at lucerne verkehrshaus i disembark one station earlier than planned, trying to catch the voralpenexpress train back to biberbrugg. with a bit of, let’s say, fast-hobbling i manage to catch the train and am on my way back home.

at biberbrugg i meet up with mrs d who has just been dropped of by fredi and is tired but happy from a fantastic day out. together we hop on to the train to einsiedeln and walk/hobble home

picture links:

• my pictures from today’s tour
• mrs d’s pictures from her tour today

the post bus ride from ibergeregg pass down to schwyz was, well, exciting if not adventurous. in contrast to the more gentle norther approach from oberiberg, the southern approach really takes you into the alps with breathtaking views across lake lucerne, up to the huser stock and hengst mountains — all the way constantly going back and forth, left and right, most of the time with no space for two cars, let alone a car and post bus, to pass each other. the way down thus turns into an almost constant post bus horn concerto and i’m glad that it’s not me who is doing the driving a fantastic ride!

we get to schwyz in time for the bus to brunnen, ship station and i get there with 20min to spare unitl the 12:50 steam ship to lucerne departs. from the south more and more cumulus congestus and cumulus nimbus clouds make their way north and i wonder what the weather in the gotthard area is like and whether mrs d can enjoy the panorama or is stuck in the clouds.

the steamship uri, an old paddle steamer, arrives right on time and departs right on time. i make my way up to first class and the restaurant, where i can share table with an elderly couple from nidwalden (as it later transpires). over lunch we chat a bit about living in switzerland, rüschlikon (he grew up there) and the beautiful lake lucerne area.

later i go outside and watch the scenery slowly go past. switzerland seems full of beautiful places.

sound of the steamship “uri” on lake lucerne

first stop on my tour through the swiss alps by public transport: ibergeregg pass.

the post bus from oberiberg wound its way up the pass road navigating lots of curves and bends each time sounding its characteristic swiss post bus horn: dah-dee-doh-dah!

sound of the ibergeregg–schwyz post bus

right at the summit of the ibergeregg pass is a pub-cum-hotel with a nice terrace providing a fantastic view of the alps! i’ve got until 11:40 for the bus to schwyz and settle down for a cup of coffee and some mountain and motorbike watching: the pass road is very popular with both bikers and motor bikers and over the course of half an hour you get to see motorbikes of almost any shape and make: those tiny ones with barely enough power to make it up here — isn’t there a law against mistreating small mopeds — up to real monster bikes that threaten to eat the whole pass in one go, road, mountain, pub, the lot.

then there are the racing cyclists: mostly men in their late 50s (the younger ones are probably already at home again), sometimes accompanied by a younger woman, always in what appears to be the latest racing outfit, almost all happy to reach the summit.

next stop: schwyz.

having hobbled to einsiedeln station, i’m in time for the 9:05 post bus to oberiberg — the weather is fantastic and i do envy mrs d for her snowshoe hike from the gotthard pass up to fibbia, a tour i’d been looking forward to very much¹, especially as it is guided by fredi kälin from bluedimensions (if you want to do really nice walks or snowshoe tours: book fredi!)

instead of moapping around at home, however, i’ve planned a little mountain and lake tour myself — using only public transport i intend to go from einsiedeln via oberiberg to ibergeregg pass, have a coffee break there and enjoy the panorama, then on to the capital of our canton, schwyz. next stop is going to be brunnen where the plan is to switch to the steamship for lucerne. from lucerne it’s back by train via arth-goldau and biberbrugg to einsiedeln again.

lazyrelaxed.

originally our plans for the pentecost weekend had been to do a two day walk in the napf area, a rather nice walking area between lucerne and berne. originally…

well, two weeks ago we set out to find the “across einsiedeln” geocache — which was supposed to be a rather simple one in easy terrain. as the weather was quite warm i didn’t put on my mountain boots but instead went in sandals — had i but known… we did find the GPS location of the “across einsiedeln” geocache, but didn’t find the cache itself. looking around i spotted a rather nice hiding place up a slope, climbed it, checked the spot, found nothing, then went back down to mrs d waiting on the path — and, hitting a muddy patch, slipped and twisted my ankle terribly! it hurt quite bad, and we returned home immediately, me grinding my teeth, mrs d trying to support me as well as possible. needless to say we cooled the ankle all afternoon and evening and on monday morning it did look better already.

