by Diccon Bewes
BLS is now the second-largest train company in Switzerland (after the national rail outfit, SBB). With 436km of rail lines, plus the ships on Lakes Thun and Brienz, it carries 56 million passengers and 1.3 million cars annually. The latter are loaded onto special open-sided carriages (which look scarily like mobile Nissen huts with no walls) and transported under the Bernese Alps to Valais in 15 minutes. It’s still by far the quickest way to reach Italy.
Building the tunnel, which was opened with great celebrations in July 1913, took 66 months but came at a cost: 52 million francs and 64 lives. Most of those who died were Italian, mainly because 97 per cent of the 3000 manual labourers who dug the tunnel were from Italy. Avalanches, floods, cave-ins and 34 ºC heat inside the rock, not forgetting working with 961 tons of explosives, made it dangerous work. Nevertheless, it was also a precision job. After years of tunnelling and thousands of accidents, the final result was remarkably close to the original plans: the differences between the drawings and the actual tunnel were 410mm in length, 257mm in width and 102mm in height. And yes, that is millimetres, in a tunnel that is 14.612km long – Swiss (and Italian) precision, even with dynamite and axes.
The Lötschberg tunnel changed Kandersteg completely. At first the effects came simply from the massive influx of workers and their families. Given that it took seven years of hard labour to excavate under the Alps, it’s no surprise that the men brought their wives and children with them. The population of the village mushroomed from 445 people in 1900 to 3554 ten years later, at the peak of tunnel building. A separate town sprang up with workshops and barracks, as well as a school, hospital and a Catholic church for the immigrants. I’m tempted to ask Frau Agostino if her name is a result of one of those families staying on after the work was done; more than likely, but it’s rather a personal question to ask a museum guide, especially in Switzerland. I focus on the story instead. Once the tunnel was complete, the site was abandoned until Lord Baden-Powell, a regular visitor to the valley, saw an opportunity and raised money to buy the land, hence the annual invasion of woggles.
Italian immigrants provided the manpower for building the Lötschberg line underneath the Alps
While the Italians were busy constructing the tunnel, the Swiss were busy building hotels. They foresaw that the new line would transform the local economy, so they spent the time getting ready for the onslaught: by 1914 there were 30 hotels and pensions in the village, many with their own ice rinks to cater for the growing winter trade. Confident of the good times ahead, Kandersteg seceded from neighbouring Kandergrund in 1908 and created its own separate community. As we have seen, in Swiss terms that’s an important step. Of course, those anticipated good times for Kandersteg didn’t last that long. Less than a year after the Lötschberg tunnel opened, an Austrian duke with a big moustache was murdered in Sarajevo. The world collapsed into the disaster that was the first half of the twentieth century, and Kandersteg wouldn’t be the only place to see the after-effects. There were no bombs or bullets, but no tourists or trade either. It would be years before the guests returned in force.
The latest chapter of this village history is still playing itself out. In 2007 a new, deeper Lötschberg tunnel opened as part of the national plan for rail transport. At 34.6km long, it is currently the longest land tunnel in the world and has cut the journey time between Bern and Brig by 40 per cent. Double-decker trains, and more importantly a lot more cargo (two-thirds of heavy goods vehicles in Switzerland travel by train), can now whizz under the mountains in record time. The Swiss celebrate the opening of almost every tunnel, but this one was cause for a bigger party than normal: tickets to be the first to ride through it sold out months in advance, bands played, speeches were made and sausages were grilled. The tracks were blessed by both sides of the religious divide, which in Switzerland means Protestant and Catholic rather than any other religion, and everyone rejoiced in their shopping trips to Italy now taking an hour less each way. Everyone except the citizens of Kandersteg, that is.
