Back in Switzerland – temporarily

On June 20, I returned to Switzerland and arrived at Zurich Airport at eight in the morning. After seven months in Southeast Asia, Switzerland felt strange, somewhat chilly. However, that didn't apply to the temperatures. I read somewhere that it was the second hottest June since 1864 – only surpassed by June 2003. In Zurich, the hottest day reached 35 °C, and in Basel even 36 °C. It had not been much hotter in Bangkok either, just that there are air conditioners everywhere there.

Although I no longer had an apartment, I spent most of my time in Switzerland as a couch surfer at Christoph Beer in Bern and especially at Martin Kulik in Illnau near Zurich, and spent a few nights in hotels or in a vacation apartment in Lenk in the Simmental. Memories of my earlier bourgeois life with its obligations, restrictions, and conventions resurfaced. But I successfully suppressed the temptation to fall back into the old routine.

I had bought a car from afar, without being able to see or test drive it. The 24-year-old Audi A3 with 150,000 kilometers on the clock cost around 3000 euros after vehicle inspection (that’s what the TÜV is called in Switzerland) – a sum I could manage if it turned out to be a wreck, which it did not. (Five months and 10,000 additional kilometers later, I sold it for almost 2500 euros.)

Thanks to the car, I was able to fulfill not only the journalistic obligations for which I had returned. I also used it for various excursions. In July, I visited the city of Bern again, where I had lived for a long time, and then spent a week in Lenk from July 14 to 21, where a good acquaintance, Lena Galanakis, is the tourism director and another, Michelle Bühler, whom I know from the Rotary Club, is on the organizing committee of the annual jazz festival.

It was beautiful in the Bernese Oberland; in the evenings, concerts took place in the Kronenplatz in the middle of the village, outdoors, but under a huge tent in case it rained. In the evenings, it wasn’t as cool as hoped, but at least cool enough that I could sleep in the vacation apartment with an open window instead of with an air conditioning unit – which was not even present.

Lenk in Simmental, a holiday resort at the end of a valley in the Bernese Oberland, surrounded by three-thousanders, is the cliché of Switzerland as depicted on postcards, but of course it doesn't correspond to the life of the majority in the flatlands. You hike over the pastures where cows graze, with ringing bells around their necks. You stroll along the Simme river to the Simmen Falls, where the water thunders down into the valley over the rocks. If you follow the hiking trail steeply upwards for about 30 to 45 minutes, you reach, in my case panting, the so-called Seven Springs. Here, at the source of the Simme, the water bursts forth in seven wild streams directly from the white limestone rocks.

After a week, I am completely refreshed – as if that had been necessary after seven months of vacation. In Spiez down by Lake Thun, I take a break and visit the impressive castle once again.

Two weeks later, on August 5, I had business to attend to in Basel and used a free half-day to travel to the neighboring Alsace. From all the picturesque Alsatian villages and towns, I chose Kaysersberg this time, which I hadn’t known yet.

Kaysersberg is a photogenic medieval town with many half-timbered houses, through which a small stream flows. As everywhere in Alsace, one can dine excellently and drink even better; the place is right along the Alsatian wine route. Many visitors know this too, as Kaysersberg was voted the “Favorite Village of the French” in 2017. The parking lots outside the town are full on this August 5, a totally ordinary Tuesday, and the restaurants with their flower-adorned terraces are also packed.

Here it is again, the overtourism that I had meticulously avoided in Southeast Asia.