having worked from home on monday, i decided to give it a try and went to the lab on tuesday — tuesday evening matters were worse: the left foot swollen and hurting like hell. so, wednesday morning i hobbled my way to the A&E at einsiedeln hospital: luckily nothing was broken, but the diagnosis was: torn ligament no walks for the next three weeks, and a brace to wear 24×7 for the next two weeks

so, that kind of spoiled our plans for the pentecost weekend. the foot is improving, luckily, and as of tuesday i’m allowed to drive again. as the weather was fantastic today (grumble, had i but worn those boots), i decided to finally tackle the gardening experiment i had meant to do all along: grow some vegetables and herbs on our balcony. the wooden container i had already assembled during last weekend’s enforced stay-at-home sunday and it was now time to fill it with a mixture of clay spheres (to retain the water) and soil — and, of course, some vegetables and herbs!

a trip to the local garden center (the “landi”!) later i had soil, clay spheres, and a green tomato plant, a san moreno tomato plant, a basil plant, italian parsley, english mint, an oregano plant, chives, french carrots, and an assortment of colourful radish seeds.

here the container once it was filled with soil:

a pixture of my buxus buxus along with the lavendel — which we planted four weeks ago:

at the landi i also bought a sheep, can’t have agriculture without sheep, really:

and here is the final result of my groundforce afternoon:

now i’m really interested in what this will turn out to be: vegetables in 3 months time or compost in 3 months time? hoping for the vegetable option…

[some german skills required]

i used to sing in the church choir of the united methodist church adliswil back then when we still lived in adliswil. around december of last year michael hug, a very good friend of mine, asked me whether i wanted to take part in the farewell summer concert for viktor hug, long time conductor of the choir¹ — naturally, having always enjoyed the way viktor leads the choir, i agreed. and so i’m taking the train from rüschlikon almost every thursday night to thalwil, pick up the mobility car there and drive back to adliswil in time for choir practice. then at around 21:30 i “race” back to thalwil, drop off the car at the station, and catch the train back to wädenswil to make the connection to the train to einsieden.

tonight we were practicing chorus #24, der herde gleich, out of händel’s messiah — and although we had had a stab at that one before, tonight i picked up an old german word: wallen. it seems to mean to walk and is used like “er wallte seinen weg dahin” (he went his way). i liked it so much, that at arund 21:30 i didn’t just go, no, ich wallte von dannen

via spiegel online i came across a fascinating youtube video made by christoph rehage who after studying in beijing decided to walk home from beijing to bad nenndorf. now, as you might have noticed, bad nenndorf is not exactly a chinese name¹ but instead the name of a little town in norther germany, so quite a distance. in fact — and if you take a look at christoph’s walking map, you quickly realize it yourself — just crossing china east to west is a bloody long walk. aside from doing a photo blog about his experience, he also took a picture of himself everyday and assembled it into a video clip:

have a look at his blog, fascinating reading!

stumbled over this excellent youtube clip about lambient media … enjoy!

lazyrelaxed.

as we did last year, over the easter weekend mrs d and i stayed with the sisters of the communität casteller ring on the schwanberg again. in contrast to last year, when we had snow on good friday, this year the weather was just splendid with the sun shining from wednesday afternoon all the way through monday when we returned to erlangen.

i really enjoyed the “time out” from my job and from the day-to-day hustle and bustle and took the chance to think several things through and reach a kind of internal consensus on some of them.

ever since i’d seen american cemeteries with their open, park-like appearance — in contrast to the european but certainly in contrast to the german and swiss ones with their rows and rows of “burial allotments” — i had been fascinated¹ with the concept of a friendly, open, and peaceful cemetery and found it sad that there was nothing comparable available in my home country, germany…

…until a couple of years ago when we learned about the friedwald concept, where, after cremation, one gets buried next to a tree in a specially designated forest, the friedwald.

somewhere around 2006/2007 we learned during one of our stays on the schwanberg that a friedwald was going to be established on the schwanberg. ever since both mrs d and i had wanted to buy a final resting place for both of us there but somehow had never got around to it. so, this easter we went and acquired our last and final resting places: it’s tree #282, a lovely spot close to the old celtic wall.