The railway once brought the masses to Frutigen, where they climbed into carriages for the journey up the valley. Then it carried them right into Kandersteg itself, fuelling a boom that transformed the village. Today the new line bypasses both completely. Intercity trains no longer stop at either village, but instead dive down into the earth just outside Frutigen, coming up for air about 16 minutes later on the other side of the Bernese Alps. The old line still clatters up to Kandersteg before entering the original tunnel and winding its way down to the Rhone Valley, but it is now only for local trains. As Frau Agostino put it, “It was a big shock. Suddenly people were not stopping here any more.” Instead, they were going straight to the peaks and slopes of Valais; direct services from Basel and Zurich to Brig now only take two hours, making day trips for walkers and skiers a reality. The Kander valley was in danger of going the same way as the Gemmi Pass, but it has fought back.
Kandersteg has some spectacular scenery on its doorstep, most notably the deep turquoise waters of Lake Oeschinen, but there’s quite a lot of that in Switzerland. A beautiful lake and snowy mountains just aren’t enough to draw in the crowds. So the village decided to focus on its heritage instead and created a Belle Époque week at the end of January. Every year villagers don period costume and go about their daily lives as if it were 1913: ladies in big dresses with frilly parasols, gentlemen in regimental uniform, “housemaids” pulling sleds loaded with groceries, schoolboys in knickerbockers and woollen socks. People indulge in a spot of curling and carriage riding, or partake in afternoon tea and dinner by candlelight. The post office and the Coop supermarket are dressed in hoardings to transform them back to how they once looked, and posters in the station are all changed to be authentic. It’s rather like Downton Abbey on ice, and it’s proved quite a hit. During that last week of January, it’s not unusual to see yards of tweed and lace walking through Bern station as people change trains to reach Kandersteg. Not only villagers but visitors are raiding their grandparents’ trunks and rootling around antique shops to find the perfect outfit. Top hats and crinoline are back in vogue, at least in one corner of Switzerland for seven days of the year.
Frutigen, on the other hand, has looked to the future. One unexpected byproduct of digging the new deep tunnel was warm water, although with Leukerbad just over the hill perhaps it was to be expected. The 20 °C water was too warm to be pumped straight into the river, where it would harm the fish, so instead it has been harnessed to produce two things: tropical fruit and caviar. At the Tropenhaus the water gushes through at 100 litres per second, heating the tropical hothouse so that guavas, papayas, bananas and starfruit can grow. Next door, the mineral-rich water makes the perfect breeding ground for sturgeon, as it mirrors the conditions found in a Siberian summer. Even in the depths of winter, the fish are cosy and warm in their underwater world. So, rather unusually for Switzerland, visitors can buy home-grown mangoes and caviar; at 315 francs for 50 grams, the latter is as much a luxury as anywhere else in the world.
The coming of the railway changed the Kander valley for ever
The story of the Kander valley over the past 150 years is almost that of tourism in Switzerland over the same period. A steady trickle of visitors always found their way here to admire the “bewildering beauty”, as Miss Jemima described it, but services were low-key. The advent of train travel and group tours provided the impetus for change and the income to achieve it. Shepherds became mountain guides, farm workers turned to bar work, hotels were built and jobs created. Everyone could benefit from the influx of tourists, the cash cow that provided far more income than Daisy and Bella in the back field. But, as any farmer knows, putting all your eggs in one basket is not the best idea. While the scenery might stay the same, war and recession, as well as changes in taste and technology, mean that the numbers of those coming to see it are never stable – and never assured. Switzerland has one big natural advantage in the Alps, but it can’t rely on that to be enough. Although the country was the bi
rthplace of mass tourism, it must continually adapt to attract the next generation of visitors.
Today is 1 August, or Swiss National Day, and Kerry decides it’s the perfect moment to get out the world’s most impractical musical instrument and have a blow. The cosy kitchen-diner of the chalet B&B isn’t quite the right place to play a 3.5m horn, so we gather in the garden for an impromptu concert. Sunshine, mountains, muesli and the melodious harmonies of the alphorn: I can’t think of a more Swiss way to start a day of national celebration.
