Running in the Alps

So they won. We drove to the point where we left of yesterday and simply continued walking up river. But, I guess we didn't really know how else we could possibly top walking in a valley with water of the most beautiful colour and snow tipped mountains as a backdrop.

After we spent almost 5 hours walking uphill (with constant camera pauses, sitting next to the river watching the water flow, chasing colourful lizards through the bush in a chance to catch another glimpse), I decided against an alternative to catching the post car (aka. hourly bus) down the hill. I ran down. The view was amazing, being more open than the forest we were walking through on the way up, but my knees do not appear to be willing to forgive me for this yet. 7km run after a 4.5 hour walk does not appear to be their idea of a holiday.

The walks themselves in this area are really kind of funny. Constantly you find a little piece of "art" around the place. Somewhat seemingly just scattered about. Everyone seems to think that they can only walk in the morning, given that we started off being swarmed by school groups and were constantly passing by other people, which spontaneously stopped at some point such that we didn't even see any locals anymore. The walks go through weird stuff including cow hers, abandoned villages, active villages, bridges, boulders that look like they were meant for a giants, and the list just seems to go on. Hard to get … bored.

After paying for most things with Euros, and constantly getting ripped off as a result as they take Euro 1:1 to Swiss Francs even though their not worth the same, we decided we needed Swiss Franc. So, drive to closest town, get to an ATM, get cash. That was the easy part. We then got attacked by two elderly people only too happy to spot a German license plate and start talking about how they used to live in Germany and how life has changed, and sorry for bothering you, and my husband would rather still live there, and and and. They were very joyful and friendly, it was just a little weird having them talk in the door of our parked car, in an accent that meant I only understood every second word. At least they were happy. And consequence two of going to the ATM was the while finding that was easy, getting back out of town was a chain of dead end roads, one way roads, and authorised vehicles only roads. No one seemed keen to make it easy for us to leave.

Tomorrow we move locations again, a little bit more north again. Maybe that will mean we will have to finally give it a miss to cross over to Italy for dinner every night …