by Diccon Bewes
A prime example is Davos, which was a retreat for the sick and ailing long before it was an escape for the rich and powerful. In the 1880s, British author Robert Louis Stevenson finished Treasure Island while convalescing in a Davos sanatorium. How apt that a tale of pirates and hidden treasure was written in the town that is now famous as the home of the annual World Economic Forum.
While the clinics and sanatoria remain, most of today’s guests come to rejuvenate, not recuperate. Deep breathing is still on the agenda but with a new purpose: de-stressing the mind rather than de-clogging the lungs. Different ailments, same cure. Cool air, warm sun and hot water are the perfect ingredients for relaxing the body and soul. Miss Jemima and all those other early tourists didn’t know what they were missing out on.
FIVE
OVER THE HILLS
The Gemmi is one of the most remarkable passes across the Alps. Its scenery is, perhaps, extraordinary rather than grand, and to be seen to advantage it ought to be approached from the Valais.
—Murray Handbook
Miss Jemima illustrated her journal with postcards pasted in as well as her own drawings
Sheep – hundreds of them wherever we look, bounding down the slopes, bleating all the way to the lake. The first hint of their arrival had been the bells, a distant tinkling that prompted everyone to turn away from the water and focus eyes (and cameras) on the rocky horizon. Then a single pointed face appeared on the crest of the hill and stopped a moment to survey the scene, before plunging headlong towards us. The deluge had begun. Soon a few of us were stranded on a tufty mound halfway down the slope, an island in a stream of off-white, and the odd brown, clouds on legs that poured downhill, leaping over gullies, following their leaders, ignoring the strange humans taking photos. Welcome to the annual Gemmi sheep festival!
A casual comment over breakfast had turned our plans for the day upside down. At the table next to ours sat an elderly German couple, who had been married long enough that they no longer made conversation over their cornflakes (or muesli). The man was part of the way through his boiled egg when he leaned across and spoke to my mother. “Gehen Sie heute zum Schäferfest?“
Now that I live in Switzerland, my mother is trying to learn German, from scratch with Der-Die-Das. She’s fluent in French and Italian, but is making the effort with Swiss national language number 3. Still, I’m sure that her vocabulary doesn’t yet stretch to “sheep festival”; it’s not exactly the normal thing to learn in a conversation class in deepest Hampshire. So I reply for both of us. “Was für ein Schäferfest?”
And that’s how we learn that the 54th annual sheep festival is taking place today beside the Daubensee, the lake that sits up on the Gemmi Pass. Every July, farmers and herders from Cantons Bern and Valais assemble, with their sheep, for a day of grilling sausages, throwing flags and catching up with old friends. Plus a spot of yodelling and alphorn blowing to liven things up. It’s an excuse for the locals to get together for one day when very often they spend the other 364 hardly seeing each other. Their farms and herds may be quite close as the crow flies, but little inconveniences like cliffs and mountains get in the way. However, like many a festival in Switzerland – and there are many – what started as a local affair has become a minor tourist attraction, not just for the folklore but also the 900 or so sheep.
So instead of taking the cable car to the top of the cliff with a view to walking across the whole Gemmi Pass to Kandersteg, I decide we’ll go up purely for the sheep party, then come back down and travel round the long way by train. I’m rather relieved I don’t have to literally follow in Miss Jemima’s footsteps. The logistics of the day had meant I was going to have to walk for four hours, only to arrive in Kandersteg and leave straight away in order to come back by train, fetch our bags and return the same way. No wonder Miss Jemima travelled without a suitcase. This way we can enjoy an unexpected burst of local life and I can come back another time to walk across the Gemmi Pass, without luggage and without a mother who needs a more restful day.
Dangling from a cable is possibly the best place to get a perfect view of the Tyrolean handiwork on the Gemmi wall – assuming you are safely inside a cable car, of course. From this bird’s-eye perspective, you can’t help but be astounded at the impossibility of the path carved into the cliff face. Every bend looks sharper than the last, every overhang more unnerving, and every metre of path a triumph of mind over matter. It’s a two-hour hike up to the top, or a seven-minute ride in a cable car, and today either route takes you through the thick mist still clinging to the cliff face. The thought of walking that path without clearly being able to see where you’re going leaves me with sweaty palms.