Public holidays in Switzerland are religiously observed, including the secular ones. Some are national, such as Christmas Day and 1 August; some are only observed in Catholic areas, for example Mary-went-to-Heaven Day (which is 15 August, for those Protestants who have no idea when that is – me included, until I moved to Switzerland); some are only for Protestant cantons, which typically have fewer holidays so created ones on days like 2 January to make up for the shortfall; and some are specific to one canton, for example Ticino celebrates its patron saint’s day on 29 June. In all cases holidays are treated as holy days; that is, they become a Sunday, which means that normal life is suspended.
In Switzerland Sundays are still treasured as a day of rest – not necessarily for praying and going to church, but definitely not for car washing, window cleaning, recycling or doing some DIY. None of those is conducive to rest, relaxation and spending time with family and friends. As for shopping on a Sunday, forget it. There are a few shops open in train stations, airports and petrol stations, but otherwise the high streets of Switzerland are shuttered up until 9am on Monday. Having lived in London for 15 years, it took me a while to get used to the idea that shops were closed for 39 hours precisely when most people have time to spare. Now I rather like the idea, not because I’m at all religious, but simply because it makes a pleasant change to have one day in the week where you have to switch off. You can go to the cinema, visit friends, read a book, or be very Swiss and go for a walk. However, a Sunday walk in Switzerland is a hike in any other country: height differences of 400m or more, stony footpaths, boots and sticks required. Yes, the views are wonderful, but as you’re a gasping wreck by the end of it all, you barely remember which mountains you saw.
After slowly and musically breaking our fast, we finally set off for the train down to the lake. For Miss Jemima it was no holiday, partly because she was here before Swiss National Day had been invented and partly because she had a long journey in store. She was, as ever, up at the crack of dawn and on her way before the larks even knew which day it was:
“Up at 4.30 a.m. – breakfast quickly over, and we were soon seated in a rickety old carriage, drawn by a pair of rough-looking horses, in a hurry to catch the steamer at Spiez on Lake Thun. The hills in our descent to Frutigen were very steep. The chalets along the road were of greater pretensions than any we had seen, the gardens tidier, and some enterprise displayed in a new hotel with tastefully planned grounds, but was not all this easily accounted for? We were in a Protestant canton.”
The world was sometimes very black and white to Victorian Britons: Protestant equalled hard-working, prosperous and simply better in almost every way; Catholic meant something slightly suspicious with its papal overlord, unnatural celibacy and bells and smells. You can almost hear Miss Jemima’s sigh of relief to be back on Reformed ground. These days the main difference in the standard of living between Catholic Valais and Protestant Bern is that the former has fewer cows but more public holidays. Today is a holiday all across Switzerland, so there are Swiss flags fluttering everywhere. It’s a modest but very apparent display of patriotism, not quite on the scale of the Fourth of July but enough to stand out.
The Swiss love to fly the flag, although very often it’s the cantonal one rather than the national one. Maybe that’s because the instantly recognisable red with a white cross isn’t actually that old. The square flag (one of only two square national flags in the world, the other being from Vatican City) was first used as an army flag during that short civil war of 1847, but the exact proportions of the central cross were not settled until 1889. Only the Swiss could argue for years over the tiniest detail like the dimensions of the arms on a cross. In the end it took an act of parliament to settle the argument, meaning that a proper Swiss cross has arms that are of equal length but are one sixth longer than they are wide. Miss Jemima was here 26 years before that act, so it must have been most unsettling for her to have to look at a Swiss cross with disproportionate arms. As for the exact shade of scarlet, that took more than another century to decide: in 2007 it was set as Pantone 485. That’s red to you and me.
It’s quite hard to go anywhere in Switzerland at any time of year without seeing red and white flapping in the breeze. Maybe the inhabitants need to remind themselves sometimes that they are Swiss. It has often been said that a Swiss person only feels truly Swiss when he is abroad; until then his heart beats for his canton rather than his country. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of good marketing. There’s nothing like a bit of brand awareness on a national scale to sell a few souvenirs and make those fleeting visitors aware that they’re in Switzerland and not Sweden. And 1 August very handily falls in the middle of the prime tourist season, and was declared to be Swiss National Day only in 1891 for the 600th anniversary of the oath of confederation. The trouble is that no one is really sure exactly when that oath took place. The document signed by the first three cantons (Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden) states: “So done in the year of our Lord 1291 at the beginning of the month of August.” That is worryingly imprecise for the Swiss. After 600 years of doubt, they settled on the first as that is very obviously at the beginning of the month.
