A postcard home from Montreux

– went to Chillon through Scenery worthy of I know not whom –

Byron’s Alpine Journey, September 18th-29th, 1816

Annika gave us the most delicious breakfast of granola and yoghurts with her Reine-Claude delicious jam.  And with the coffee and Stephen’s fried egg on toast, it made the absolutely perfect start to a walking day.  It was to be another longish one at 24.5 km; and similarly hot.  Annika has been THE kindest host, and we hope she comes and visits soon in England so we can return the favour! Unlike Byron, she is mad and good and wonderful to know.

The waterfront was no less spectacular than last night; if anything, even more so. The winds had died down overnight and the valley at the end of the lake with the mountains rising at its end drawing us onwards and upwards receded in a series of increasingly hazy flat blue forms, vanishing into a fumy early morning haze.

Nearer to hand was the famous statue of Charlie Chaplin, his quintessential bowler hat, baggy trousers and comically bendy cane complimented by a bronze rose held speakingly in his right hand. Frightful to think of him being hounded out of his adopted country by the communist witch-hunts.

In front of the statue and seemingly thrust into the yielding waters of the lake was ‘La Forchette’, a whimsical statue commemorating the Alimentarium Food Museum’s 10th anniversary in 1995.

It was so unexpected it made us laugh out loud, and provided a surreal counterpoint to the forking mountains behind and the feeding frenzy of hundreds of cormorants hated by local fisherman for how much fish they take).

It was hard to tear ourselves away from lovely, warm hearted, spontaneous, and generous Annika. She took a final photo of us with the fork between, her monumental gift to us to match the hand-carved wooden spoon Stephen had given her last night.

And then we waved goodbye to her in front of the uber-luxurious Hôtel des Trois Couronnes

and set off again to take another bite out of the road to Rome.

The lake now curved round in a series of natural bays leading to Montreux where we intended to make our first stop of the day, to shop for bread rolls and hopefully an Opinol knife (to go with the fork and spoon?)

We emerged fairly rapidly from Vevey and meandered along a shoreline shaded by ancient plane trees, passing by the toy museum housed in an old Château and being visited by chattering but well-supervised primary school children. The same could not be said of the little group of three girls playing on the shingle shore of a tiny beach and exchanging pebbles and other precious items, all the three small boys playing in some kind of outfall pipe and picking up litter to show each other — in the water with no adults visible.

We found ourselves walking downwind of a free-spirited man smoking a joint who was channelling the spirit of Liberté just as effectively as the pêcheur on the rocks.

Always, always the stunning backdrop of the mountains, and the mesmerising and absurdly beautiful shifting palette of blues on the lake.  You could quite see why so many European luminaries visited or settled here — many are commemorated by plaques and busts, like conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, looking for inspiration to the mountains,

and Leo Tolstoy

And others too: Stravinsky, transported by a firebird dream,

and a more measured Strauss.

Of Byron’s visit to Montreux 210 years ago there was little trace except an unpromising alley,

looking very seedy in comparison to some of the glamorous villas which surrounded it.

Byron had spent time in 1816 with Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin (it was the same few days when Mary Godwin had the nightmare which was the origin of her later novel Frankenstein), sailing on the lake and visiting both Chamonix and the Chateau of Chillon.  He’d kept a diary, fragmentary notes of his time there, 

We took a break on a shady bench along the waterside promenade to check on our accommodation instructions for tonight, and to do a little bit of budgetary overview.

We need to get Swiss francs out to pay for board and lodging, but we don’t want to get so much out that we have masses left over by the time we cross over into Italy. I was concerned that our weekly budget has been effectively blown out of the water by the two taxis we took, the first in London in the middle of the night to get from Paddington to St Pancras at 1:30 in the morning, and the second, much more expensive, to cross Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon. It is cheaper to walk!

More whimsical statuary further on round the lake: a small lizard fountain to make up for the three enormous brightly coloured iguana in someone’s back garden we saw yesterday but couldn’t photograph well, and an incongruous penguin; he wouldn’t have been so out of place if the Dents du Midi mountains in the distance were covered in snow as they really should be at this time of year.

