To Andermatt: By bike and by train

September 27, 2012

There was a massive thunder storm overnight and torrential rain. In the morning the rain had stopped but it looked pretty unsettled. Last night I had read a couple of journals that had been written about the part of the route we wanted to do today. Brian Brown in particular had found it almost impassable when he and Sue did it on a tandem in 2009. We figured things may have looked up a bit.

We started off from Ilanz on a track that fairly soon turned into a gravel road which we found reasonable even though it was pretty mucky after last night’s rain. The Rhine was amazing , it was hurtling down the valley and muddy brown, every little side stream had turned into a torrent and there were waterfalls everywhere. It really felt quite scary when you got too close to the river, if you had gone in you would have lasted only a couple of seconds.

At Tavanasa we found a bar open for a cup of coffee with a lady very eager to be friendly but her English was as limited as our German. Here we crossed the Rhine and the track became a lot worse. It now was a muddy single track a bit close to the river for my liking at times and with some very steep ups and downs however it was still passable. We came to Trun and thought our problems would be over as the map showed most of the tack sealed with only a small section of about 4km unsealed. We were wrong, it started off OK on a gravel road but this soon became a road of mud. We crossed one stream and then we came to it, a bridge had been half washed away and the track beyond it a wild torrent of water. No way could we pass it so around we turned and back to Trun. The only solution was to take the road to Disentis and hope it wasn’t too busy. It started well with a wide hard shoulder and although reasonably steep it was quite rideable. After a while this disappeared, trucks and other traffic were getting heavy and with the increased slope I was riding too slowly to be safe, so it was walking. Eventually we got to Disantis and made a big decision. The weather was cold and unpleasant but more importantly I wasn’t coping with the hills very well so instead of the more than 1000m climb over the Oberal Pass that was in store for us tomorrow we would get a train to Andermatt. Why not get it now?

We had the great delight of experiencing Swiss rail and what a treat it was. The line from Desentis to Andermatt takes you over the Oberal pass, it is so steep that the train has a third rail with cogs on it. The views are astounding as you go higher and higher till you are right up in the very highest of the pastures and there are still little wooden houses up there. One thing that really amused me was a group of school kids who got on, they of course just dingled around as kids always do absolutely unaware of the spectacular scenery around them, it is their everyday environment. It would have been great on a bike and I feel ashamed of my whimpyness but it was a great train trip.

Andermatt is a ski town, it was absolutely freezing and we soon found a hotel