Day 9: Vaduz – Andermatt

I’ve just arrived back to my hotel for tonight, situated in the Swiss town of Andermatt, a sleepy little place and pretty much a dedicated tourist destination for walkers and skiers. It’s not very big at all, in fact I’ve explored all there is in just under an hour, including grabbing a bite to eat – my first since breakfast this morning in Lichtenstein.

It’s been a pretty long and exhausting day today, despite the journey here only taking around six hours. I think I’ll head out for a couple of beers later and see if the town livens up at night, but I’m not expecting big things – That’s probably for the best though, because an early night is very much overdue.

I was hoping to set off fairly early this morning – have a quick breakfast and hit the road for just gone 9am, however I got chatting to the only other person in the hotel restaurant as I started to wake up with a lovely cup of coffee. I bump into the strangest and most wonderful people... Francine Massey, an American woman, was planning on taking the overnight train through to Spain in order to meet her husband who’s taking part in a three-cushion pool tournament over there. It’s a pretty big deal for them obviously, as Mike - her husband, has won seventeen trick-shot titles at world or international level. She was keen to hear about what I’ve been up to on my trip thus far and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting to her as I filled myself up on most of what the hotel buffet had to offer. Before I knew it 9.30 had come and gone and we were still talking!

Finally hitting the road at just gone 10am, I travelled through Lichtenstein on my way back to Switzerland – north this time after arriving from the south and hoping for a nice, easy, quick and uneventful ride through to Andermatt. This was apparently not to be the case, as just before leaving Vaduz, Two police patrol bikes who were in front of me halted my progress. I stopped and waited to see what they wanted, but they just sat there, doing nothing, but making sure that no-one (including me) got passed them. When two blacked out BMWs with Swiss flags on each bonnet pulled out of the entrance to an underground car park, I finally twigged as to what was going on and smiled. For three miles I tagged along behind the back of a Swiss diplomatic convoy out of Lichtenstein! Looks like I’m going to be having these crazy things happen to me whether I want them too or not!

Despite the size of Lichtenstein, it’s a surprisingly difficult place to get out of! I found the first couple of towns I needed to travel through alright, but the third was a real pain. Conflicting advice from locals compounded the problem, and I spent a good twenty minutes trying to get back on track. Once I’d found where I was going the rest of the day was pretty much plain sailing, taking the main road out into Switzerland, and following it most of the way to Andermatt, passing lovely quaint villages, bigger bustling towns and strange oddities along the way, from bizarre sculptures, through to llama trecking excursions! Maybe next time...

The highlight of the day has to be the ride through Klausenpass though. This was a ridiculous drive up and through the mountains, made both entertaining and nerve-wracking as I navigated my way past cattle wandering in the road and doing my very best to keep my eyes on the road. As I found out when I got to a cafe at the top, several bikers have died in recent years on this pass, with a regular rider (who seemed to work for Swiss mountain rescue) telling me how his friend (comrade) had come off at the highest point, and dropped 350 feet... Needless to say I made it through ok, and despite everything, had a real blast navigating my way through. I have three similar roads to take tomorrow, but as I understand it, they’re nowhere near as treacherous.

At the cafe I also met a couple of young German guys, David and Daffid, who were coming through from lake Constance, purely on a one day trip from their home towns, and exploring Switzerland for the first time also. Epic day trip guys! They seemed to really like Betty and her chrome, but not as much as the engine noise as they laughed when we said our goodbyes and I fired her up for the journey back down the pass.

By the time I’d made it to the bottom and reached Altdorf I was running pretty low on fuel. Not knowing when the next manned service station would be, I made my first big school-boy error of the trip and decided to try my luck at a self-service station. As I tried to understand the instructions and fed the machine €10, expecting the pump to start working, it didn’t. Instead I was told the machine had timed out and received a nice voucher receipt for my money rather than fuel. Not knowing what to do with it, where to put it, or who the hell to talk to in order to claim my money back or get some petrol from it, after ten minutes I left (in a bit of a grump) and found a “proper” petrol station a mile or so down the road.

Deciding I’d pretty much had enough of riding for the day as I left Altdorf, I made my way through to Andermatt on the dual carriageway. This cheered me up no end as I realised I was only 30km or so from my destination at this point. It also made a nice change to be able to get up some speed and feel like I was making some real progress, whilst still bearing witness to some fantastic scenery, not to mention tunnels through the mountains – something I’ve both come to look forward to experiencing and enjoy immensely.

Arriving into Andermatt around 4.30pm, I popped into the local tourist information office and found out about cheap hotels with garages in the town. As well as being a beautiful country, Switzerland also appears to be a pretty damn expensive place to be... Maybe it’s because Andermatt is a tourist place, but at €75 for an ultra basic room and “free” garage parking, I definitely feel like I’ve been stung. From the looks of some of the other hotels in the town though, I could certainly be paying a huge amount more!

It’s been a pretty cold day too here, especially driving through the mountains (to be expected perhaps), but apart from the very quick and infrequent spots of drizzle the weather has been pretty good. Very cloudy, but with the occasional break in the sunshine, riding through Switzerland has been most pleasant. I’m really looking forward to tomorrows ride out through to Basel and getting back out onto the mountain roads (First Furkapass and then Grindlepass, with Brunigpass to finish), but for now I think I’m going to put my feet up for an hour or so, relax, and then head back into town before retiring for a very early night.