Mountains! - The Alps, Oct. 16

Well hello again! My apologies for keeping you all in the dark for the last few days, but my trip through the Alps was pretty packed and I just didn't have the time to give updates. I was only staying in each place for one night and travelling for most of each day, so I got to see a lot very quickly! I'm now in Vienna for a couple days, so I've got a chance to catch up. And this is another long one with lots of pictures! A friendly reminder that for the smaller photos, you can click on them to see a bigger version to see more detail.

​Last we left off was on Tuesday, where I was staying one more night near Zurich. I finished booking accommodations and travel, which included the following plan:

• Wednesday - Travel to Zermatt, southwest side of Switzerland
• Thursday - Take the Glacier Express to St. Moritz, southeast side of Switzerland
• Friday - Travel to Innsbruck, west side of Austria
• Saturday - Travel to Vienna, east side of Austria

And surprisingly, everything went according to plan! I took a heck of a lot of photos along the way, and spent a good amount of time today picking out the best ones to put here. For example, this awesome view of the Matterhorn right after I arrived in Zermatt.

I think my favorite part is the rays coming from behind the mountain, this is definitely one of my favorite shots of this entire trip.

My timing for this part of the trip was fairly intentional, because we're in the middle of autumn and the leaves are starting to change colors. My hope was to time it such that the hill sides were all shades of orange, but I was unfortunately a bit too early for that. Most were still very green and just starting to turn a light yellow.

However there were a handful of trees with very rich colors on them, from yellow to orange to red. Many of them passed by very quickly on the trains, and I didn't have time to snap a photo before they were gone. But I did manage to get a few of them, here's the best photos I got of colorful trees.

Most of the rest of the photos have much more green trees, so if you prefer the look of orange and red trees, just pretend they are!

Most of the trains I took through the Alps were just regional trains, but they had especially large windows so you could get the best views. One problem I did encounter while taking photos was glare and reflections. Some trains had lights on the ceiling (even though it was plenty bright without them!) whose reflections unfortunately popped up in some of the photos I took. My phone case is bright blue on the back, which is also very apparent in many photos unfortunately. So you'll just have to look through the reflections since there wasn't much I could do about them. Or you can look very close to try and see me in the reflections!

The best train was on Thursday, when I took the Glacier Express through most of the Swiss Alps. This is a fairly famous train route aimed at tourists, and is thus fairly expensive. But the Eurail pass actually gets you a free ticket for the whole journey! That saved me about $150, so definitely worth it!
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However you do still have to pay for a seat reservation plus a meal if you want it, which each add another $50 or so. There are several meal options, but I just decided to splurge and get the 4-course meal to not feel like I was missing anything. Although I unfortunately didn't find the food to be spectacular, but it was still decent.

One of the most famous bits of this trip is the Landwasser Viaduct, a tall bridge going over a river and straight into a tunnel. This is on the east side of that route, it's fun to see your train just disappear into a hole in the wall.

As I said, the train is called the Glacier Express, which I think is a bit more relevant in the winter since there weren't many glaciers to see on my journey. I did spot one right outside Zermatt at the top of some mountains. This isn't the best photo of the glacier itself, but the rest of the area looks pretty cool.

These next sections are collections of photos with features in common, rather than being ordered chronologically. That felt like a bit of an easier way to group them together, since each area of the Alps had several features in common. And this allows me to give a bit more context to them than if I had just thrown them all into a single gallery of photos.

This first set is of several rivers we passed by or over. Obviously there's a lot, since water is what formed the shape of the mountains.

Some of these rivers have carved very deep gorges over many many years of erosion.

And what do you get when a river flows down a steep mountain? Waterfalls!

And if the rivers flow into an open area, you get lakes!

And if the water is in the air, you get clouds! I actually got really lucky with the weather on this leg of the trip, Wednesday and Thursday were super sunny. It did get a bit cloudy on Friday and Saturday, but it made for some really cool photos too, especially with the sun behind a thin layer.

There's lots of small villages and towns the we passed by on the trains, these people live in some very cool places. Though I can't help but think they're a bit more challenging to live in, due to being far from major cities and often having steep hills to overcome.

The most challenging of which are probably these lone buildings completely isolated from everywhere else.

Though mobility really depends on your mode of transport. Why not fly and skip the hills? I spotted multiple people paragliding, and even a few helicopters.

One of my favorite areas was this rocky river, where huge cliff faces were exposed by this river with a gravel bed. Looked like a super cool area!

One of my trains also passed right through Lichtenstein! I think I was only in the country for a total of about 10 minutes, ha! We passed through the north side, which didn't have a great view of the main city, just a farming area. However I did manage to get a photo over the river that separates Lichtenstein and Switzerland.

Ok, I've run out of ways to group these photos, so here's the rest that I wanted to post. Yes, I know it's a lot of photos, but this is after I cut back on many of them, there's a lot you haven't seen here!

I've also got a few notes on each of the places I stayed at, the first being Zermatt in the southwest of Switzerland. This is right next to the Matterhorn where I got the first photo in this post. Obviously it's a big tourist destination, and therefore is quite expensive, most of the places I looked at for accommodations were around 4x more expensive than what I've usually found in Germany.

