Photo Blog, part two: From Crete to Edinburgh over Land and Sea

From Rome to Como

I’m almost a week into my Crete to Edinburgh journey. It’s Saturday – time to move on again. I head through Rome’s Piazza del Popolo to the metro at 7.30 a.m. It’s fairly quiet but there are already two tourist groups at the fountains. But it’s not only tourists. The evening before I’d passed a local group of gardeners just at the edge of the square tending roses they’d planted to green a small part of the area. It’s a hopeful sight.

Today, I’m heading away from cities, on another fast Italian train that takes me, on the first leg of this journey, to Milan via Bologna but then on to Lake Como. I manage to order a coffee and croissant at the hectically busy, rush hour Termini station before finding my platform (and spilling half the coffee as I struggle with my bags).

The train passes through Umbria first and then towards Florence, gliding past green hills with little burnt umber houses dotting their sides or balanced precariously on their summits, before a string of tunnels takes us on to Bologna, then across the green northern plains of Italy to Milan. Soon enough, I’m in the art deco Milan station – the arching roof is beautiful; I happily miss the deliberately fascistic external décor of the station as I’m heading straight on, on a crowded local train, to Como.

It's only lunchtime by the time the train pulls into Lecco at Como’s southern end. Lecco, I find on Wikipedia, was home to Gauls and Celts, three thousand years ago, its name possibly deriving from loch or lech.

I walk the ten minutes to my basic hotel not far from the water’s edge. I’m feeling disoriented, in a positive way, by the number of places I’ve been in. It’s how people used to travel; it’s how I always travelled when younger. But one effect of polluting, disconnecting air travel is to render more normal travel quite special – and wonderful – and then entirely normal again. Travelling through and across a land, our land, seeing many places, cities, towns, villages should be familiar again.

I only have an afternoon and evening in Como, so I head off for a stroll around the lake, finding a quiet café on its eastern shores for a sandwich and drink and some shade from the heat. The lake is calm, it’s not busy, and the hills and mountains are the brightest green (the snowy mountains lie further up lake Como to the north).

Later, I wander in the other direction west along the shoreline to a small village and have a chilled glass of white wine with a small cheese plate. But suddenly, storm clouds gather, there’s torrential rain, lightning and thunder, and the happy pre-dinner crowds dissolve. I take shelter, glad to have finished my drink and snack, and soon enough it’s possible to walk on home. I chat to a local who’s pulled in on his bicycle to take photos, like me, of the stunning light and shades the storm has brought.

Then, in the softer evening calm, I wander round the fair in Lecco that’s on the water’s edge – food stalls, gifts, ice-cream, there’s even a Scottish whisky stall, just in front of my hotel.

From Como across the Alps

In the morning, I’m up early, after a rather stuffy, hot, sleepless night. I walk to the lake’s edge, take some photos in the golden, early morning light that’s just angling its way over the mountains tops.

Then I’m off to the train station and onto an impossibly crowded train that I somehow squeeze onto (fortunately most of the squashed travellers decant at Varenna, a couple of stops further north, for a Sunday by the lake). I’m heading on towards the small Italian village of Tirano to take the Bernina express across the Alps into Switzerland.

The train follows Lake Como’s shores for a while before heading north-east along the broad, Valtellina valley, lined by snow-tipped mountains on either side. There are green and yellow fields, rolled up bales of hay, horses, small villages and church bell towers. On we chug. Eventually, we get to the small village of Tirano, where the Bernina express train leaves from (express is a misnomer, it goes at an inevitably slow pace, averaging around 30 kilometres on its four and a half hour journey through 55 tunnels and over 196 bridges).

I have time for lunch in the square before seeing if the always good advice from the rail expert ‘the man in seat 61’ holds true. I don’t have a reservation, the tourist carriages are all full but, as he advises on his website, there are three non-reservation carriages at the start of the little red train just behind the engine. He’s right – there’s plenty of space. I clamber happily on board. And not only is my carriage only half-full but one or two windows actually open in these non-tourist carriages which is great for taking photos.

The train starts off steadily, right on the streets of Tirano and is soon climbing through spring meadows, full of flowers and fat cows, and on steadily up towards the green, tree-covered mountains at the start of the journey. We pass alpine houses and blue lakes. One part of the journey is a UNESCO world heritage site – the Rhaetian railway and its 65 metre high Landwasser viaduct.

And, though it’s mid-May, there’s still a lot of snow on the mountains. The train, as it climbs, winds past similar viewpoints more than once before reaching its highest point on the Bernina pass, at 2,253 metres (from a mere 441 metres at Tirano). It’s the highest railway in Europe and the steepest in the world, I learn.

There are ice-blue lakes, sheer black rock faces and sharp peaks, more snow.

We pass glaciers that look less imposing than they must have done a few years back.

