Alpine Panorama Trail — Stage 1: Rorschach to Trogen

www.flickr.com runningcommentary.net’s Alpine Panorama Walk – Stage 1 – Rorschach to Trogen photoset

The plan was to leave Horgen by 08:00. Waking at 6, this should have been a comfortable target, but of course I spent at least two hours doing things I could have done the night before, like preparing food, checking travel options and seeking out the Vaseline whose whereabouts had slipped from my memory’s grasp after so little recent use.

Vaseline, you say? Yes indeed: preparing for this expedition had much in common with getting ready for a marathon. Clothes, footwear, nutrition, travel, route pondering and general staring into space. It was all a bit nostalgic.

Where had the tabernacle gone? I’d last dipped my fingers into the cool sacrament on Boston Marathon morning, more than four years ago. This gave me a clue, and I was able to rescue it from a bag of Boston remnants I’d spotted in a cupboard about a year ago. I’d forgotten the odd sensation of slathering the stuff in between toes and around heels, before pulling on socks – a step that didn’t seem to complement the viscous coating of the skin. Standing up and feeling the gooey stuff squelch between the toes confirmed its wrongness, but we all know it’s a necessary wrongness, like Nigel Farage, or HP Sauce on baked beans.

Still in the Boston groove, I wore my canary yellow Boston Marathon commemorative shirt for only the second time ever. The first  was the day after this year’s event, when I got up early to go for a feeble jog. I don’t usually go in for pointless symbolism but it was all I could think of doing in the aftermath of the bomb. The reason for choosing it on Saturday wasn’t to continue the Vaseline precedent, but because it was the only long-sleeved light-weight wicking shirt I could find. It was going to be a hot day – over 30 degrees – and I knew that on the exposed hillsides I would soon frazzle under the unforgiving sun.

So in the end it was after 10 o’clock when I left. The result of my careful planning was a decision to drive to Trogen, the end point of the walk, park the car, and take a train to Rorschach via St Gallen. Most of the plan worked, but I’d forgotten that this weekend was the triennial Züri Fäscht, or festival, so the idea of driving through the city to head north east towards Trogen turned out to be a bad one. My usual short cuts were either closed to traffic or blocked by beaming, silent Swiss people politely waiting to be informed that the party could begin.

I got to Trogen at noon, and found a small, charming village with a splendid Italianate church and nowhere to park. The main car park in the village square had been commandeered by a raucous wedding party. As I slowed down to ponder what to do, an usher in an extravagant dress shirt tapped on my window to offer me a consolatory glass of Prosecco. I declined, but took the opportunity to ask where else I could leave the car. In impeccable English, he gave me directions. I suspect he was part of the population who had completed non-mandatory or university education. According to Wikipedia, this segment of Trogen’s 1,668 inhabitants account for “about 74.8%” of the population. “About 74.8%”? If I didn’t have more pressing tasks, like staring blankly out of the window, I would write to complain about this uncharacteristic lack of Swiss precision.

Successfully parked and packed, I headed for the tiny station and took the 12:32 to St Gallen. It was my first visit to this  fine looking town, though I squandered most of my 30 available minutes, first queuing for a train ticket, only to discover, when I got to the front of the line, that it was a cash machine. I then joined another queue at a window, before realising after a while that these people were buying cinema tickets. I concede, the trouble I had locating a train ticket and finding my way out of St Gallen station entrance hall made me question whether my navigational abilities were up to the task of the Alpine Panorama Trail. But I manfully persisted, eventually arriving in Rorschach at 13:30 – about 4 hours later than the initial schedule.

Emerging from Rorschach Bahnhof, you’re greeted by the great blue expanse of the Bodensee, the massive lake that separates Switzerland and Germany. A wonderful sight in this light, the water dotted white with spots of distant yachts.

A stroll along the lakeside path would have been pleasant, but I should have been heading in the other direction. As I peered at my map, a kindly lady stopped to ask me where I was trying to get to. “Geneva”, I replied. She hesitated, then walked away without another word.

The first steps of my journey took me past a rotating sculpture of a plump blue lady, looking strangely like the famous Niki de St-Phalle sculpture that hangs from the ceiling of Zurich Hauptbahnhof’s cavernous entrance hall. HB has an official meeting place in the opposite corner of the station concourse, but people typically say: “Let’s meet under the blue angel”.

