Friday, August 03, 2007
Delayed blogs
Stage 31 -- Grindelwald to the Kleine Scheidegg
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Tuesday July 31st, 2007
We spent a very pleasant free day in Grindelwald, or more accurately in the Hotel Regina, in large part because it has such a lovely wellness center that we all felt no need to go anywhere else. After blogging and email in the morning, Lidia and Ioana arrived around lunchtime (which we skipped, as is becoming usual on a rest day) and then we all went down to a melange of massages, manicures, saunas (2), steam baths (2), and swimming pools (2, one inside, one out), as well as a saltwater meditation pool, a Kneipp bath, cold and hot showers, and various relaxation rooms. Ahhhhhh.
More than a little refreshed, the following morning we set out for the long climb up to and along the base of the north face of the Eiger to the Kleine Scheidegg pass. "We" in this case being Arnulf and I because:
o Russell needed to find an ear doctor to resolve partial deafness caused by a wax ball he had unwisely pushed down his ear canal (removal successful)
Monday, July 30, 2007
Russell posts again: "bloggart"
The vast majority of Swiss folk are pleasant, helpful, content and generally wonderful in a tra la la kind of way. Perhaps it is the abundance of private-numbered bank accounts, the world famous spectacular vistas, the predominance of pork n' cheese, something prionic in the air, the active involvement of the Red Cross ( as evidenced on flags everywhere), the overwhelming japanese signage, or shrinking glaciers, but it leaves no doubt that there is something fundamentally different about the Swiss as compared to the average human.
As an octegenarian bicycles by me at speeds rivaling that of the Pelleton on the downhill, I am surprised at the the familiar "Greuzi!" call of greeting she humorously wafts in my direction, as she seems to have breath to spare, something I would not. I am somewhat annoyed by their sportliness, as no matter how hard I try, my adiposity just keeps increasing. I don't mean to gripe, but it is in the comparison that I always fail to measure up, and this eventually gets Jaba down. I have increased my physical output a thousand-fold these last five weeks, but still the average Swiss child can bench press more than I.
We recently observed a pregnant Swiss 98 pounder throw a rock twenty feet, and the rock must have weighed as much as a VW. This was during a competition staged as part of a folk festival that took place way up on a mountain pass. The air was so thin I worried about foetal oxygenation status, but the mother's performance indicated a thriving state of health. Helicopters have a hard time finding enough air to push through the blades at this altitude, but the Swiss are unaffected.
I thus must search for some reason behind this ostensible difference. What makes them superior? It can't just be a question of placement ie. higher on the earth's crust. One of the reasons might be genetics. Given the relative physical boundaries the Alps provide, perhaps a certain amount of selective breeding over the centuries has favoured the trait of altitude thrivation, as has been observed in himalayan sherpa chest excursion measurements, or andean goat herders' hematocrit levels. My most ridiculous fear of interspecies breeding seems to be absurd as there are no tails or pelts to be seen.
Could it be the cheese, which is consumed in vast quantites? There is cheese in everything eaten, I kid you not. Look at the ingredients on anything purchased as a comestible item, and somewhere cheese is to be found. It's used in soap powders, marmot-based massage oils, gasoline, rocking chairs, air fresheners, and even beer. Cheese is sprayed on fields as a fertilizer. Cheese is used as paper. Cheese is eaten even more than pork. Switzerland could be the moon, which they say......(is made of cheese fer all ye fuzzy furryners).
If it's not the cheese, then what? I suspect I might never know, but I will eat more cheese in the vague hope that I too might become more Swiss over time. I will however, never be able to throw the rock that far, or even lift it. And I am not pregnant no matter how it looks or what the strip indicated.
So for now, it's cheese rather than pork for me. Cheese tartare followed by cheese soup, a small piece of amuse cheese, followed by filet of cheese medium rare, then the queen of desserts' cheese brulee, followed by a plate of cheese, all washed down with a cheese smoothie. I will walk over the mountain passes, as opposed to crawl, sometime during this trip, I promise you.
Stage 30 -- Meiringen to Grindelwald
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Sunday July 29th, 2007
We walked out of our hotel at 8:15 under partially cloudy skies. The day promised to be fairly cool, which suited us well, since although the hike up and over the Grosse Scheidegg pass would not be a difficult one, it would be long.
Because of this Beatrice, mindful of her leg cramps after the last hike, had decided to take the Postbus up to the Schwarzwaldalp, thereby saving herself some 800m of climbing and shortening the day by 3+ hours. But Bea cannot endure inactivity for long when in the mountains, so it was not to be. She left the bus at Rosenlaui for a short walk up the side valley to see the glacier, and some 2 hours and several hundred meters of ascent and descent later got back on the bus.
As a result at the end of the day she had tears of pain in her eyes once more. However, on balance it was probably a reasonable bargain because she said that the Rosenlaui valley was so beautiful that she was crying with joy (and by the following morning she was fine once more). Clearly, therefore, like Meiringen (and Elm, and Vaduz...), this is another place that I will have to come back to.
