Extremely pleased with our own brilliant planning, we woke up in Lugano with only a short bus trip to the station and our tickets already printed. Today we were taking a scenic route through the swiss alps from Lugano to Chur where we would meet our first actual couchsurfing hosts. Exciting times.
We slept in as late as possible, shoved everything into our bags, dashed for the bus and just got it. Having learned to build in some contingency, when everything went to plan we actually got to the station 40 minutes early.
We got ourselves some breakfast – one sandwich, one strudel, one coffee. We joined what I thought was the end of the line, and got gradually more annoyed as more people attached themselves to the other end of the queue. The bus pulled past all of them, we threw our bags in and were first on board. Yes! Take that, old high-panted man!! ...Then we learned our seats were assigned anyway. Buh.
The bus ride took three hours, through really scenic roads, alongside the very blue Lake Como and green/blue Lake Lugano (better) and tiny sleepy Italian and Swiss villages. We stopped in Tirano and got some lunch. I also got yelled at for no reason by some crotchety old bag with a crocheted jacket, as Matt called her. Anyway.
We then boarded the Bernina Express, which was quite the splurge on our major budget holiday. It's billed to have these giant high roof wrapping windows, so you can see everything, which it does. What it's not billed as having is an entire German tour group aged 75+, eagerly jabbering away and leaning over/under/across us to take pictures and then excitedly show each other. End result: Matt attempting to enjoy a burger with a German fogey practically in his lap. We found a little compartment between the carriages with a window that opened and hid there for the first few hours taking pics.
The next four hours are best explained with said pics. Glaciers, waterfalls, aqueducts, more Gemans... eventually they all got off and we had the train to ourselves.
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| Matt gives the thumbs up as we pass frozen lake |
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| Glacier! And lake |
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| Snack cart decorated as ram... why not |
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| glacier and waterfall |
When we arrived in Chur (which we had been pronouncing Chur, but its like 'Core' – oops) we got a text from Matthias, our CS host, with directions to his house. We somehow worked out the local bus system in German, and journeyed about 5 minutes through town. Matthias came to meet us at the bus stop, and took us back to his apartment where he introduced us to his girlfriend Andrina.
I had been really nervous about this part of the trip... I mean, staying with local people (strangers) who want to host us for free just to be nice??!! Yeah right.
They showed us through their lovely apartment and to our room for the night. It was just about the nicest place we had stayed so far on the trip (plus one awesome obese ginger cat). The apartment was high over the city of Chur, with an amazing view into the mountains and around the valley. Our first home-cooked meal in a while was very nice and we talked long into the night about our travels and theirs. Matthias and Andrina had spent a year travelling basically across the world. They had been all over the USA, across South America, Asia and down to Australia. Doozy of a trip. Our 7-week journey gave us an inferiority complex, but we shared plenty of stories.
At some point we brought out a bottle of limoncello for them that we had picked up in Como. They had never had it before, and they then uncorked some home-made 'Iva'. A very unique flavour and apparently based on some local flower, specific to the canton of Grabunden (where we were). Really cool.
We said our goodnights as we only had a few hours the next day to explore Chur before we had to get the train to Austria. Our hosts had graciously volunteered to give us a bit of a tour around the area, maybe sample some of the local delicacies, and we were exhausted from battling German tourists in high altitudes.