I found a hostel near the edge of town and stayed in one of the dorms since that was the cheapest option. And it included free breakfast! The dorm itself wasn't the nicest, all the beds were mushed together so you had neighbors on both sides. Fortunately it was only half full, so I didn't have anyone trying to cuddle in the middle of the night.

I did quite liked the town itself, it's a very small area that is very pleasant to walk through. I didn't actually spot any cars around at all, the only vehicles were these little electric taxis that could hold only a few people. Others had been modified for moving stuff instead of people. And because they're all electric, they're super quiet! This was definitely a nice area to stay for a night, even if it is super expensive.

St. Moritz was also quite expensive to find accommodations since it's another tourist area, but it's definitely not as nice as Zermatt. It's a lot more spread out, so cars are fairly common there. There are at least bus routes to take you places, though I found them a bit challenging to use.

For example, when I first arrived I needed to take the number 9 bus to get to my hostel, so I hopped on the next one that came by the station. It was actually going the wrong way, but it's near the end of the line, so I figured it'd just turn around and go the direction I needed. But nope! It suddenly changed to become a number 6 bus and ran a completely different route! It did happen to go to a stop near my hostel, but gave me a good deal of confusion.

​This hostel was at least a bit nicer than the previous one, I was in a 4 bed dorm with bunk beds, along with 1 other person. They may only be filling the dorms half way for COVID reasons. Apparently our neighbors were making a lot of noise just after dinner, and they apologized by giving us each a cookie. But I didn't hear it at all since I had my noise cancelling headphones on, so I got a free cookie!

When I got to Innsbruck, I actually explored around a bit more since I arrived a bit earlier, and it was already on my list of places to explore. I definitely didn't explore enough, but I wasn't really a huge fan. My hostel was in the outskirts of town, which is a very car heavy area with a couple major roads running right outside. The only restaurant in walking distance was a Burger King that was clearly not designed for people to get to by walking. The sidewalk doesn't even really even connect to the building, you have to walk across the drive through lane. And the closest intersection didn't have a crosswalk on the side I needed, so I instead had to go around the entire intersection and cross it 3 times. Not good for walking.

To be fair, the center is much better designed for getting around by foot. There's a few blocks with pedestrianized streets, so those are pleasant to be in. The roads that do go through the center had very few cars on them, they seemed mostly intended for public transit, so bonus points for that!

However I have to immediately take those bonus points away, because the public transit was so unexpectedly difficult! My main problem was the number 2 tram line, which runs from the center of the city out to the hostel I stayed at. Except for when it doesn't! There are apparently different destinations for the number 2 tram line, which go in completely different directions from the city center. And I didn't realize that until after the second time I got on the wrong tram, and went even further away from where I wanted to go!

Why the heck do those trams get the same number if they take completely different routes!? Number them differently, please! I found a chart listing transit times for a particular stop, and apparently the tram going in the wrong direction was the more frequent one. The one I needed only came every 15 minutes, so I spent a lot more time waiting around than I wanted to. Definitely not the best public transit experience I've had on this trip.

Similarly, the hostel I stayed at was also not great. At check in, they have guests fill out an online form, which was way longer than it needed to be. It kept asking survey questions like "how did you hear about us?" and "what kind of activities do you enjoy?" Apparently this is so they can recommend things to do, but I didn't get any recommendations from anyone. I also really needed to pee and didn't think I would get held up by a stupid survey at check in, so that got me extra frustrated.

Next, they don't even accept credit cards, you have to pay in cash. Even though I had already payed a reservation fee online. If you can accept online payments, why not cards, eh? I only barely had enough cash on me to pay it. The worst part was that they take your passport until you check out. I really wasn't comfortable with that, but I was too frustrated at that point to argue, and I was really needing to pee and just wanted this check in to be over with. Supposedly they hold your passport to prevent people from stealing room keys. I can understand wanting to prevent key theft, but taking people's passports away is far from the best way to do that. A deposit would make way more sense and be way less concerning for people who need their passports to travel anywhere.

After spending probably 15 minutes just getting checked in, I finally got to my room, which was another dorm to save on cost. Innsbruck was also pretty expensive for accommodations, and this was the cheapest option. And it definitely showed, the bathrooms felt super old, the doorknobs were wiggly, it didn't feel very nice in a lot of areas. The bathroom area was separated into 4 "rooms" with the rightmost one having a shower and sink, and the middle two having toilets. These all had doors with locks, so far so good. The leftmost one had 4 sinks, presumably for everyone to brush teeth or whatever, as well as a shower with a partially frosted glass wall. And the door to this room did not have a lock. So if someone decided to have a shower in there when you wanted to brush your teeth, you got to look them straight in the face while you did so. Not cool at all, such a lack of privacy that I'm not okay with. Fortunately no one used that shower while I was there.

On the bright side, I did find a nice park area near the center of town to explore. It actually had a lot of figures with lights inside them, such as deer or a knight in armor. It was a cute area, very nicely kept.

And now I'm in Vienna! I'll save my comments on it for the next post, this one is plenty long enough already. It's also pretty late, so I'm gonna get some sleep. I'm staying one more night here, so I'll do some exploring tomorrow. Take care!