We spent a half an hour at the pass watching a "Schwingen" competition at a little folksfest. Schwingen is sort of like a stunted version of sumo, or possibly like cows (not bulls :-) vieing for dominance. The two participants in each bout spend most of their time bent double, cheek to cheek, holding onto one anothers' pants, punctuated by short bursts of frenetic movement and grunting, and culminating in one or the other being thrown to the ground and pinned. Not the most elegant of sports, but somehow appropriate in the Alpine context!
The views were (as usual) spectacular: with massive glaciers and even more massive mountains. The high points, as we were coming down, were our first views of the Eiger, and the Upper Grindelwald Glacier cascading down its narrow valley to end about 1350m, making it one of the lowest glaciers, if not the lowest, in Switzerland.
We reached Grindelwald around 4PM after some 7 hours of hiking. Compared to previous visits we were in remarkably good shape: in the past we have arrived here and chosen to take the elevator rather than walk up or down a single flight of stairs. Clearly we are much fitter than we have ever been (from a hiking perspective), which is most pleasing!
Grindelwald, by the way, is as "touristy" as it gets in Switzerland, due to its proximity to the Eiger / Moench / Jungfrau trio, but despite this it manages to be a very pleasant place to stay -- the beauty of the surroundings somehow overwhelms the commercialism, at least for me.
I was pleased, however, seeing all the people, to have booked our hotel a week in advance. This was further in advance than I had originally intended when planning the trip, but for a couple of reasons I have changed my thinking as far as reservation strategy is concerned:
o I quickly found that reserving accommodations on weekends can be difficult. Even now, reserving two weeks ahead for weekends, I find I can often get only my third or fourth choice because the others are booked.
o we have found that the incidence of bad weather (i.e., sufficient to make us wish we weren't hiking), is lower than expected. And the incidence of awful weather (i.e., sufficient to make it impossible for us to take the route we had planned to take) is very low. We have been hiking for forty days (30 stages) now, and only once has the weather been awful (going over the Bockscharte to the Prinz-Luitpold-Haus in Stage 12)... and even then we were able to hike it anyway. So the need to delay making reservations until the last minute is much lower than I expected it to be.
o Lastly, the number of days where the hike is truly dangerous in awful weather, and where there are no lower-level or safer options, is quite low, so the risk of having to change a string of reservations is very low. Moreover, even if awful weather and such a no-option day were to coincide, since we have many rest days planned in I'd probably only have to change two or three days at the most.
I thus am now booking a week or ten days ahead for weekday stops, and two weeks for weekends or bottle-necks (where there are few alternatives). Thus far we haven't had to break or change any reservations, and we remain exactly on schedule. However, we are now entering August (high season), and afterwards comes September (higher likelihood of awful weather), so I'd be surprised if our record is still perfect by the time we get to Monaco.
One final thought: it now seems quite natural to say "by the time we get to Monaco", which is a big change. We seem to have settled into a comfortable routine: all three of us remarked on this last night, when, after a full day of hiking we nevertheless had the energy to spend a couple of hours before dinner in the excellent wellness facility of the Hotel Regina where we are staying. Our various aches and pains seem to be diminishing from day to day, and seven hours of hiking (which corresponds to a planned 8 to 8.5 hour hike, since we now find that we hike 15-20% faster than the estimated times) now seems like a comfortable distance.
Pyschologically too we are settling down, as some come to accept the plan, others work out how to balance group interaction with private time, and as all benefit from the reduced levels of stress associated with chronic pain and fatigue.
It is starting to feel as if we might make it....
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Continuation of Russell -- One man and his Blog
Cows rule, as they are ubiquitous. A helicopter flew overhead yesterday with a cow suspended beneath it confirming my suspicion that cows are at the top of the food chain, not ourselves. Saner people than myself suggested the cow was sick and was being transported to a more vet-accessible area, but I believe otherwise. People walk, cows fly, seems simple to me who's on top For instance, all the cows have yellow tags in their ears. On first glance, this appears to be a cataloging system, but with closer inspection, one realizes this is noise reduction technology of the highest quality, employed so that the sound of their own bell doesn't drive them insane. This technology has yet to be made available to me, and thus I have gone a little round the bend from all the ringing. Another technological intervention proving bovine superiority, is the use of electrified fences to keep humans from straying too near the cows. The shock is particularly nasty to the human nervous system, but co
ws seem unaffected by the occasional contact. Gated communities are the in thing for the upwardly mobile herd, keep the human riff raff out at all cost!
Every hiker knows of the cow gauntlet. This is when, hiking along a trail, suddenly one or more cows blocks the path, and you must then walk the dreaded cow gauntlet. Cows sense your incipient fear and refuse to move when approached. If the wind is right, small strands of mucous are blown from their noses, creating an early warning system somewhat like the web of a spider. Aware of your proximity, they crowd the path, forcing you off of it. You skirt them warily, but to leave the path is to enter full-on dung and hoof-wrecked terrain, which you traverse usually with deleterious incident. Heaven forbid that any of your clothing is red, as we have seen this attracts the damn beasts and they start to give chase! I am haunted by the cow gauntlet, and fear intimate contact with these huge beasts as I am small and easily crushed. One licked my hand the other day it's sandpapery tongue sening shivers through me. I am their plaything and they know it. I live in fear and yet must eat chees
e to live, thus do we serve the cow.