The Junior United Alpine Club tackled the perpendicular path partly on foot, partly on a mule:
“on looking up its bare vertical surface we were hard put to discover a path, or to understand how we should reach its summit. In some parts the path was a mere groove, cut in the face of this huge cliff, just wide enough for a mule to pass and at the turn of the zigzag we constantly overhung a depth of 500 or more feet. It is classed as one of the most extraordinary of all Alpine roads. … Its zigzags have been ingeniously contrived, for in many places the rocks overhang the path and an upper terrace of rocks projects further out than the one immediately below it.”
A mountain path on horseback was not for the faint-hearted
Those are almost exactly the words used in Murray, although that adds a reassuring “There is no danger in it; and the terrors have vanished of late before improvements in the path and balustrades at the side.” The group dismounted from the mules once they decided that two feet were surer than six, and they might have been right to do so.
A young American girl came along on a mule, and in making the turn the mule’s hind foot caved all the loose masonry and one of the fence posts over board; the mule gave a violent lurch inboard to save himself, and succeeded in the effort, but that girl turned as white as the snows of Mont Blanc for a moment.
That comes from A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain’s wonderful account of his walk through Europe in 1878, including a descent along “this dreadful path”. He also relates the story of a newly married countess on “her bridal tour” who fell from her saddle over the precipice; she made the mistake of going down on horseback. With that in mind, I am decidedly happy to be gliding up in a gondola rather than riding up on a mule. The tiny figures hiking way beneath us appear very weary as they toil upwards, but it’s probably a walk worth doing for the path itself if nothing else. I might need a couple of valium beforehand, though. Incidentally, 1863 was the year when Samuel L. Clemens first used Twain as his pseudonym.
At 2348m up, this is the highest point the Junior United Alpine Club reached on their tour and the view from the top is truly memorably. Over 900m beneath our feet is the model village of Leukerbad, or “a bed of mushrooms” as Miss Jemima described it. Some of the mushrooms have grown quite a bit since then, but from this height even the ugly fungus of the clinic is almost appealing. The azure of the Alpentherme baths is a clear blue, inviting patch of calm amid the brown and grey. Then come the velvety green fields and tree-covered slopes, topped by a hazy strip of dark-blue ridges, all of it crowned with a jagged white horizon. The procession of snowy peaks has Weisshorn as its tallest, though the Matterhorn is the best known – except that from this angle you wouldn’t recognise it at all. The iconic crooked pyramid has transformed into something much wider and flatter, as if a duck-billed platypus is sticking its bill up into the air. It’s rather disconcerting.
A deep-throated blast of an alphorn wafting up from the valley behind us acts as a timely reminder of why we are really here, so we reluctantly turn around and pick our way down the rocky slope. As we clamber down, we are serenaded the whole way by alphorns echoing off the mountains surrounding this deep bowl of a valley. It really is one of the sounds of Switzerland, designed to carry across the hills and send tingles down your spine. Miss Jemima was equally enchanted:
“It is a wooden tube from five to six feet long bound round with split withies of willow. This he rested on a wedge-shaped hollow trough, and blew as we approached. He must have practised long to emit such a flow of mellow, sonorous notes from so unmusical-looking an instrument. The notes died away in softest cadence, which notes were taken up by the mountains and reverberated by them again and again. We had scarcely a moment’s interval to remark on their sweetness, when the rocks echoed the same notes in fainter strains, another pause and we heard their vibrations still lingering among the cliffs till they expired in but a musical sigh.”
The festival is taking place on the shores of the Daubensee, a murky grey-blue lake that lurks in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. It is fed entirely by melting ice and snow, which carry all manner of deposits with them, giving the water a hue that is less than enticing. In winter the lake pretty much disappears, with whatever water that is left frozen to the bottom. Come the spring and it returns, filling the valley with meltwater – and mud. At the near end, a huge fan of sludge spreads out like a mini-Mississippi delta, with little rivulets wiggling their way through the flat expanse on the way to dumping more material into the water.