‘Before flight’, an award-winning sculpture at the Montreux biennale recalled a garden sign we’d seen earlier today.

Of the very many statues all along the promenade, our second favourite was Freddie Mercury in his classic rockstar pose in front of the market hall. Around him was a buzz of cyclists all queueing up to take selfies with the musical genius, and I loved the pot-bellied Freddie Mercury impersonator complete with yellow jacket and microphone, lounging on the rails behind it all.

The best one, though was the bust of Miles Davis, who played at the 30th Montreux Jazz Festival.  A trumpet with playable valves was embedded in the stone of the plinth.

We passed architectural icons of the town too: the casino, and the Grand Hotel, the subjects of Deep Purple’s classic ‘Smoke on the Water’, which tells the story of the catastrophic fire at the casino in 1970 during a Frank Zappa concert, when ‘some stupid with a flare gun/ Burned the place to the ground’. They couldn’t record their album as planned and so ‘had to find another place’.  They ‘ended up at the Grand Hotel’, closed for renovations, so ‘empty cold and bare’ — although they could use the Rolling Stones’ mobile record recording studio, and the album got made after all.

The promenade was at times stunningly beautiful

and at others seemed something of a parody of itself, with gigantic hibiscus and absurdly tropical leaves set incongruously against the Swiss mountains,

and after a while, the luxury began to feel saccharine and slightly brash. We decided that we preferred the slightly shabbier villages between Vevey and the hotspots for the wealthy.  The villages were not as fancy, but no less clean: tiny electric buggies furnished with a twig besom and rakes occasionally passed us on the road, the operative leaping out with alacrity to pick up any stray pieces of rubbish of which, to be fair, there are strikingly few.

As we walked away from Montreux town centre and into Territet, still on the luxuriantly-planted promenade, the atmosphere became more relaxed, slightly more provincial, and certainly more accessible. Gradually the architectural mishmash of 19th century apartment blocks sitting uncomfortably next to modern ziggurats

gave way to steeply sloping forested hills which had been built on much earlier. Looking back to the Montreux promontory the extent of modern building was quite obvious, whereas here it was far more peaceful.

With an enviable view of the Château de Chillon behind it, ‘ordinary people’ bathed, rinsed themselves off under the showerhead built into the rocks, and availed themselves of the communal barbecue grills and ‘toilets biologiques’. Or perhaps they just read a book.

We were intrigued by the Chateau of Chillon as much as Byron had been enthused by it, although sadly being pilgrims short on time we simply walked past it taking photos rather than touring round as he did. His diary records the visit: ‘– on our return met an English party in a carriage – a lady in it fast asleep!– fast asleep in the most anti-narcotic spot in the world’. I do not think he would have approved of our not visiting and would probably have recorded the fact in his diary.

The Chateau was one of many defensive structures built by the Savoyards.  Constructed on its own little island, it sports their favourite semi-circular corner towers, designed to provide opportunities both for lookout through the arrow slits, and for defence, via arrows shot parallel to the walls and from wooden gantries cantilevered out from the tops of the main towers.

The castle remained completely assailable from the 12th century until the invention of artillery.  But in 1536 the Bernaise arrived with 1500 arquebusiers and 16 canons, and destroyed two of the 400-yr-old towers in a single night.

Reader, I did not photograph the woman in the long mediaeval-style belted cream dress being photographed coyly swirling the skirts with the backdrop of the castle — presumably for the Insta. I will draw a veil over the Lady of Shallot, and let you imagine for yourself.

On the outskirts of Villeneuve right at the top of the lake we found the perfect lunch table in the shade with a breeze and I took my shoes off and dried my socks in the sun.

Stephen made us rolls up out of the cheese and salami, with the exciting new addition of cucumber.

The little grapes we had bought were the Chasselas variety that we had seen growing on the slopes yesterday. It’s a local grape, originating from Switzerland and dating back at least to the 16th century. The individual grapes were indeed a coppery good colour — and they turned out to be sweet and delicious.

I realised with a shock how close we were now to the end of Lac Léman.  It’s been such a totalising and impressive presence on our right hand over the last two days that it seemed unlikely that we would really now be bidding it farewell.