you are welcome to visit

View our last resting place in a larger map

[caution: advanced level german skills required]

ever marveled at the pristine, clean appearance of the swiss alps? ever wondered why the alps are just that tad more appealing here in switzerland?

well, wonder no longer:

interestingly enough, there is a tradition of cleaning the mountains, albeit not from bird droppings but from loose rocks, and it is an austrian institution, the bergputzer.

if you’ve been following the swiss press over the last couple of weeks you might have noticed that the finance minister of my home country, mr steinbrück, managed to get most of the 7-plus million swiss all excited — well, angry is probably the better word for it. what happened? and what does it have to do with my tax declaration?

well. most of the larger EU countries but also the US have been trying to negotiate better ways of cooperating with switzerland on the exchange of financial information about swiss bank accounts held by their respective citizens — in particular information on those accounts whose owners the respective governments suspect of tax evasion and worse. since 1934 switzerland had a banking law…

…which codified the rules of secrecy and criminalizes violation of it [wikipedia: banking in switzerland]

basically (and i’m simplifying a bit here) only swiss banks knew about your accounts, nobody else would. ever. ideal for protecting your privacy. but also ideal for protecting your ill-gotten gains from interested eyes — except, well, except if you live in switzerland: in contrast to most other countries where your taxes are withheld from your salary right away, in switzerland you have to pay them yourself and usually in one lump sum at the beginning of the year and you can also go to the tax office and request to see what your neighbor filed and declared as income and as assets, which introduces a kind of social checks and balances system for taxes. also, the swiss make a fine destinction between forgetting to include facts in their tax declaration and tax fraud — a distinction that most non-swiss fail to understand.

since 1934 there have been repeated attempts by various countries to penetrate the swiss banking secrecy: the european countries with less luck, the US with considerably more success — perhaps due to the long lasting swiss–american love story?¹ as of a couple of weeks ago, switzerland was only willing to lift the bank secret if the requesting country could provide proof of tax fraud being committed by one of its citizens…

…then came mr steinbrück, the german finance minister. a man in need of money and also a man with a certain rough charme, he started firing verbal broadside after broadside against the swiss banking secrecy act. actually, it was not just mr steinbrück but also mr obama, mr gordon, mr sarkozy, and probably others, but for some reason the swiss press latched on to every uttering of mr steinbrück. some of which where really downright rude, others were not only rude but downright stupid. most of them (and their ripostes from swiss politician) on kindergarten level — that is, rather refined.

things came to the boil, when parts of the OECD started talking about a “black list” of tax havens and possible sanctions against any country that found itself on that list — and, oh, dear, they mumbled something about including switzerland unless, unless switzerland would adopt article 26 of the OECD model tax convention.

some right wing swiss politician fancied themselves in the middle of a war by then, the swiss finance minister kind of said “only over my dead body”, the press was having a feast. a week or so later, the same finance minister announced that switzerland would adopt article 26 after all, prompting cries of outrage and “traitor!” as well as heated discussions in parliament and pubs alike.

enter, stage left, again, mr steinbrück: smart guy that he is, he mentions in a interview with swiss television that there never was a black list, and that it was just a ruse to scare the tax heavens worldwide, “like the threat of the cavalry against the indians”. that, to put it bluntly is not only rude but also rather stupid²

now, he didn’t really equal the swiss with the american indians — but that subtlety was lost on the swiss press and subsequently also lost on most of the swiss population. if we had heated discussions before, we now were in the boiling pot. mr steinbrück became the most hated man in switzerland. somehow the swiss fascination with america didn’t extend to being compared with the american indians.

this is were my tax declaration and my proposal to solve this problem comes in as i mentioned earlier in switzerland you have to pay your taxes in one go early in the year. your tax declaration is due by march 31 (that is, yesterday). every year my wife and i collate all the various bank statements and then figure out the official currency conversion rates for our german bank accounts (not an easy undertaking, for some reason the cantonal tax authorities hide that information in huge lists of stock price listings, not immediately obvious if you do this kind of stuff just once a year), apply those to the bank statements, tabulate them and transcribe them into the tax software. tedious. annoying.

