Zurich, 11 August

Sitting in the lounge at the Zurich Airport Hilton. It is 4pm and we are catching a flight to London tomorrow morning. I am very content to be stranded far from sights for a few hours.

When I was little and living in Switzerland, Mum and Dad took me to see a castle. My sole memory of the castle was walking down stone spiral stairs inside a turret and that memory is fleeting. I didn't fall down the steps, nothing dramatic happened, so why would I remember that one moment rather than a suit of armour or a moat or a dungeon or something else that was .....memorable? I will never know and I will never know whether the castle Mum and Dad took me to was Chillon. There was one accessible turret staircase at Chillon, from the Dukes bedroom to the chapel, but it did not ring any bells. And if I had seen it before, surely I would have remembered the Duke's bedroom. This photo, borrowed from another blogger,

Attribution: http://fivemonthsabroad.com/2011/01/20/the-chateau-de-chillon/

gives the faintest idea of the splendour of the room in the 14th century. The ceiling was printed with gold crosses, the walls painted blue and printed with fleur de lis, probably gold (How did they touch up the paint? What poor serf had to freshen up each cross and fleur de lis?). Each wall was adorned with large paintings of animals, both real and legendary. Did the Duke, lying amidst vibrantly coloured mythical creatures, think of the prisoner languishing in the dungeon under his feet? 

The same Duke of Savoy that vastly enlarged and improved the fortress on the site of Chillon Castle, Peter II (1203 -May 15 1268), also built the Savoy Palace on The Strand in London. John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, later lived there and the Palace burnt down during the Peasant's Revolt in 1381 because the English were so angry about a poll tax that had been imposed obliging each and every man to pay a flat tax. The Savoy Hotel was later built on the site.  The power of the Duchy of Savoy was once immense. Now Savoie is known for Chamonix and Mont Blanc. 

Yesterday we travelled from Montreux to Lucerne on the Goldenpass line, a train journey of three trains traversing truly spectacular scenery. You have to change trains twice and the journey is about five hours in total. Amazingly, confounding all we had heard about Swiss everything, the second AND third trains broke and we had to catch buses for the last leg of each trip. But also amazingly the buses got us to our final destination, Lucerne Bahnhof, within 15 minutes of the original scheduled arrival time. Despite the problems, the trip is really worth it. Here are some photos, taken from the train window:

Every time we passed a barn brimming with hay, I thought of Terri Garr in Young Frankenstein saying, "rrroll, rrroll, rrroll in ze hay! Rrroll, rroll, rroll in ze hay!" Weirdly, we only saw a few cows. The rest must be on summer holidays like the rest of Switzerland.