasant change after a few busy weeks of sightseeing and we would all love to go back and do the walks one day.