I crossed the busy road via the underpass, relieved to see the first sign for Route 3. For 500 metres or so I was led through quiet residential streets before taking a right up a steep side road, then a track between some large detached houses and out across a stretch of neatly cultivated farmland into open country. Stopping briefly to look back across the cornfields to the Bodensee, I was struck by the silence and tranquility of the scene. As always,  serenity makes one more conscious of chaos. I wondered what this small place, at the junction of Germany and Austria might have felt like 70 years ago. Standing on this hillside on a sweltering July afternoon in the early 1940s, staring across the lake to Germany on the distant shore, what fear and uncertainty would I be facing?

I turned to continue my journey.

The agricultural land eventually gave way to woodland, in the shade of which I stopped to adjust my backpack, slap on some more sun block and take a first glug of water. Then through the trees and down into the hamlet of Tobel, where I could stand on the bridge and watch a quaint rustic scene that seemed like something out of children’s television. A couple sat quietly on a bench on the platform, waiting for a train that you suspected would never arrive. But that didn’t matter. The point was the moment and nothing more. Under the strong afternoon sun, all was still and totally silent. Had I stood at that spot indefinitely, the sense was that the sun would have kept shining forever, with the hands of the station clock remaining motionless.

I didn’t conduct the experiment, for fear I’d be proved wrong. Sometimes it’s best to carry off an impressionistic hypothesis, rather than damage and devalue it by putting it to the test. Instead, I followed the road down to the left of the tiny station, and after a bit of head scratching, spotted a steep narrow path on the other side of the road.

As I made my way down, I exchanged beaming Grüezis with a mother and young daughter attaching balloons to a fence above a sign that wished Holger a happy 60^th birthday. I remember thinking, ‘I hope I reach my 60^th, and I hope it will be as sunny as this’. I wondered if anyone would be attaching balloons to a fence in my honour. I doubted it.

Leaving behind the strange stillness of Tobel station, the trail led me through another patch of thick woodland where the path, criss-crossed with damp tree roots, offered the first mild hazard of the journey. Hardly treacherous, but as the first pangs of mild fatigue were appearing to displace my concentration, I had to watch my footing. Given the eerie torpor of Tobel, I couldn’t rely on an ambulance arriving much before Christmas, though I consoled myself with the thought that if I did have to spend 6 months lying in the forest with a broken leg, surviving on a diet of leaves and slugs and rainwater, at least I had a couple of series of The West Wing on iPod to help pass the time, not to mention the entire Sherlock Holmes archive in audiobook format.

One of the causes of my earlier delay was fretting over what to listen to on my journey. Now don’t get me wrong — I like a good cow bell as much as the next fellow, but I had to plan for the possibility of dong fatigue, as it were. So what to load onto the device? My podcasts of the moment include Scriptnotes and In Our Time, but I’d exhausted this seam and needed something  more elementary. But what? I pondered the question in silence for some moments, then without warning, my eyes shot open in wild excitement. Barely able to contain myself, I cried: “By Jove, I have it!”

And so it was that I’d  started listening to A Study in Scarlet over breakfast that morning. This was one of the few full-length Sherlock Holmes novels, and the one that had introduced him to the world. I’d read it before, of course, but more than 40 years ago, so I was able to enjoy it afresh. It was reaching its climax as I emerged from the woods and began another ascent. This was the theme of the opening stage of the Alpine Panorama hike — up and up, then up some more.

Reaching a farmtrack near the crest of the hill, I spotted a bench set against a dry-stone wall and headed for it. It was there for a reason. I was panting and sweating heavily, and desperate to rest. I was close to Heiden, my planned lunch stop, but the bench, with its superb views across the Bodensee, already a long way off and a long way down, was the ideal place to treat myself to a starter of boiled egg, blueberries and walnuts, washed down with diluted grapefruit juice.

What a meal and what a moment, enjoyed as the wretched Jefferson Hope’s backstory reached its climax, revealing him to be not just the dastardly murderer but also a pitiful victim of past injustice himself. I marvelled at the richness of the narrative, and was reminded just how skilled a story teller Conan Doyle was.

It was hard to get off that bench, but eventually I upped and moved the kilometre or so to Heiden. The route took me past the toytown train waiting in the toytown station and along Dorfstrasse. How odd to be suddenly clumping along the high street with the Saturday afternoon shoppers, just minutes after the rustic idyll of my bench with its expansive forest and lake vista. Even odder to find myself in the supermarket checkout queue with backpack, floppy sunhat and hiking boots, waiting to pay for my smoked salmon bagel and drink. I had food with me, but needed an excuse to grab a few minutes out of the heat.