It’s just ten days later that, further west in Switzerland, the Birch glacier tumbles down destroying the Swiss village of Blatten. We’re travelling in climate change-damaged mountains but the tourist guide/voiceover still tells us the high points of where we are. The point, surely, is that the beauty of nature must be one major motivation for tackling our human-caused climate damage.

Zurich for a day

After a dizzying four and a half hours of vistas and views, we finally descend through gorges and valleys into the town of Chur, where I’ve a few minutes before my connection on to Zurich. Swiss trains I discover (and I’m not surprised) are very reliable. Meanwhile, as German trains get an ever worse reputation for delays, some German trains are now being stopped at the Swiss border and replaced by Swiss ones to ensure punctuality.

I disembark at Zurich, tired but sated, it’s been a long day, and I head slowly along a canal towards my hotel. I’m in luck to find an open restaurant in the nearby square since it’s late on a Sunday evening. It’s a good, modern Greek restaurant, though the prices – as elsewhere in this town – are distinctly Zurich-level high.

Then, after a good night’s sleep, I’ve a whole day to explore Zurich. One friend has recommended the Sprüngli café for breakfast. It turns out to be one of the most famous, Swiss chocolate houses. I have coffee and croissant in the sun, as blue and white trams move smoothly past right in front of the tables.

Later, I wander the narrow lanes of the old town, and up to a small, green park overlooking the river Limmat that runs through the centre. There are a few tourists up here for the view.

And then a local woman appears at the dovecote in the park, climbs a ladder to look inside at the top, before having a conversation with two tourists, that I listen into, about how they try to control pigeon numbers by putting some plastic eggs into the nest in place of some of the real ones.

Down in the old town, I pass St Peter’s church, Zurich’s oldest, with an impressively large clock face that I discover is the largest tower clock face in Europe – at 8.7 metres beating Big Ben at a mere 7 metres.

The old houses are adorned with Swiss flags and occasional golden signs – a gloved hand, a horned sheep – that I guess relate to what the shop is selling.

Later, I head to Café Odeon, recommended by another Swiss friend, who tells me that it used to be frequented by an extraordinary cast of characters. After its opening in 1911, regulars in the following years and decades included: James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Herman Hesse, Albert Einstein, several of the Dadaists, Mata Hari, Mussolini, Lenin and Trotsky amidst many others – a dizzying list to imagine.

Its interior is still the original art deco (though it’s only a third of its original size the waiter tells me). I leave wondering about the political and intellectual history of the café, and our lack of anything equivalent in our war-ridden, unstable times today.

I walk on to lake Zurich – boats and ducks on the water, locals having lunch on its edge, mountains hazy in the distance. Later in the evening, I have a glass of wine and a not very impressive pizza – though the price is impressive enough. Zurich is a great place to visit; it reminds me a bit of the rather bigger city of Berlin – but it’s not cheap.

Zurich to Edinburgh in a day

As I walk back to my hotel, I’m musing on the fact my journey is almost over, even though I’m barely over halfway distance-wise. But I’ve used three days of my four day rail pass. So, the pass will only get me all the way to Edinburgh if I do it in a leap from Zurich to Edinburgh in a day. The timetables tell me it’s feasible – we will see.

In the morning, I’m up at 6 a.m., walking to the station, hoping my long day’s journey goes ok, bemused that it will bring my cross-Europe travels to a close on this trip. There’s something about slow travel that you get used to, like a way of life. The idea of an ending is strangely unsettling.

My first train is full of Swiss commuters. There are a few stops before Basel, where I have just a ten minute connection to the high speed TGV to Paris. But it’s Switzerland and the train is perfectly on time. I’m soon ensconced in my upper level seat on the twin-decked TGV heading the 510 kilometres to Paris in just three hours.

I’ve plenty of time for lunch before the Eurostar once I get across Paris from the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord. I head off down the side streets and find a small, friendly place, with a table outside – perfect for watching Parisians walk, cycle and drive past.

Fortified by a super-fresh, mixed salad, I head to the always cramped Eurostar waiting area at the Gare du Nord.

The train itself is, unusually enough, only half full. And my only hiccup in the whole nine day journey comes as we head towards St Pancras. A text arrives to tell me my 5pm, LNER train home to Edinburgh is cancelled. I check my alternatives – there’s a 4.30 pm one I’m unlikely to get, then the last couple of trains that evening at 6 and 6.30. But, somehow, luck is with me and I’m out of St Pancras and customs and into Kings Cross and on the train in less than 20 minutes (and, very helpfully, my rail pass lets me change trains with the click of a button).

A final four hour train journey – flashing past bright yellow gorse and a sunny blue north sea as we head into Scotland. There’s a beautiful, golden sunset as the last miles unfold. Then I head out of Waverley into the evening light.

After my 15 hours of travel today, my nine days of travel from Crete – I walk along Princes Street thinking how strange it feels to be home.

Part one of this two-part blog can be found here.