so, here’s my proposal: why not give each country’s tax authority the right to automatically access the information about all your bank accounts in each country at year end and have them obtain the current balance as well as earnings on that account — and in return they pre-fill the tax declaration for me? including downloading those 20-plus megabyte PDF files and looking up the official currency conversion rates at year end? just an idea

a very short night — we arrived in dubai city at 23:25 last night and got to our ridiculously expensive hotel at 1:10 this morning and i got up at 5:00 to be picked up by the shuttle to our workshop location at 6:00. well, it was supposed to pick us up at 6:00, it did turn up at 6:30: what i had heard in the night was not (as i had imagined in my sleep-deprived state of mind) the hotel crew washing off the desert dust but was indeed and in fact: rain!

the first time i’m on the arabic peninsula, in a desert state, it rains! typical. rain in the united arabic emirates is like a couple of centimeters of snow in the southern states of the US: it hits both on the wrong foot and in both cases you have accidents all over the place. the largest one was without doubt a “sweet water tanker” that had titled over on the highway to abu dhabi.

during the workshop with our client i keep fighting against sweet sleep — inspite of very interesting presentations.

luckily, we finish earlier than expected, have a lovely dinner outside with a view across the waterfront, then manage to get the bus back to arrive earlier than scheduled to take us back to the hotel — which we do, once the bus driver has been told how to get back to dubai…

i’m sitting in the saddle spot between mount zindelspitz (to the south) and mount rossalplispitz (to the north). half an hour ago, mrs d, i, and fredi, our friend and outdoor guide from blue dimension got here after a climb up from lake wäggital, up through some frozen and snowed over patches — just my luck really: we hired fredi’s services as an outdoor guide to help me get over, past, beyond, and ultimately safely away from those exposed sections of today’s walk, and i had not really banked on having the additional challenge of iced over slopes… anyhow, just getting to the saddle spot was already quite exciting for me — just a couple of meters to the east of where i’m now sitting is: nothing! to be exact: about 1000m (about 3′200ft for you non-metricals) of nothingness, 1000m of straight down nothingness.

yikes.

the path to zindelspitz is looking ghastly from the point of view of a confessed acrophobic such as myself — that and the 1000m of nothingness right in front of me already had me politely but firmly excuse myself from the expedition to the peak of zindelspitz. so, mrs d and fredi have set off by themselves and i’m waiting for them to return.

having calmed down from my initial panic attack i spend the time trying out my new camera (got the body last monday from digitec and the 28–300mm lense arrived on thursday from adorama): i’m just blown away by the vibration compensation feature which allows me to shoot 300mm at 1/30s!

after about 30min a young walker comes down from zindelspitz. watching him it seems to be so easy, so effortless, just like taking a stroll to the station in the morning. sigh. sometimes i wish i had that same non-concerned-ness about exposed places, sometimes i wish that i, too, could just ignore those gaping abysses of nothingness… eventually he passes me and continues up towards the peak of rossalplispitz — which i’m supposed to scale today as well. following his progress i begin to have second thoughts, and third thoughts, and fourth thoughts. in fact, i can’t stop thinking that i must have been bloody raving mad to have agreed to today’s experiment, ropes or no ropes. i briefly entertain the idea of returning back to the lake right away, the memory of the iced slopes and that bit of having to scramble put a stop to it, though. sigh.

after a while i can hear the voices of mrs d and fredi and then see them navigating the chain-secured part and coming back down to me. yet, before i can even voice my concerns i find myself on the ascend to rossalplispitz! gulp!