By the time we arrive in Spiez on the shores of Lake Thun, we’ve seen Swiss flags on almost every possible protrusion: car aerials, building sites, balconies and lampposts. There are also quite a few flagpoles, and not just official ones. I can’t remember ever seeing a flagpole standing in someone’s garden in Britain. Perhaps if I’d lived near Major-General Fotheringay (retired) it might seem normal, but for me there’s something rather odd about having a flagpole between the barbecue and the potted basil. It seems very American, but it’s apparently very Swiss.
We could simply change trains in Spiez and carry on to Interlaken, but the Junior United Alpine Club did not have that option. The railway would not arrive here for another 30 years, so they took the boat, although even that was not as simple as it sounds. From the dock beside the impressive Schloss, they were rowed out in a barge to meet the steamer coming from Thun, the main town at the northern end of the lake. Today we can sit beside the water and wait for our boat to glide in to pick us up. It’s making all the stops like this that has lengthened the overall journey time. It once took 1¼ hours to sail from one end of the lake to the other; now it takes a little over two hours. Not everything in today’s world is faster.
The first steamer plied its trade on Lake Thun in the mid-1830s and by the time Miss Jemima arrived to step on board, there was lively competition for passengers, mainly because the railway line had reached Thun in 1859 but went no further. After that travellers had no choice but to go by boat or carriage to Interlaken, although Murray casually notes that “The steamer does not take carriages”, presumably a warning for those rich enough to have travelled from Britain with their own wheels. Those were the days, assuming you had the money. Our paddle steamer, the Blümlisalp, was launched in 1906 at the height of Lake Thun’s popularity, when half of Europe came to enjoy the views from the wooden decks sailing over the calm blue-green water. Then came the wars, severe coal shortages and a switch to motor boats. Elegance was out. In 1971 the Blümlisalp was decommissioned, an unwanted reminder of past glory. Nevertheless, she survived the next two decades and came back into service, restored, repainted and more popular than ever – a huge white swan paddling gracefully across the water.
As stylish as she is, the Blümlisalp is not petite. Over 63m long and 13m wide, she can hold 750 passengers and travel
at 25km/h. She is a dowager duchess at her most formidable, stately, aloof and unstoppable once she really gets going. Today she’ll need every bit of oomph to reach Interlaken, as it seems that total maximum capacity is on board. You can barely see any deck at all in second class, with people sitting on every available inch of space, including each other.
Normally I stay down on the lower deck until we’re underway to admire the technology of a paddle steamer in action: the heavy pistons pumping back and forth, the huge red paddle wheels spraying water in every direction, the cloying aroma of hot oil, the slight lurching motion until the boat finds a rhythm. It’s wonderful, but today we can’t get near the brass banister that surrounds the thumping heart of the boat. There are too many people, and the warm stickiness of steam and sweat combined is less than appealing. It’s time to travel in style, so we climb upstairs to the relative tranquillity of first class. It’s the Swiss boat equivalent of turning left when you board a big plane. From here we have a perfect view of what Miss Jemima called the “panorama of great beauty”: the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau mountains. And we can breathe.
As the paddle steamer surges forward, cutting a swathe through the water, a welcome breeze tickles our faces and laps at the edges of the giant Swiss flag dangling from the flagpole. This is Swiss bliss. It would be hard to find a more inherently relaxing hour than sitting in one of these Belle Époque beauties, surrounded by polished wood and brass, in turn surrounded by shimmering water and mountains. This is slow travelling at its finest. We can sit back and relax until we reach the tourist capital of Switzerland, also known as Interlaken.
SIX
PARIS OF THE ALPS
[Interlacken] was once a truly Swiss town; it is gradually becoming a little Paris or Brussels. Fashion and gaiety find their homes here, and the pleasure-seeker will vote the town to be one of the most charming in Switzerland.