{"id":315,"date":"2014-09-03T15:36:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T03:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=315"},"modified":"2015-06-23T11:33:44","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T23:33:44","slug":"cogwheel-trains-mountains-ferries-and-birds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=315","title":{"rendered":"Cogwheel Trains, Mountains, Ferries, And Birds. Also A Brocken Spectre."},"content":{"rendered":"

It took me a couple of hours to get back to sleep after reading The Work Email<\/strong>, and then my alarm woke me 45 minutes later, in accordance with The Plan.
\n~sigh~<\/em>
\nGetting into Zurich and onto a train to Lucerne was fairly easy, in that I followed Jono & he knew where the hell he was going, and in maybe an hour we were in Lucerne, where the weather was looking pretty good.
\nOur original plan had been to potter about in Lucerne, take the ferry to Alpnachstadt, and the cogwheel train up to Pilatus-Klum. (We figured this out last night, while swearing at the Pilatus website, which does not have an easily-accessed map or diagram saying where the various features\/places used to describe the transport options actually are<\/strong>)<\/em>
\nThanks to the weather, we decided to get a train to Alpnachstadt & go up the mountain sooner rather than later, to take advantage of the clear skies, though we did take the time to walk across the Chapel Bridge.
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There was a slight cock-up with train timings, where two number were accidentally transposed & we missed the train we’d intended to take, but since our tickets were from Dietikon to Alpnachstadt by way of Zurich & Lucerne, that just meant getting on the next one, and we made it just<\/em> in time to get on The Steepest Cogwheel Railway In The World. It did not disappoint.
\nThe train car is stepped, much like the Wellington Cable Car, but more so; There’s no aisle, and you enter from the stepped ‘platform’.
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The way up is quite scenic, I suppose.<\/p>\n

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In the fullness of time, and after a delay to let the descending trains past (it’s single-track for most of the way, and the points might<\/em> just be sections of track which can move sideways while the train is on it), we got to the top of Pilatus, Pilatus-Klum.<\/p>\n

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The first thing to do was book\/reserve our trip down, so we gave ourselves a couple of hours & found a walk which could be done in the available time; There was a choice between the Tischenhorn, the highest point, or the Mattenhorn, which is lower & a bit further. We went with Tischenhorn, as it was slightly shorter at 35 minutes one-way, and did not involve descending into a valley. The Matenhorn, by comparison, had an uphill climb at both ends, which looked unpleasant.
\n(The second thing was putting on my warm jacket; Turns out that 1500m vertically makes a big temperature difference)<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a hotel. A monumentally expensive hotel, which makes it basically OK from a Swiss pricing point of view.
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If you squint just right, you can see the path we took heading out to the left of the picture; You walk past the hotel & keep going.<\/p>\n

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It’s possible to walk up. Also down, but that, I think, would be annoying; Up is easier, I find.
\nThere’s a walk which takes you to the peak over yonder, but as it was uphill in both directions, and the weather was closing in, we elected to go for something shorter.
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It wasn’t open while we were there, but there’s a gondola which comes up the other side of the mountain, so that you can do a round-trip.
\nOr could, if it weren’t the off season.
\nMaybe if I go back, and do the walk up from the lakeside, I’d take the gondola down.
\nIt’s a hell of a view, and a hell of a long way down.
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Oh, and the view goes on … Pretty much forever, as Jono is demonstrating.<\/p>\n

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\nVertigo was kind of kicking in here, so this grin was probably the last one before we reached the local summit; Everything else would more accurately have been a grimace.
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Looking back along the trail, back to where there was safety, and guard-rails.
\nOK, it wasn’t\u00a0that<\/strong> bad. While steep, the drop-off was probably survivable, if fantastically unpleasant, and the view was good.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Cloud was banking up against the\u00a0other<\/strong> side of the mountain, as Jono is demonstrating here.
\nThe path actually cut through the ridge to the other side for a while, and from memory, on the spot just in front of Jono, it drops away on both sides, so for a brief moment you’re on the ridgeline.<\/p>\n

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This, as near as I can tell, is part of the view from the top, and it’s a fantastic view, well worth the climb.
\nAnd the vertigo.
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The walk was, I think, close to the limits of my ability to do heights. If the guard wires weren’t there I doubt I’d have been able to reach the summit, but I did; Sat there on the little bench, looking at the side where the air was clear & the mountain sloped steeply down to farms, with the faint clong of cow-bells rising up.
\nThis meant that I was not looking at the other side, where the clouds blocked the view and mountain drops vertically into white nothingness, and was rewarded by an ambassador from the wildlife of Pilatus, who wanted to have a word about our lunch.<\/p>\n

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The views are amazing, and I’m glad I was able to do the walk & see them.
\nI’m equally glad that there were well-formed paths, as seen here;
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Somewhere along the way there we were lucky enough to see a Brocken Spectre<\/a>, though my photo is not very good.
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We made it back in enough time for Jono to consider one of the other peaks (I took one look at the stairway & decided that one was enough), before deciding that the stairs were kind of uneven, & that he didn’t really feel like climbing them.
\n\"DSC00648\"
\nThe clouds closing in and obscuring the top didn’t help.<\/p>\n

We got the little train back down, and I managed to get quite a good seat, just behind the driver.<\/p>\n

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We passed by some magnificently uninterested cows on the way down, complete with alpine cowbells.<\/p>\n

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As we had the time, we took the ferry back, with the requisite spectacular views which are apparently just a thing<\/em> around these parts.<\/p>\n

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Back in Lucerne, we wandered through the old town & eventually found an access onto the old walls of the city which wasn’t blocked by construction, and climbed a guard tower.
\nThere’s a good chunk of the old city walls left, admittedly with the odd roadway cut through them, and at some point I’ll upload my photos of them.<\/p>\n

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\"IMG_2754\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took me a couple of hours to get back to sleep after reading The Work Email, and then my alarm woke me 45 minutes later, in accordance with The Plan. ~sigh~ Getting into Zurich and onto a train to Lucerne was fairly easy, in that I followed Jono & he knew where the hell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday-2014"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-55","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}