…and the first part is kind of ok, i manage to persuade myself that that tiny piece of void to my right is not really important. soon it gets steeper and steeper though and the scenery becomes breathtaking — literally so in my case. panic sets in. luckily we have fredi with us, experienced fredi and he helps me take a break, take a deep breath and calm down again, and we try the last 50m scrambling up to the peak. it would have been nice, could i report that it went all swimmingly, but it didn’t. half-way up i get another panic attack and it takes quite a bit of encouragement, patience and even the encouraging words of a young swiss-french lady overtaking me to get me going up again…

…and i make it! i really make it up to rossalplispitz! it’s an exhilarating experience! the views are fantastic — as is lunch out of the rucksack up here at over 2100m altitude! yes, sure am i concerned about the way down, but i also enjoy being up here and am grateful for fredi’s help and patience (and the encouraging words of that swiss-french lady).

after about half an hour we get our kit together — fredi is very kindly going to secure me on my way down and so i’m being “put on a leash” as i call it. the descent of the scramble bit is every bit as frightful as i imagined it to be, but being secured via the rope i manage to get down to where the path is — and then have to manage the final “piece de resistance”, about 50m of narrow path with the aforementioned 1000m of nothingness to my right… with fredi’s help and securing i do manage it and it becomes much easier after that. phew.

we make our way through rocks, but nothing as scary as what i’ve just put past me. the landscape looks almost alien being slightly covered in snow dust.

at hochfläschen hut we break for a well-deserved coffee — and enjoy the view back (rather impressive and chat with a young couple who had passed us on our way down.

a rather exciting walk. would i do it again? hmm…i guess that yes, but not alone

links:

• pictures
• slideshow

this morning i learnt that on monday afternoon my very good friend steve wright died after a motorbike accident in twyford.

to say that i’m devastated and sad is an understatement.

all day long pictures of steve keep coming up: our first project together for a UK mobile phone operator, working frantically through the night to get the demo running next morning at 9:00 … steve picking mrs d and me up at the end of our southdowns walk last year and whisking us back out of the rain to warm and friendlz bigpath farm … steve taking care of their cat bramble … steve preparing the BBQ … us having a ridiculously expensive pint of guinness at disneyland paris … seemingly endless and escalating sametime exchanges of more and more ridiculous icons that we each had found on the internet … his two words of german “moin moin” with which he would start all his sametime sessions with me … DVDs with those missed topgear or dr who episodes arriving from the UK … steve taking us on a mini-pub crawl through pubs of hampshire … URLs with links to fantasticly looking new bikes … URLs to ridiculous stuff each of us had found on the internet … our planned trip to the bike exhibition in milano in three weeks, him as the CEO of bigpath enterprise, me as the bigpath enterprise sales director germany and switzerland … his “right!” when he’d just finished something … standing in line at the coffee bar in hursley … his shed full of bikes and bike parts … his wit… his humour … having a laugh with him…

sigh.

we have lost a very good friend and i miss him terribly. our thoughts are with his family who must miss him even more.

here’s to you, steve! i hope we’ll see each other again some day!

i wake up early today, not just because of the usual 5:00 bell ringing from the monastary’s church tower, today the whole valley around einsiedeln is just drowning in the sound of cow bells and sheep bells — it’s alpabtrieb! every year in the may–june time frame the local farmers bring their stocks, mostly cows and the occasional sheep herd, from the valley floor up to the alps where they stay for the summer. from the beginning of september until mid-september, end of september we then have alpabtrieb when the whole process is reversed.

einsiedeln being a little town¹ with tourist traffic all year round it wouldn’t do to have all the farmers bring down their stock all at once, so, the whole business proceeds in stages according to a pre-determined schedule over the course of two weeks. today we seem to have the cows from our end of valley descending on us

oh, and that picture was not taken today but rather two years ago at the goldinger tal, they’ve homecoming cows there as well.

after a nice breakfast at 6 oakfield street where we meet our co-guests as well (two americans, mother & daughter, on a two week tour of the UK), we are off via earls court underground to kew gardens! well, eventually we are off, as we at first board the wrong train but we manage to get that sorted and 20min later emerge at sunny kew gardens station, have a coffee at the starbucks right on the route to kew gardens, and arrive shortly after 10:00 at the victoria gate of the royal botanical gardens, kew

the weather is gorgeous and we are really looking forward to a day at kew: i just love the arboretum and the whole landscape. this year is particularly interesting as kew has just opened the rhizotron and xstrata treetop walk, a 200m walk way some 18m above ground winding its way through the tree tops of some very magnificent old trees!

i’m a bit apprehensive: on one hand i dearly love to get up there and have a walk-about in the tree tops, on the other hand i’m really afraid of heights and exposed places… this is going to interesting…

first things first, we register for the special 12:00 “champion trees of kew” walk — and then are off to have a go at the tree top walk.

