Well blog readers travelling by train in Switzerland although a costly exercise is very efficient. There are various ticket savings you can buy but you need to do a lot of train travel to warrant forking out 120 swiss francs each for a half price ticket plus there are 6 day tickets you can buy for your bike again at a huge price. Yes your bike needs a train ticket too and its only allowed in designated compartment and must be hung up. Luckily we were travelling to Disentis/Munster the end of the line so no rush to get off with all our luggage and unhooking bikes before the train took off.

Our appartment wasnt ready so we dropped our luggage off and set off cycling uphill,do able without luggage to the local cable car station. We had been given our free tourist vouchers by the hotel but on arriving at the cable car station it was under maintenance and only operating at the weekend. Great! We locked our bikes up and walked up for a while instead beautiful views and much cooler thank goodness as we got higher.

Street signs in this area seem like you are in Italy but the language is Romanisch only 40,000 people still speak it but in this area all the children have to speak it at school till grade 4.

Our appartment I’d chosen it,  instead of a hotel room so we could cook and spread out and the cost was the same as a hotel room. The apartment was in a house on a corner at the main junction in town so you had cars coming at you from all directions if you were on the ground floor, fortunately we were up on the 1stfloor  and also had access to a patio overlooking the railway, which was ok as we still had views of mountains and trains only run once an hour, and do stop at night…

 

We checked out the tourist sites in town. A Bendectine Monastery has been here since the 900s the current one is being renovated and is massive aswell as being very ornate. This village is on the Way of St Jacob so it has the same shell symbols as Santiago del Compostelo dotted around.In fact it is the one and the same route but it is the route by st james to join up with the Spanish and French one.

So day 43 was the day for the source of the Rhine so we caught the cog train up to Oberalp Pass. On the train we met 2 canadians father and son who were doing 2 weeks of the Rhine cycle route.Theyd left their luggage totally behind in Chur another option but it meant they were cycling 95kms in one day, in fact 2 stages, not for us.

We left the train successfully not having luggage made it easier , out into drizzle and snow capped mountains. Bikes were locked up at the one and only cafe up there who also kindly  looked after our helmets for us. We had decided to take the shorter route to Lake Toma as we still had to cycle down all the hair pin bends and I wasnt sure whether Id need to stop at each bend and take a breather.

According to our beloved battered guide book the walk was 90minutes, I thought return…wrong .Anyway after quite a bit of uphill hubby decided he’d prefer to take photographs of motorbikes coming up the hairpins to the pass so he slowly went back. I kept going and then met a huge section of snow covering the path with a sheer drop down the valley. I wouldnt normally walk across snow like this without poles to check its soudness particularly as the sun was on it, anyway a couple had just got across so I hopefully followed in their footsteps. Around the next corner there was even more snow, then the couple had stopped and as I continued on you couldnt see the path for snow just footprints across it. It was slow going and I figured by now hubby might be getting fed up waiting for me stuck in the middle of nowhere. I realised by now it was at least a 3 hour walk and probably another hour longer in the snow, so I reluctantly turned around. Coming back I remembered its much easy to go up through snow then go down without poles, I thought my hands had frost bite trying to find hand holds…all good fun.So Lake Toma is going to have to wait for a July trip to Switzerland when all the snow has melted.At the top of the Oberalp Pass they have the lighthouse from Hoek van Holland to show the journey of the Rhine. The information hut was open when I got back and it is 1hour 50mins each way to Lake Toma the source of the Rhine.

 

Cycling down all the hairpins wasn’t as scarey as I thought it could be. My bike sat happily at 42kms an hour without a wobble. Great fun. We were back in Disentis in no time at all. You even get to zoom through one of those long tunnels.

So we’d now successfully completed half of day 1 of the beginning of the Rhine route so we rested up as  tomorrow we had the only serious ascents of the whole Rhine route and we’d never planned to do this section and here we were loving it.

 

Hotel Alpsu

Disenter/Munster

Friendly hotel will wash your cycling gear for you. Only wifi in main hotel.

Appartment fair facilities but beds made for people less than 5ft8inches

Plenty of rooms around town advertised, more to do and less busy in next town up Sedrum but youd need to change trains to get there.