March walks: 1. Wagitalersee

Two diverting walks to report. I’m afraid I got so bored with this entry that I’ll leave the second to next time. Here’s the first.

1. Sunday 14 March, Wagitalersee:
Ah! Nothing better than a bracing walk in a blizzard to blow a few cobwebs from the fat bloke emerging from winter hibernation — even if a statement as glibly positive as this will be heard only after the trauma is over, and the memory rapidly diminishing in the rear-view mirror.

My German friend, C, messaged me far too early for a Sunday — a common character defect among the wholesome Teutonic peoples. I blame myself for forgetting to turn off the phone. Otherwise, I’d have slept on obliviously, no doubt with a peaceful smile painted across my face. Instead I was wrenched from my this state of innocence by the phone’s infantile warble. What had seemed such a jolly collection of bleeps in the hours of daylight was suddenly hostile and threatening. I peered at the egregious device through one reluctant eye, and groaned helplessly at the double whammy it conveyed — the time (08:15) and the temperature (+1 degree). Just one of these items would have been bad enough but multiplied? The message read: “Hey! Lets go walking round Horgenberg. How soon can you get there?” I sighed deeply and responded: “A week from now. Maybe 2” and pulled the duvet back over my head. Unusually in these healthier times, I’d enjoyed a few glasses of wine the previous night, and was in no mood for early-Sunday treks on a rasping wintry day.



But C didn’t get where she is today by taking no for an answer, and she soon came back with an improved offer to challenge my objections. A confident “After lunch then” dealt with the time problem, and “How about Wagital?” tickled my curiosity. An unfamiliar walk was a significant advance over the initial suggestion, a trek round my local patch and one I’ve paced many times. When I bought a camera in November I resolved to visit new places. Wagitalersee, or Lake Wagital, wasn’t a place I’d heard of despite being barely 30 minutes from my gaff. I quickly Googled it and grumpily consented. A few hours later, after installing a pair of long johns beneath my jeans, I set off.

I’m always nervous when people replace proper directions with the phrase “it’s easy to find” or “you can’t miss it”. Experience tells me that these destinations are rarely easy to find, and that there’s every chance I’ll miss it. A friend who once invited me round to his place in central Zürich instructed me: “We’re 5 minutes from Hardbrucke station. Head past the EY building and we’re just round the corner.” An hour or so after leaving the station I finally made it to his apartment. The first problem was that there were several exits from the station, and naturally the correct one was the last one I tried. I’d no idea what the EY building was, nor how to recognise it, though I did finally notice that one of the many office blocks looming over me was labelled Ernst & Young. A lifetime of cryptic crosswords finally paid off, and I was able to interpret this as the EY building. The next conundrum was how I should ‘head past it’? In front? Behind? Down the left? The right?

The more I think about it, the more I realise that all those years spent writing code followed later by years of proofreading and editing, have affected how I go about things. Or some things. So my own directions, by contrast, are relatively bulletproof. When my Hong Kong friend James came to visit, he mentioned that the instructions I’d given to him were the best directions he’d ever received. Curiosity has driven me to look them up again. Along with a diagram of the airport and a screenshot of the train map, I’d said:

1. From the airport barrier, take the escalator down two levels to the railway (signposted ‘the Bahn’).
2. Buy a single ticket to Wädenswil — a bustling settlement on the southern shore of Lake Zurich, just past Horgen.
3. Opt for the 2-hour ticket, not the 24-hour.
4. Descend another level to platform 3. You can take the S8 or S2 service but to avoid changing at the Hauptbahnhof (HB), opt for the S2 which arrives on platform 3 at 06 and 36 minutes past each hour.
5. It’s a double-decker train. Go upstairs and sit by the window on the left side of the train, but face backwards. This ensures you’ll be facing forwards after leaving HB and will give you a nice view of the lake. The journey to Wädenswil takes 34 minutes.
6. Alight at Wädenswil. You will immediately see the lake. Walk towards it via the pedestrian underpass. Emerging by the lakeside, turn right, with the lake on your left. About 50 metres on, you’ll spot a bar-restaurant masquerading as a boat — or possibly the reverse. Either way, it sells beer and food and floats. I will meet you there at 5pm.
7. Note: If you have time to spare beforehand, consider a stroll in the other direction, towards Au, where there are some vineyards and nice distant views of Zurich. If you have any problems, like getting beaten up by Swiss Customs for displaying even a hint of insolence, call me on my mobile. On no account get a taxi to Wädenswil or you will be paying off the debt for the rest of your life.

Maybe it was overkill but he made it without any “head past the EY building”-style confusion.

Where were we? Ah yes, heading for Wagitalersee. “Keep going through Lachen. At the lake go right. I wait there. Cannot miss it.”

I did miss it. Or so I thought. In fact I hadn’t missed it at all; I’d just not gone far enough when I prematurely turned round and headed back through Lachen. I tried again. By now the snow was heavy enough to make me glad I still had my winter tyres on, despite Juerg from the local garage emailing me a couple of days earlier, suggesting it was time to switch to summer wear. Nice man, Juerg. He once lent me a car free of charge when mine was off the road, to ensure that my ticket for SC Freiburg vs Borussia Dortmund didn’t go to waste. How I miss my fortnightly trips to Freiburg. Staggering to think that the BVB match was only last season: October 2019. Watching the YouTube highlights of that brilliant match makes me quite emotional. It’s like some distant glimpse of a bygone civilisation. I’ll talk about SC Freiburg and the Black Forest Stadium some other time.

Back to the more recent past. As I tried the route again, the fear of committing the Swiss cardinal social sin — lateness — was piling even more pressure on. So I applied a little more acceleration than was wise, bringing with it that deadly flash from the side of the road — to be followed a few days later by a letter from the Kanton Schwyz Polizei with a polite request for 40 CHF. Still, what’s £30 when compared with the shame of tardiness? I retraced my route but this time continued beyond the point where I’d lost confidence ten minutes earlier. A fog started gathering on the pine slopes to my right but I pressed on and eventually, there it was in front of me — something resembling a lake, and something resembling C, who stood there like a traffic cop, pointing me towards the small car park.

By the time we started walking round the lake, along the tarmacked path through the pines, the snow had become a dense curtain, like a hazard in a computer game to fight past. This trek through a million frosted Christmas trees gave the landscape, and the experience generally, a surreal aspect that I greatly enjoyed. We talked about the usual stuff — work politics, her undulating love life, and Covid. She said she’d be reluctant to take the AstraZeneca vaccine. Why? “Because you hear so many bad things.” I reminded her that there was nothing to back up the idiotic comments of Monsieur Macron and the German health minister. She said: “But so many countries have stopped using it. Can they all be wrong?” I told her that yes, they can all be wrong. She remained unconvinced.

The path goes all the way round the lake but we didn’t have the time or the insulation to do all three hours. We stopped after 40 minutes or so and headed back the way we’d come. Taking my camera bag with me through a blizzard turned out to be a bad idea. Even when the snow stopped, as it did 10 minutes in, if it’s too cold and inconvenient to keep taking off gloves and attaching lenses, you know you should have stuck with your phone. (A few snaps to follow.)

Like a lot of things in life, opportunities you reluctantly take having first rejected them turn out to be enjoyable and valuable. My walk wasn’t remarkable but later that evening, back home, watching the sunset over Lake Zürich, cup of tea in hand, I felt very glad to have done my 10,000 steps at Wagitalersee, rather than round the local streets.