the whole structure looks fantastic — and breathtaking. 18m above ground is quite a bit if you are not really a fan of exposed places. the walkway itself is constructed from punched and streched steel sheets, giving you plenty of the exposed stuff, enough to drown yourself in mrs d, true to form, just dances up the stairs and is on her way around the tree tops. me? well, i make it half-way up and then have to call it off and retreat down to safer grounds, where is stand with my head tilted back, longingly looking up, wishing i was made of sterner stuff and not such a wuss when it comes to heights…

…well, after about 10min i had enough of that and decided to give it another go: i must have been the slowest person ever to climb that staircase, resting every so often to get used to the height, until i finally was up on top of the first platform! wow! still scared i made my way round — and it was worth every bit of courage i had to scrape up: being up there in the tree tops was fantastic, the view across london was great and just the fact that i had made it up there was exhilarating! still scared but also enjoying it

the guide walk — champion trees of kew — was really interesting: champion trees are trees that are considered to be prime examples of their species and kew has quite a few of them.

lunch was long and leisurely at the conservatory and we really enjoyed it! most of the afternoon we spent walking through the arboretum, reading (remember the new elisabeth george? , and enjoying our last vacation day in england.

a fantastic day.

it’s 9:45, our taxi which was supposed to have picked us up at 9:30 is still not there, and our train is due to leave bangor station at 10:18, slowly but surely our adrenalin level is reaching new heights. our landlord phones the taxi company once more and returns with the good news that “she’s just seconds away” — which turns out to be literally true. we hurriedly say our goodbyes to our landlord and landlady of marteg bed & breakfast and get into the taxi as quick as possible. the drive to bangor station is a bit a race against time, particularly so when we hit a traffic jam just 0.5km from the station — luckily our taxi driver knows her way around and does a u-turn and weaves her way through a couple of side streets and we make it with a couple of minutes to spare! phew…

the train from bangor is a direct, fast train to london euston and we are travelling first class again today (which, thanks to our britrail flexipasses, comes out cheaper than buying 2nd class tickets in bangor) — complete with free drinks and coffee

the weather has turned wet — as forecast, but we are not really concerned and as we move further south again the rain slowly ceases and it’s sunny and rather warm when we arrive in london euston on the dot at 13:40. we take the underground to earl’s court station and then head south to 6 oakfield street our b&b for the next two nights.

6 oakfield street is a narrow, three floors victorian terrace house in a side street of “little chelsea”. our double bedroom is to the front and on the top floor of the house — nicely done, has a bit of a changing rooms flair to it, “oliver heath’s grey area”, as mrs d so aptly summarizes it we even spot the famous MDF! a bit of a curiosity is the fridge, which i at first mistook to be the b&b variant of a mini-bar but which on closer inspection turned out to be the “overflow” fridge of the family fridge containing vegetables, a cake, and other stuff.¹ but, in total, a very nice room

we unpack and then make our way to the victoria & albert museum, the v&a, which is “close by”. mrs d is interested in the fashion exhibits, i’m looking forward to the photography collection. we also intend to get a little walk through south kensington in sideways to offset the hours of just sitting on the train…

it’s a bit past 16:00 when we arrive at the v&a, leaving us with just about one and a half hour to spend at the museum. mrs d decides to look at the fashion through the centuries exhibit, i make for the photo gallery…

…which turns out to be rather small but also rather interesting, motivating, and inspiring! if you are in the vicinity and have the time, go pay a visit — it’s completely free but worth the effort.

we meet again at 17:00, stroll through the v&a shops (finally pick up that birthday present for my sister-in-law, mrs a) and then go on that mini-walk of south kensington.

before returning to earl’s court we stop for a look around at a nice little independent bookshop. mrs d very kindly points out the latest elizabeth george, careless in red — a grave mistake as it turns out: once i get started on it i just have to keep reading, reading, reading…

dinner is at a local restaurant, balans, at the corner of old brompton road and redcliffe gardens. nice food, charming waiters (according to mrs d .