However, what makes the Daubensee interesting is not its source but its outlet: it has none. No stream flows out of the lake. In fact there is a small hole at the bottom, and for ages everyone presumed that the water eventually found its way down to Leukerbad. One year the authorities decided to test that theory and added some harmless red dye to the water. It went down the hole and never came out, at least not in Leukerbad. But in Salgesch, on the way to Sion, the sudden appearance of red water caused a few raised eyebrows. The mystery of the Daubensee’s plughole had been solved.
The water doesn’t appear any more appealing close up, but there’s plenty else to look at. Long before the sheep make their grand entrance, the flag throwers, alphorn players and yodellers are out in force, entertaining the crowd. Yes, it’s a little kitschy, but it doesn’t feel contrived and most of the onlookers are Swiss rather than tourists. It’s just one of the many festivals that pop up all over Switzerland, so you’re never far from an embroidered Tracht (traditional dress) or sizzling sausage, especially in summer. Or, come to think of it, from flaming carriages, fighting cows, burning snowmen and wailing women. All of those feature in one Swiss festival or another, as does a lot of food, whether it’s onions, chestnuts, carrots or (of course) cheese – and a lot of cervelat, the Swiss national sausage.
Miss Jemima had no such festivities laid on, but instead made her own entertainment: a snowball fight. It was 3 July and baking hot, but the group found their first snowfield at the top of the cliff. They ran around like children, pelting each other with hastily made snowballs and sheltering from the blows under umbrellas, three of which were left “shattered wrecks”. These were some snowballs! There was human damage as well, when one ball “unfortunately struck the eye of our gallant Professor, with a blow that made him motionless. His glass eye rolled to his feet!” Clearly the sun and the altitude had gone to their heads; either that or the holiday spirit was finally triumphing over Victorian propriety.
The only snow we can see today is the odd patch on the mountains that ring the lake. While this is not an unimpressive stretch of countryside, with a sense of space and size, it’s not particularly beautiful. The “ghastly desolation of the place” was Twain’s description and it certainly is rather austere, with no trees or flowers, no birds or bees, just endless rock and scrubby grass. This is not the normal picture-postcard view of Switzerland, although being a little less manicured makes it all the more interesting. What a pity the rugged scene is spoiled by a long line of giant, skeletal pylons straddling the hills on the far side of the lake. They’re a necessary evil, though, as it’s the most efficient way to transport one of Valais’s main exports, electricity.
The topography that once isolated half the canton is perfectly suited to hydroelectric power (HEP), thanks to the combination of narrow valleys and plentiful water. Giant concrete dams, such as Grande Dixence (the world’s tallest gravity dam), were built in the remote valleys of Valais and help Switzerland produce 56 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources, nearly all of it from HEP. That percentage will only increase in the next decade or so, as the Swiss government has announced that it will not replace the country’s five nuclear power stations when they are decommissioned. By 2034, nuclear power, which currently accounts for about 40 per cent of Switzerland’s electricity production, will have been phased out. That’s quite a challenge for a small country with no coal or gas of its own. The sad thing will be if Switzerland gets rid of its nuclear stations and then simply imports atomic-powered electricity from abroad.
No one seems to mind the metal arms and looping cables in the background, least of all the sheep. After their mass helter-skelter down the hill, driven on by men with sticks but very few dogs, they’re happily munching away on tufts of grass. It’s what sheep do best. I’ve never seen so many sheep in one place in Switzerland (this is cow-land, after all) and that, along with the scenery and singing in the background, makes me think of Wales. There’s something about hills and music that belong together. I wonder how the Swiss would react to a full-volume rendition of “Bread of Heaven” from a Welsh male voice choir. It might scare the sheep. In terms of area, Wales is half the size of Switzerland, but whereas the principality has 3 million people and 9 million sheep, the republic has 8 million people and not even half a million sheep. No wonder you rarely see them (the sheep that is, not the Swiss) or get Swiss lamb on a menu, but Valais is the place to come for some Swiss sheep-spotting: with over 62,000 of the bleaters, it’s the ovine capital of Switzerland.
