My Swiss experience – 9 days trip in April 2019
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My wife and I visited Switzerland for 9 days in April 2019 and had an amazing experience. My trip went super smooth and a lot of its credit goes to this forum where I found tons of useful information. So, I am trying to give something back to the forum here.
Below are some points that I thing made my trip awesome and I hope it would help someone who is planning a trip to Switzerland.
- The best thing that I had done was I had bought a Swiss Travel Pass (STP). It gets you unlimited access on all public transports covering trains, buses, boats, trams and gets you discount on mountain excursion tickets. This was really worth it. Not just I saved money, but I didn’t have to worry about buying a ticket every time I needed to go anywhere. I could just hop on any bus, train, boat or tram. Note that there are some express trains that this pass won’t cover, but those are very few and are meant to be scenic excursions themselves.
- Install an app called “SBB” on your mobile. It has full timetable of all the transports (bus, boat, train, trams, cable cars) across Switzerland. So any time you can put origin and destination in it and it will show you the best route to get there. It also shows for each vehicle there current location. And the Swiss transport system is amazingly punctual, so you can completely rely on this app and the ETA, it tells you about anything. You can buy tickets on this app too but if you have bought the STP, then you would just need it to check the timetable.
- Anytime you are going up to a mountain, check the weather forecast. It wouldn’t be fun if you go up and it is cloudy there. I cannot stress this enough, keep checking the weather. I just used to google like “weather on Mount Titlis” and the hourly info that it showed using “weather.com” was pretty accurate always.
- I didn’t buy any tickets to the mountains in advance because I wanted to check the weather before going up. I’d recommend you do the same. Buy the mountain excursion tickets directly on the spot instead of buying it online in advance.
- You should definitely include Mount Titlis in your plan. It was so beautiful up there on a clear day. I took many cable cars during my Swiss trip but all of them were too big where many people would be put at one time which won’t give you a complete view from the car. At Mount Titlis though, they have small cable cars that run at a frequency of 10 seconds approx. Since the frequency is so high, everyone takes a personal cable car. So you’d have the entire cable car to yourself and have a 360 degree view from it.
- To reach to Titlis, you’ll have to go to a town called Engelberg. Mostly people stay at Lucerne and take train to Engelberg. This train would have big panoramic windows with awesome views. And it would be free on STP. Then from Engelberg station you’d have to go to the cable car pickup point. There would be signs all over on how to reach there. I’d recommend you walk there instead of taking a bus. The walk is only 5 minutes. On the cable car pickup point, you’d buy a ticket to Titlis, if you have STP you’d get 50 % discount. Then you’d take the small very frequent cable car I talked about. This cable car first makes a stop at a mid-station called “Trubsee”. You can chose to hop off here, take a look around and come back to cable car. Or you can chose to stay seated. Then it will take you the the next station called “Stand” which is terminal. From here you have to switch to a bigger cable car called “Rotair” that will take you to the tip of Mount Titlis, this cable car rotates while going up so you will see 360 degree view.
- I’d really recommend that you take a ride on Ice flyer when you are up there on Titlis. It is super awesome. In case you don’t know what it is, google it and see images.
- The second excursion that I’d highly recommend you is going to Mount Schilthorn. It has two routes. So you should go up by one and come down by second to get the entire experience. I just watched this youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QXM3VJFrGU and followed it blindly. I’d really recommend you do the same. And this entire trip is free on STP including the james bond museum, thrill walk, cable cars etc. that are mentioned in the video. One thing that is not covered in the video is, there is a bus ride in the itinerary while coming back. From that bus you can see so many waterfalls. There will literally be a waterfall every half km. Sit on the left side of that bus to view them.
- The third excursion that I’d recommend that you should try to fit in your schedule if time permits is going to Mount Rigi. Though this is not so popular, the reason why I suggest you this is that going to Mount Rigi involves travelling through boat and cogwheel train which were not there in Mount Titlis and Mount Schilthorn trips. So if you do this, you’d cover all types of scenic commute experiences. And this full trip is free as well on STP.
- To reach to Rigi, you’d take a boat from Lucerne to Vitznau. From there you’d change to a cogwheel train which will take you all the way to Rigi Kulm. There are another routes as well to Rigi in case you want to come down from a different route. So first option is you can come down the same route you went up. Second is you go down from Rigi Kulm to Rigi Kaltbad via the same cogwheel train you came up with, then change to a cable car that brings you down to Weggis, then walk to the boat pick up point (15 mins) and take boat back to Lucerne. We didn’t do the second option because the cable car to Weggis was not operational when we were there.
- There is a mountain called Jungfraujoch which is called the top of Europe. I chose not to go there because the ticket to it was very very costly even after the STP discount. And I had asked some people and they said the view seems almost similar from there as you’d see from any other high mountain like Titlis. But in case you want to boast later that you’ve been to the highest point of Europe then you can consider it. You have to start from Interlaken city to get there. There are two routes to go there. One from Lauterbrunnen and one from Grindelwald. You can go up by one and come down by second. If you go to Schilthorn, you’d have gone to Lauterbrunnen anyways.
- About where to say, what we wanted to do is stay in the country side locations. So I had picked some towns near the famous cities so that we weren’t far from cities too. For example, we stayed at Zug near Lucerne instead of staying in Lucerne itself. Similarly we stayed at Brienz instead of Interlaken. At both of these places train would take 20 minutes to take us to the city and the frequency of trains was pretty high too. Or there was an option to take boat to the city via Lake Zug and Lake Brienz respectively. That is something that you can consider because towns were much peaceful and prettier than cities nature wise.
- For chocolates go to shops called Laderach and Bachmann. These are there in almost all big cities. I liked Ladrerach more. Note that they have alcohol in many of there chocolates, so ask about it in case you want to be alcohol free.
- For grocery shopping, we used to go to a supermarket called “Coop”. These are literally everywhere in Swtizerland and have everything and are cheap as well.
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