tomorrow it’s kew gardens and, perhaps, if i dare, the new tree top walk…

all in all: nice train trip. interesting exhibits at v&a. exciting new book. nice dinner

after yesterday’s fantastic day out on mount snowdon we are eager to see more of snowdonia. the recent snowdon special issue of country walking — which we brought with us — has a couple of rather scary walks (scrambles, exposed ridges, and so forth, nothing for me, though mrs d wouldn’t mind doing those…) but also describes a walk around beddgelert which sounds rather interesting. so, the 10:16 S1 sherpa bus sees us again and we ride up to pen-y-pass once more, this time to change to the sherpa bus to beddgelert.

whereas the scenery on our left and right up llanberis pass and for a couple of kilometers past pen-y-pass was rather barren and conveyed an almost alpine feeling¹, it now morphs into a more tree-d one and resembles the country side in the lower parts of the lake district at times. the road to beddgelert winds its way along the valley, passing the llyn gwynant and llyn dinas lakes before reaching a rather nice little hamlet at the confluence of the afon colwyn and the afon glaslyn rivers², beddgelert.

beddgelert is a bit smaller than llanberis but it becomes immediately clear that tourist-wise you are better off in beddgelert: a couple of decent looking restaurants and pubs, tea-rooms and nice surroundings — if we are to return to snowdonia we’d probably “take lodgings” here. after a tea at one of the tea-rooms (a bit too overstuffed with “antique” nick-nacks and riff-raff for our taste, oh, and “prices are not negotiable”) we start our (mini-)walk by walking along the afon colwyn to the confluence point and turn south after crossing over a foot bridge. at first the walk is quite level and “suitable for all ages” and abilities. a sign informs us that the former railway tunnel unfortunately is now longer open as it was becoming too dangerous and to expensive to maintain, and that the footpath now is diverted along the river bed…

…as it turns out that really is not quite true: as we progress towards the “former railway tracks” we quickly realise that those tracks are anything but “former”! before us we are seeing brand new tracks! way cool! and — that tunnel? it’s no longer closed but instead has the new line passing through it again. the railway enthusiast in me is very satisfied to see what once was thought lost being restored.³

once we have crossed the new old tracks we indeed are now following the riverbed. at first wide and more or less flat the path then becomes narrow and at one point circumnavigates a protruding rock where we have to use iron grips anchored in the rock itself to avoid having to introduce ourselves to the lovely river below. after about 30min we reach the pass and turn left into a valley which is at the same time climbing up and narrowing. the path takes us past disused mines and mining equipment. whereas the wind was initially just a breeze, the funnel-like shape of the valley concentrates it and it almost becomes a veritable storm when we reach the highest point, a style taking us across from rather rocky terrain into a moorland of sorts — and fantastic views towards snowdon but also towards the irish sea!

the path soon takes us steeply downhill past a lake and back to and along afon glaslyn in the direction of beddgelert again. about halfway there we pass a sign for the sygyn mine and mrs d suggests we pay a visit. sceptical at first — it does look like one of the typical british tourist traps — i join her…and we go on a walk on the other side of the mountain that we’ve just crossed: the inner side that is.

we enter the mine at the former base level and a long low tunnel (i’m a tad on the tall side for this adventure and am in a constant crouch state) takes us quite a bit into the mountain. this part of the mine had to be dug out again when work started on it in the the 1980s to turn it into a museum mine. finally, after what feels like an eternity, we get to a series of caverns containing rather interesting displays about the working conditions, the geology, and the everyday lives of the ancient miners. also “on display”, so to speak, are underground lakes entertaining hundreds of stalagmites and stalactites!

the path then takes us up a series of stairs (183 in total) through various work areas — the most impressive one explaining about the actual mining process itself, complete with recreating the atmosphere and a “real” underground explosion (at one point we are left in almost complete darkness with just a couple of candles burning: the working conditions of the original miners). very interesting!

we emerge about 100m above the base level and return to the visitor centre to drop off our hard hats⁴ and to have a cup of tea before tackling the last part of our walk to beddgelert.

that last part is almost flat out tarmac road and we soon reach beddgelert where we have a pint of beer each at one of the local pubs before we board our bus back to pen-y-pass and onwards to llanberis.

all in all: breathtaking landscape, exciting riverside path, satisfying rail development, a walk on the other side. would do it again