This summer, we decided to go on an 8-night train trip around Switzerland, to visit places that we had wanted to go to for a while and never did anything about.

This is my traveling log − mostly something for me to remember, but I like reading other people’s traveling blogs/threads, so maybe someone will enjoy these as well! It’s organized in 4 parts, where each part corresponds to”where we dropped our suitcases” (we stayed in 4 hotels, 2 nights in each). After some hesitation, we decided to travel in style and to not worry about transportation tickets – we each got a month-long General Abonnement (in first class because see previous point about “in style”), which covers the very, very vast majority of the transportation in Switzerland. Probably somewhat more expensive than unit tickets, and probably slightly more expensive than planning things correctly and taking individual day cards with a discount, but peace of mind also has a huge amount in value in my book.

We first travelled to Lausanne, which we have passed many times over the years, but where we had never stopped. We left home around noon, got lunch at the Zürich Hauptbahnhof, and took a direct train to Lausanne. First train control, and our tickets do seem to be valid – yay, I didn’t mess up the dates! 😛

The arrival in Lausanne and the following small walk to the hotel gives as a very first impression of the city: it’s Not Flat. By then, it was roughly 15:00; we decided to go for a small walk around the Lavaux vineyards. These are the one place that will inevitably make me go “wooooooow” when traveling past them on a train, and walking around them definitely confirmed the wow factor.

We walked from Grandvaux to Cully, and again: Not Flat. Going down that hill was already challenging enough; I would not have liked climbing uphill, I think! (For sure my shitty right knee would have looked at me with disapproval. As it is…) After this walk, where we also saw a shitton of lizards and somehow resisted the temptation of stealing some grapes from the vine (they looked ripe!), we went back to the hotel and arrived there around 18:00.

Time to find a restaurant, to go there, to have an absolutely excellent meal sitting at a delightful terrace (Jacques Restaurant, highly recommended). The food was amazing (especially anything around fish); the only annoying thing was that our neighbors were smokers, which got on my nerves a few times (but then I also didn’t ask them to move downwind for their cigarette, soooo.)

On the way back, we took the metro to go see the lake. Lausanne is the only city with a metro, and that metro is also Not Flat − there’s a sticker in the train warning that one of the stops’ platforms is at a 12% slope. It’s kind of weird to feel the metro brake much harder than it actually does due to the acceleration added by gravity!

The lake was quiet; we walked to the end of the jetty and went back home. The last adventure for the day was that our bus broke down: it was a trolley, and it needed to get its perches down to handle a section with road works… and one of the perches stayed up. We walked the remaining 3 stops (… uphill), and didn’t get passed by another bus. Hopefully they resolved it swiftly, still.

On the next day, Pierre went for a run in the city, and then we took the train to go to Bex, where we had tickets to visit the salt mine! We took the train to Bex, the bus to the salt mine, and started the visit at noon.

For the visit, we take the small mine train, go visit some tunnels with some explanations, come back to the main site with the train, and have a bit of food – chips salted with some salt from the mine, sausage that is actually dried in the mine too (fun gimmick tbh). The whole visit was pretty cool, but we both felt it was lacking a bit on the technical aspects of it. In particular, we did spend roughly 30 minutes on the train, and we got 0 mention of it during the visit − at the very least, I would have liked to know when it was built, see a map of the tracks (there was definitely some intersection going on)… and discuss the building of the rolling material itself, which is quite custom!

We still had some energy after the visit, so we decided for an impromptu visit to the Château de Chillon, which was on our way back to Lausanne. We decided against the audioguide – while I love a good guided visit, audioguides tend to get my attention drifting quite swiftly. So we visited the castle with the paper guide given at the entrance and following a number of information panels.

The path through the castle is very well made and well indicated; the castle itself has some very cool rooms and some neat furniture. There’s an overall feeling of “… yeaaaaah that’s how they restaured this at the beginning of the 20th century and the historical accuracy may not have been the priority” which was also interesting. Overall, I liked the visit − and the building itself is an impressive sight for sure.

We hurried a bit for the end of the visit, because we  were pretty close to the timing of the boat that was going from the castle back to Lausanne, and that sounded like a great idea (especially since our month-long transport ticket also covers boats!) And it was indeed a very pleasant trip along the lake, looking at the Lavaux vineyards from below, having the train and the boat exchanging honks, and getting some apéro on the deck.

We went back to the hotel to drop stuff, and went for dinner to Les Trois Rois, a very nice brasserie-style restaurant next to the train station − good food, pleasant service, this was nice! And we went back to the hotel around 21:30, where I’m writing this post as we’re planning for tomorrow.

On the next day, we checked out from the hotel and dropped our luggage in a locker at the train station in Lausanne, so that we could have some freedom to walk a bit in the city. We visited the cathedral, which has an impressive organ (quite modern, it seems) and stained glass windows from the 1930s that I found myself spending more time than I usually do on stained glass. We also walked in the city, visited a board game shop (because that’s what we do), and decided on a whim to visit the Élysée photographic museum.

Said museum had three exhibitions, dedicated to Alfredo Jaar, Hannah Darabi and Ella Maillart. The first one hit me the hardest: 20 photojournalists had been asked for their most joyful and saddest pictures, and both of them were projected on the walls in large format. The exhibition “mood” changed every 20 minutes to go from one side (“paradiso”) to the other (“inferno”), and both “sides” of the exhibition moved me tremendously, in very different ways (I was in tears when I exited the “inferno” part). The other exhibitions were also interesting, but didn’t move me nearly as much.

After the museum, we got our luggage back from the lockers and, after a short train ride, arrived in Montreux where we left them in the local lockers 🙂

As a life-long Queen fan, I almost cannot believe that it took me 18 years living in Switzerland before I went to Montreux − where a number of albums were recorded, and where there’s a very cool Freddie Mercury statue next to the lake.

The casino in Montreux is also home to the studio where Queen recorded there (they did buy said studio, actually), and there’s a small Queen museum on the first floor of the casino. There’s a lot of items; I particularly liked seeing a lot of song lyrics/drafts. There’s also a room where you can see some recording equipment and play with a few sliders to mix various song parts of a song. It was all quite neat; and it made me happy to see a bunch of fans around (the statue has a lot of people taking pictures with various extra items, and the museum has a full corridor plastered with pieces of paper with fan messages. That felt quite wholesome.

In Montreux, apart from that, we mostly strolled along the lake − there’s a very nice promenade; but we didn’t stay much longer before taking the train to Sion, our next destination.