But it happened in an instant. We definitively turned our backs on it at the final ferry terminal of Villeneuve on Piazza Gandhi, where a rather lovely statue of the man in deep contemplation had been decorated with a garland of marigolds around his neck.

The loss of the lake was tempered instantly by the gain of the mountains.  These are babies compared to what we will encounter over the next few days, as Stephen pointed out.  But for me their closeness and precipitousness, and the contrast with the lake, expanding in a horizontal rather than vertical plane, had a powerful impact.  I couldn’t believe we had come upon them so quickly: yesterday — this morning! — they had seemed so far away.

To get to our day’s end in the town of Aigle we needed to schlep up the valley that we had seen first thing yesterday morning from the top of the Sauvabelin tower. The path here had to be threaded through a tangle of main roads, elevated freeways and train tracks, and the heat by this point and from all the concrete was significant. 

We were diverted by the ribbon of allotments between road and rail, impressed by the quality of tomatoes, aubergines, leeks and basil that were being grown, and wished that we were not so civilised as to refrain from picking other people’s figs.

We scurried from the insufficient patch of shade to insufficient patch of shade afforded by widely spaced-out spindly trees, but howsoever feeble the shade, each still felt about 5° cooler than out in the hot sun.

We came across a very patient heron waiting for us to finish taking photographs of him before he could finish hunting for frogs and fish in the canalised stream. We were close enough to his wicked beak to appreciate what a devastating weapon it was.

Eventually it flew away, but it was fantastic to feel in an instant a reconnection with the natural world.  I waited for Stephen who had ducked into Decathlon in the horrid out of town shopping centre to furnish himself with an opinel knife the cutting of brunch rolls for the better with, and I stood in a scrap of shade admiring the oregano flowers and dark mullein; the feeling only increased as we left the road network behind us and set off out into a marginally rural stage, next to a babbling stream with late willowherb, chicory, clover, Viper’s bugloss and clouded yellow butterflies fluttering about its banks.

Ahead of us two tiny Francigena pilgrims gave sense of perspective to the huge hills on either side of the valley.

Stephen ruminated that although this part of the walk was in almost all senses semi-industrial, ugly, hot and boring, it was an important stretch to do.  One normally takes such roads to get from one place to another and not to stop, but we were paying this linking landscape due attention. It’s made Stephen more relaxed about the walking today: moving across the landscape as it is, rather than making comparisons with the mountainous country he prefers to walk through.

We passed three women at an outdoor shooting range practising target shooting with pistols, and we wondered whether they might be a local club, or police women being trained. The sound of their shots ricocheted off the mountain walls around us. My firearms expert kindly explained the difference between a pistol and a revolver.

There seemed to be a lot of violence in these hills — Stephen will fit right in with his Opinel.

There followed a slight — ahem — variation to the route; not, I would delicately point out, occasioned by any error on my part. We eventually scrabbled our way onto a straight road flanking the railway line, the twin of the one we should have been on. It made not much difference except that ours had less shade. So we stopped under a bridge, through which the wind fairly whistled,

and Stephen ate his apple and I had (as my good friend Rosie would say) a ‘pyum’.

 Crossing the river we entered the town (very modern, no old part that we could see), and, grateful that we had 45 minutes until Yolanda Butticaz could receive us, we sat on a cool bench in the shade, took our shoes off, and I did a lot of yawning.

Yolanda and Philippe are inveterate walkers, and live in a bright airy modern apartment with wraparound views of the mountains.  Butticaz is a local surname — one in fact we had noticed back in the vineyards, as one of the Domaines.  Philippe cooked us a delicious meal of fish filet with lentils, followed by miso-glazed aubergine and tofu and rice, and summer pudding made with Savoyard biscuits and a topping of curd and lime zest.  All washed down with a bottle of very special Butticaz!  GOSH it was delicious!

And the sunset on the Dents du Midi, the ‘Teeth of the South’ provided a magical transformation of the landscape awaits us tomorrow.

Stats for the Day

Distance: 24.68km

Nasty insect bites: 1 🦟