DAY 112 SUNDAY JULY 15 WILLIAM TELL COUNTRY

Today was a bit of a let down.  Chur is reputed to be the oldest city in Switzerland at 5000 years.  We have probably not seen as much of the city as we should, but the Alps had priority.  We paid $148 per night, which is the highest anywhere we have stayed, and the room was new and quite good, but the service was awful.  Breakfast was a buffet with orange juice, cornflakes, bread and jam and sliced cheese and meat.  The normal price for buffet breakfasts has been $15 per person, and they offer three times as much choice.  On two mornings we were not given tea/coffee and the buffet did not open till 8am on weekends.  This morning we were locked out till 8.30am when the cook arrived and the bread did not appear till after 9am.  The hotel was next to a sex shop, and several nightclubs and the bar was always occupied by smokers.  Still, this was our first dud accommodation since we left home and the hotel in Brig is only 200 metres up a cobbled wide street from the station and the manageress could not have been nicer.  Today's train trip was four hours on the Glacier Express from Chur to Brig.  This train starts in St Moritz and follows the trail down to Chur that we had explored already so that part of its journey would have been a great experience for those already on when we boarded.  We had paid $60 to reserve seats (compulsory on this train) then the conductor charged us another $120 for a ticket to cover less than half of our trip, and that was half price because we had our Eurail Pass. We were expecting that but we were also expecting a spectacular trip.  We had wasted considerable time changing our accommodation in Brig because no seats were available on Saturday, so we were let down to find that the section following the Rhine, which they dubbed The Grand Canyon of Switzerland was no better than the trip to Klagenfurt on Day 97.  We enjoyed the scenery and the good weather today but we felt victim to the greed of Swiss Tourism.  The only time the staff spoke to us was to sell stuff.  This was the Rhine river charging down to Chur after recent rains.

These were some of the valleys and former glaciers we saw.



The real highlight of the day on the train was the group of Alpenhorn players on a station along the way.

On the steep sections up to 2100 meters and down the other side the train used the cogwheel system we had seen on Schafbergbahn tracks.

After we settled in at Brig we went for a wander and stumbled on the town castle built in the C17th and renovated in the 20th.  It was a lovely way to finish the day, particularly strolling through the garden. This town is surrounded by huge mountains.