A piercing whistle is heard and small brown furry animals run into burrows. This is the warning call of the Muermel Tier (marmot), a rodent often encountered in the Alps. Cute they might appear, but their holes evilly await the hopping hiker, to turn an ankle or break a bone. Some of the locals have banded together in opposition and now sell Marmot oil for a variety of purposes. One gets about a liter of oil per fat marmot, according to our innkeeper, who hawks the stuff in his hut. The oil is very strong, he informs us, a natural form of cortisone, good for muscle and joint aches, viral upper respiratory infections, botulism, menstrual cramps, and hair loss. We purchased a jar and sadly I spilled some on my flipflops, and the rather distasteful musky odor follows me around without surcease. I worry that this particular jar of oil was derived from a female marmot in heat, as many of the rodents now seem to look at me with a driven look I find quite disconcerting.
On a side note, the Swiss seem to use helicopters for the most mundane of activies. Yesterday I saw a helicopter hovering above a lake and a line with a hook on it was let down into the water. There was a picture of a 108 cm trout caught from a local lake, framed on the wall of last night's restaurant. Perhaps this was small fry, and a helicopter is necessary to catch the big ones, but still, you'd think some motorized winch on the shore would suffice, as opposed to a helicopter. All these banks, all that money...has to be used somehow I guess.
I will talk of other animals anon, but am called to a dinner of cheese-smothered, arterially-bothersome pork fat, and must cut this short, for I have not long to live.
Russell in Meiringen -- one man and his blog
A tour of the Alps and currently Switzerland cannot be considered complete without a description of the various animals, and their habits, that abound in this alpine wilderness occasionally spotted with villages. It seems that humans are in a minority here, as their settlements are far and few between, especially if one is walking. What humans one does see are obviously beholden unto the animals as they serve them with both deference and concern. The most noticable animal is the cow, both audibly and olfactorily. One senses a bite on one's leg, one slaps, a (poorly named) horsefly ( as I have seen only 2 or 3 horses so far, but have seen over a billion cows ) escapes near death, and one knows the cows are nearby providing building materials for colonies of said flies. The ground is a checker board of artfully splattered redolent waste, which one navigates at one's peril in a hopping fashion. Since our hike has been taxing so far to say the least, one's legs are ill equipped for such a travel mode, and more often than not, one's uncoordinated hop leads one directly into full contact with the detritus. It's hard to imagine one could get even dirtier or smellier, but such is the case
Free day in Meiringen
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Saturday July 28th
Meringen is a wonderful little town, friendly, full of life and history and things to do, and very well laid out. I particularly liked the surprisingly large church together with massive free-standing campanile in a deeply peaceful setting just up the road from our hotel. The inside is, despite the typical Swiss Protestant lack of ornamentation, very unusual, with free-standing massive wood columns of almost Egyptian stature supporting the roof.
Even more interesting are the ruins of previous churches that you can visit underneath the present-day church. These were discovered during renovations and reveal that the church had been destroyed and rebuilt on many occasions over at least a thousand years, mostly, it seems, as a result of the massive flash-floods known as "Murs" (or at least that what I think they are called).
Murs are actually almost more like avalanches or landslides: walls of water bringing vast quantities of rock, sand, gravel, and earth down with them. On a wall inside the church there is a line that must be 5 or 6 meters above the floor. Above it an inscription says that in the eighteenth century one such Mur filled the church with sand and rock up to the line! It also adds that through the effort of "four quarters" of the population, the church was cleared of the rubble and reopened in a mere fourteen days. Given the number of locals whose houses must have also been damaged or destroyed in the event, this is a remarkable testament to their piety.
It is easy to forget today that until quite recently life must have been very hard for the Swiss in their Alpine valleys. From avalanches to landslides, to Murs and regular floods, to snowstorms cutting off access for weeks at a time, to Foehn-driven fires (the Foehn is a hot dry wind that can blow at near hurricane force for days at a time), it seems as if they must have aspent at least half their time rebuilding their villages and towns.
Meiringen in particular seems to have been particularly subject to catastrophes, as evidenced both by the excavations and inscription at the church and also by the unusual and unusually consistent Belle Epoque appearance of most of the houses. The explanation for this is that in the 1840s, after a particularly massive fire caused by a Foehn that destroyed most of the town, they decided that henceforth houses would be built in stone... and they haven't burned down since.
Our hotel, Hotel zum Alpbach, is also very pleasant, and we had an excellent evening meal accompanied by a couple of fine bottles of St. Emilion Grand Pontet 2000, which was particularly pleasing to me since I have a case or two of the wine in my cellar!
The rest day, by the way, was spent fairly typically: a mixture of errands, blogging and email, games, reading, a modicum of sightseeing (key decision factor: very little walking must be involved!), and generally relaxing and gathering energy for the next hike.