What a country. Switzerland is Martijn’s secret love, next to his boat, VW bus and motorbike. It’s been 10 years I hear we need to go to the Alps for trekking, with good weather, because it is so extremely beautiful. Not that I am negative about this, just I will not take the initiative to arrange it myself. Guess how many times we went for trekking holidays. You guessed right.
I have been to Geneve and Zurich before and once we stayed in a camping with the VW van of Martijn on the way to Greece. It had beautiful view over the mountains, but it rained so much we didn’t see much of it. We spent our time inside the van giggling every time there was yet another thunder.
This time we took it for granted it would rain and be cold and all that, so we set farewell to the sun in the borders. We were wrong! We arrived at a superweird small camping in Claro with the sun above us. Aready at the phone the woman was weird, she thought I spoke German (Me? Seriously?) when I was trying to communicate in basic Italian. We arrived there and paid 56€ (cultural shock and not only) for one night, at the bottom of a waterfall, a bit like out of a movie. Everything was basic, embedded in the environment, with wood, stone etc. The swimming pool was in the same spirit, not fancy but functional, and was surrounded by mountains. It was 30 degrees, so within no time all 4 of us were in the pool. Ten minutes later we had to rush out, it had started raining. Sigh.
But the most noteworthy piece of the camping was the people. Dressing code was big shoes, short pants, lose t-shirt and short hair. I wonder how I passed the controls at the entrance. From behind, you would not know if someone is a man or a woman. A real mountaineer that respects himself walks even to the swimming pool with his Meindls and walking sticks, just in case it is too rocky on the way. And they don’t talk. At-all. Real loners, ‘it’s me and the mountain’ kind of mentality. My weirdo detector went on and started screaming every time one of them would be close.
We are social people, say hi to others, offer our neighbours what we drink or eat etc and in all places we’ve been it worked just fine. There you got the feeling everyone was trying to minimize eye contact, by fear you might talk to them. Ok, it is a bit exaggerated, but you get my point.
We had a great time with the four of us and enjoyed the swimming pool also the day after. Then we drove to a village through the most amazing route on the planet. Mountains right, mountains left, in the front, on the back, oh-my-God, I am in a documentary! Tunnel Gottard was packed by Dutch and Germans returning home, so Martijn decided to take a route through the mountains. It was our trekking holidays, just without walking. I must have taken a million fotos, impressive to say the least.
When we arrived in Andermatt, we started sensing a bit of hostility towards guests. My interpretation is that they are fed up with ski vacation tourists and get some sort of allergy when they see foreign plates. But it could be just irrelevant. After 15 minutes of making turns unable to park (even if the place was empty, ‘private’ was always indicated), we parked in front of a building. Within no time a man opened his window, red face, and started screaming to us that this is no camping, get the hell out of here blah blah. Martijn tried to explain we stay for an hour only and he kept going, he was really furious. The weirdo alarm was red, peeping, so I asked Martijn to remove the camper – maybe the lunatic screaming would break it or so.
Anyway, it was a beautiful village, still with some hostility in the air. We had lunch, served by the most inexpressive waitress of the entire holiday. I wanted to wave my hand in front of her face and say: ‘Hallooooooo? Is there anybody there?’, but decided against it because I am above ten and this is not socially accepted behavior. We were sort of happy to leave the place actually, but also happy to have seen it.
Thank God the next destination served Swiss some fairness. Again a very original camping, a real farm with cows and all (and the accompanying smell of the cows number 2s), but with extremely nice people! We were in a sunny valley at the foothills and people were clearly very different. 95% were campers, parked chaotically but not with an avoiding-contact mentality, quite the opposite in fact. People were laughing out loud, big groups were formed, kids were running, normal stuff. Pfieuw, the weirdo detector, went off. We parked in the middle of some ten campers of the same brand with very friendly owners. When we saw the ‘Cartago’ flag, we realized this was more than just a coincidence: it was a Cartago fun club meetup and we had parked right in the middle of it! Yeeeee! Camperers with passion about campering! Yeeee! We saw some high-end impressive campers from the inside and daydreamt on our future camper -> when we will be rich.
Gioia and I swam in something that looked like a swimming pool. It had a hose bringing water directly from the tab and hundreds of flying insects had found a brutal death in its interior. I would wave the dead flies away with my hand and make space for Gioia to pass. Within no time the insect bodies would come back, so there we go again, mom sending them away so we could swim. Good opportunity to teach Gioia to keep her mouth closed underwater, you never know what you swallow. All in all nice stuff, I am not really complaining, because we could still swim outdoors without freezing and this was more important than the dead flies.
The day after we left the cow smell and Switzerland behind us: it was time for France! We were (and still are) chasing the good weather, which brought us to fairy tale Kaysersberg. End of this episode.