Funnily enough, Swiss German speakers refer to the whole French-speaking part of the country as Welschland or Welschschweiz, and use the adjective welsch to describe anything from there; even the people become Die Welschen. You might think that Valais (Wallis in German) has some direct connection to Wales, like the Welsh immigrants in Patagonia, but the only link is terminological: Wales, Wallis, Valais, welsh and welsch all come from the same stem. This also isn’t anything about being the most westerly part of the country, as Wallonia also has the same root and that’s in southern Belgium. Originally it was a term used by the Romans for those areas of Celtic origin and goes back to the Volcae tribe; then it graduated into a German word for people who were not Germanic, particularly those who spoke a Romance language. In both cases it was a way of casting them as outsiders, people “not like us”, whether they spoke a Celtic language or a French one. And it certainly has nothing to do with leeks, although our friend the Savoy cabbage is also known as Welschkraut in German, revealing its French roots.
After a couple of hours, I decide I’m not cut out to be a Swiss shepherd, even on a feast day like today. I’ve had my fill of baas and bells, and if anyone else yodels at me or blows his horn in my direction, I might scream. What was delightful at first has become frightfully repetitive. Perhaps you need to be Swiss to appreciate yodelling for more than ten minutes; after that it all begins to sound the same to me. Swiss television regularly has programmes (sometimes whole evenings) with traditional music, not just yodellers but Hudigäggeler bands as well. That’s usually an accordion or two, a bass and a violin, sometimes a clarinet as well. Maybe once I’ve been here 30 years, I’ll be watching it and tapping along with the polka-esque beat.
Our journey round to Kandersteg takes almost as long as walking across the pass: hike back up to the top, cable car down to Leukerbad, bus to Leuk, local train to Brig and regional train through the tunnel to Kandersteg. That’s three hours or so, and that’s with modern transport. It’s no surprise that everyone used to walk over the Gemmi, which is exactly what I plan to do on my next visit.
Two months later, I return to Leukerbad without valium but with the intention of walking up and over the Gemmi. Once again my plans are thwarted by a local event, this one far more exhausting than a sheep festival: the
Gemmi triathlon. The victims, sorry athletes, must first swim 900m in the Gerundensee (down in the Rhone valley), then cycle 23km up to Leukerbad before running to the top of the Gemmi – madness. The winning time is usually around two hours, in other words the same as it takes for many people to walk up the last leg of the race. Even if the path were open to the public today, which it isn’t, I’ve been put off by all those super-sporty people jogging up. Luckily I can go by cable car, something that was not possible until 1957.
This is one of the few privately owned cable cars in Switzerland; it belongs to the Loretan family, who have been running it for three generations, along with the hotel-cum-restaurant that is at the top. Sitting on the panorama terrace eating a plate of Rösti and fried eggs is the perfect way to start any hike, so that’s precisely what I do. Incidentally, the rather antiquated, cramped old cable car was replaced in 2012 by a sparkling new one with giant windows and more space. Not only is the journey a whole minute faster, but the new car doesn’t need an operator inside it, merely at the station. That means it can run without a lunch break. Such is the nature of progress in rural Switzerland.
Duly fed, I set off, tacking round the far side of the lake. The hills are still as bare and bleak as before, with severe grey cliffs and coarse grass, but the pylons are soon behind me and the lake is trying hard to sparkle in the September sunshine. That’s not easy when you’re as much mud as water, but it gets an A for effort. At the halfway point is the Schwarenbach, a solitary but sturdy stone inn that has been quenching travellers’ thirsts since 1742. Murray warned that “Complaints of extortion have been made”, but apart from the lake itself it’s the only watering hole along the route, so everyone calls in – including Pablo Picasso, Alexandre Dumas, Miss Jemima and, in 1904 while in exile in Switzerland, Vladimir Lenin. Twain stopped for a “nooning” (or midday break) and memorably described the exposed location: