July 20 - Lyon to Zug

Our alarm went off at the spritely hour of 5am, just as the first rays of sunlight were creeping over the horizon. As we had spent the last night in a park, Jez and I were not feeling our best. Rather, we were feeling significantly below our best. Our aim for the day was to get to Zug, just below Zurich in Switzerland were Reggie, a girl Jez knows from Australia, lives.

So, we trudged off to the train station to wait for our train to Geneva. After arriving at the station, we realised that we were not going to be travelling by train, but by bus. At 6:04am, the bus promptly left Lyon and headed off to Geneva. Due to the ungodly hour, there was enough room for Jez and I to have an entire row of 4 seats each. This proved decisive as we quickly drifted off into a better sleep than the night before.

According to Jez, I was at my snoring best this trip and before you know it I was unconscious and making sure that no one else got much sleep. However, I awoke in Geneva feeling pretty good.

At Geneva we hopped on a train that took us to Bern, then from Bern we made it to Interlarken. Interlarken is the extreme sports capital of Switzerland, and it would have been rude not to get amongst the action whilst we were here. (If you take a look at a map of Switzerland, you will notice that Interlarken is a bit of a detour from Geneva to Zug).

When we got to Interlarken, we got in contact with a company that does canyoning and off we went. Canyoning involves being driven half way up a mountain and making your way down by the river. This is a lot more fun than it sounds. There were parts where we had to abseil down waterfalls, parts where we jumped off waterfalls and parts where we went down rapids by ourselves, like a natural slippery dip.

The highlight was this one abseil we had to do. A few days beforehand, there had been massive rains which had pushed a lot of rocks to the bottom of a waterfall. This meant that it was too shallow to safely jump off. Therefore, we had to abseil around the corner of a cliff. We had to abseil out and the jump off the cliff, and the rope brought us around the corner and onto the other side of the cliff. It was pretty cool. The funniest one of these was Jez. He got a little excited and pushed harder with his left leg than his right. This caused him to spin around whilst going around the corner of the cliff, giving him a perfect view of the other side of the cliff on the other side of the river. No harm was done though as he landed safely on the other side.

After a few hours of canyoning, we hopped back on the train and went to Bern, switched train and caught one to Zurich. After that, we got a 15 minute train and we finally arrived at Zug.

Reggie’s place was awesome. We got there and, as the rest of her family was on holidays, Jez and I found out we had a room each! This was a 5 star resort (later to be named Reggie’s Retreat). After dumping out stuff, we had the first home cooked meal in a long time. After that, some of Reggie’s friends came over and we jumped in the pool and chilled out in the spa (all the time, Jez and I were in the budgies of course).

That night, we had a much better sleep than the night before. This was mainly due to the fact that we were indoors.

Over and out,

Monty