Sat, 04 Oct 2003

author Liz	location Lyon, France
posted 19:46 CEST 10/10/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Schweiz ( all photos )

DISASTER! And Luzern ( No photos )
(Continued from Liechtenstein)
Unfortunately, crossing the border didn't mean that the weather got better, so we continued onwards in the rain until we came to Buchs central train station.
At the train station, Tim went and got us some train tickets, while I sat and waited with our bags. When he came back, he had tickets that would take us all the way to Port-Bou, a stop on the France/Spain border. I wasn't expecting to get tickets for so far already, but it actually will work out a lot cheaper in the long run. And we can still get on and off the train as much as we want. The ticket expires long after we will be home in Sydney.
At Buchs, our train was delayed, but we got one about twenty minutes later. We then changed trains twice at Sargens first, and then at Thalwil. Our destination was Luzern (Lucerne in English).
But, along the way we had a disaster - poor Tim left his camera on one of the trains. We realised too late when we were on another train arriving in Luzern. We repored it immediately to the Swiss train system's lost and found, but we have heard nothing yet, which probably means noone has handed the camera in. We are both really dissapointed, Tim much more so, although I really admire how well he is dealing with the fact that he probably won't get his camera back. It is good that we have my camera to make sure we still get lots of photos, but loosing the expensive digital camera is a huge loss.
So that all kind of left us feeling quite flat and down in the dumps. We walked from the station to our hostel Backpackers Lucerne, hoping that someone would be honest and hand our camera in.
At the hostel, we waited a while for reception to open, and then were put in a four-bed dorm with another couple. The great thing about this hostel was that it had a kitchen we could. So many hostels before then had had no cooking facilities, which meant we were having to go out and buy lots of meals from restaurants and fast food places. And on a tight budget, that takes up a lot of money. So being able to cook was great, and we made heaps of pasta and sauce which was delicious.
After dinner we went for a walk through the town. Luzern is set at the end of a huge lake, the Nierwaldstättersee, which has huge mountains all around it, and the whole place is really beautiful. From our hostel, we walked along the lake's edge through the town fair, having a look at a few of the stalls and up to Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge). This was really beautiful with the bridge, nearby tower and buildings all being reflected in the water. The bridge is old, first build in 1333, but in 1993, a lot of it burnt down, destroying many of the old and fascinating painted panels on the bridge. Even though much of it has had to be re-built, it still seems very old and you can also still see much of the fire damage.
We walked around many of the backstreets, peeking in closed shop windows and enjoyed wandering around. Eventually we slowly made our way back to the hostel, stopping at the train station along the way to get some food supplies.
We both have annoying colds at the moment, and because of this we did not sleep too well.

author Liz	location Lyon, France
posted 19:44 CEST 10/10/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Liechtenstein ( all photos )

Leaving Liechtenstein ( No photos )
On Saturday morning the weather was still awful - lots of cloud obscuring a lot of the mountains, and it was raining constantly.
We didn't feel too bad from all the bike riding the previous day, just sore bottoms! We had breakfast at the hostel and packed up all our stuff and headed out into the rain. From the hostel, we walked up towards the Rhine and then walked alongside the river until we came to a bridge, where we could cross over into Switzerland. So, we waved Liechtenstein goodbye and crossed over the borderline into our new country.

(customised)