A little further on, I chatted briefly to a young woman at her easel, painting the church. Then it was a sharp right up a very steep residential road, where the smell of barbecues and sound of party chatter made me question what I was doing. Everyone else is having fun, and here I am, on the hottest day of the year, walking to Geneva.

It was the low point of my day.

I still had my unopened bagel and bottle in awkward grasp, and was desperate to process them, but found nowhere to sit until I reached the very top of the hill where at last, I was able to use a fire hydrant to quench my thirst.

The next long stretch was uphill again, including an extended trek across a pathless field into a pathless wood. I was convinced I must have strayed a long way from the route, but no, amazingly, my instincts (or good fortune) had dragged me in the right direction — and there was the next yellow sign to prove it.

Briefly, I thought I might have been entering a state of mild delirium as Intermittently, I would catch a strain of laughter on the breeze without seeing where it could be coming from. But then eventually, I saw a sign saying Naturfreundehaus, and passed a sizeable wooden building where a big bunch of giggling teenagers were bobbing about in the garden. I’d never come across these ‘friends of nature’ before but I’m guessing it was something like a youth hostel.

At last, a downhill section, including a muddy, waterlogged stretch through a wood that began and finished with police-style incident tape and signs that said “No access”. But with no alternative to the blocked path provided, I was very un-Swiss and disobeyed the instruction.

At the foot of the hill came a tarmac road and bus stop, where a bus was due in 4 minutes. Yes, I checked. But I strode manfully on, ignoring the temptation to hitch a ride to  Rehetobel, the next town in my way,

Sometimes the signs vanish, and you have to take a punt. This I did once the tarmac novelty wore off. Leading sharply down into a wood on my left was a small lane with nothing to indicate it led anywhere. As I dithered, a bunch of confident cyclists zoomed into it and vanished round the corner. This persuaded me it had a purpose, so I followed them.

The lane led into a neat residential road with a scattering of houses looking out across a valley. High above me, on the other side of the gorge, were two villages. The one to the left had an Italianate church that looked slightly familiar. For the first time today, I took out my phone and switched the navigation on to confirm it. Yes, indeed. I was looking up at Trogen, my destination.

As the crow flies, it was close. But as the old guy totters, there was still a way to go – and it was nearly all uphill.

I first had to dip down off the road onto a narrow track. The yellow waymarker had been clear enough, but the path soon ran out, leading me into someone’s garden where a man was trimming the edge of his small lawn with some ancient hedge clippers. He glanced up at me, but said nothing.

Retracing my steps, I took an equally unpromising path into the next garden. I wandered round a corner, and nearly collided with a small dining table at which a charming lady sat with a large bowl of salad and a bottle of Chablis in a glass ice bucket. In a movie, this experience would have ended differently. But even in reality, she managed to be convivial. She was quite unfazed by my sudden appearance, so I guess I wasn’t the first uninvited visitor she’d had. She laughed pleasantly and agreed that the path was confusing.

My first garden gatecrash had been correct, so it was back past the indifferent lawn enthusiast and through a gap between two hedges, where another yellow diamond pointed me down a rocky track to the floor of the gorge. Here, alongside a lively stream, was surely one of the most remote restaurants you’re likely to find — or not find. Chastenloch is inaccessible by car, and getting there would require at least 20 minutes of scrambling down a difficult stony path, not to mention the preliminary garden creeping — so you’d better have a reservation before you arrive. But what a delightful setting. I wondered how many marriage proposals had been offered here, and how much grimmer the scrabble back up the hill would be if the answer was “Nein”.

There is, natürlich, another escape route. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been passing by. Here was a smoother walk up a well maintained path, but much steeper and longer. Worse, it was one of those deceptive hills that trick you into thinking you’ve reached the top, only to find another upward stretch awaiting you.

I didn’t hit the final peak until arriving back in Trogen village square. I was dead on my feet – a combination of the heat, the hills and a lack of fitness. It was more than 8 hours since I’d boarded the train to Rorschach. It seemed like a very long time since the educated chap in the dress shirt had offered me a glass of Prosecco. Now he is gone, just as my earlier self is gone. The square is deserted and silent, with the only evidence of earlier festivities, a flickering wisp of bunting nailed to a telegraph pole.