Montreaux, Switzterland

Montreaux, Switzterland, Sunday (22/05/05)

"We all went down to Montreaux... Dah, dah, daah. dah, dah dah-dah... Two-stroke smoke on the water, fire in the sky..."

Yes, we are in the Montreaux from the Deep Purple song, here is the story to date...


Desenti, Switzerland (Saturday)

What can I say about Switzerland but roads, roads, roads. I will put some pictures but they can never do the scenery justice! We enter Switzerland via Tirano, buy our highway toll sticker (about $30 each) and then start the roller coaster drive through the mountains (which is 75% of Switzerland).

Although it is winding, the towns rarely have a traffic light so it is fairly quick. Unfortunately though, it does not seem that we have the same "scooter" priveledges that we had in Italy - so we obey the road rules like everyone else (drive at 50 when the sign says 50).

We stay the night in Disenti, in awe of the mountains around use. The next day though we look back at those mountains as pretty ordniary as we go increasingly higher through mountain passes.

I cannot describe how beautiful it all is in words or pictures. The drive to Montreaux, through the Farka pass (which now has a Melbourne SC sticker at the top) was amazing. The forecast was for thunderstorms, the thunder never came but the scenery changed with every blink of an eye, one minute dense fog, next we are above the fog, through green fields and snow at the sides of the road up to 3 metres high. Every turn I wanted to take a picture but felt no regrets not doing so as the next turn was more impressive than the first... I resign myself just to taking mental snapshots...

To give you an idea of how wintery it was, we were going to go to Interlaken, but the Grimsel pass was shut. Judging by the mini avalanches across the road that we were driving on, I guessed that closed really meant closed!

Here are some of the pictures we did take...


Green Roads


Mountain tops


Mountain passes


Cold but fun


Montreaux scooter