Since a long time Uday was asking me to go and visit him in Switzerland. Finally I decided to go to Lausanne in Sep 2013. I was all packed and ready to leave to Swiss when I went to University to present my 1st year PhD results. Just after my presentation I left to catch a train from Trieste to Lausanne. I boarded the train around noon and I was there around 11.30pm. Uday fetch me up from the railway station and then we walked to his place. I was tired of the journey so we slept just after having dinner.
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| Montreux |
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| Montreux with Geneva lake |
Next day we went to Geneva to meet Amit (another friend who was on an
official trip in Swiss) and then we three bought a 5-day rail pass in
the Geneve lake region (this included 2 day free train rides and the
rest 3 days half price on selected routes). We started our Swiss
sightseeing from Montreux. It was so peaceful to sit and admire the lake
and alps in that beautiful sunny day.
After spending few hours we took a train to Rochers-de-naye. This was a narrow gauge (800mm) rail that went up the mountains around the Geneva lake. In the 1st half of the journey we could see the whole lake and the valley from the mountains then after the 1st stop at Glion village in the mountain, the whole track was through mountains passing one mountain to another. After climbing a steep slope we reached Rochers-de-naye station from there we had to hike a little bit more to reach the mountain tip.
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| View from Rochers-de-naye |
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| Evian les Bains |
At the top it was so silent, everyone was admiring the view, it was just
serene and peaceful, we could see Mount Blanc far away in front of us,
just mountains everywhere one after the other; looked like our Earth was
covered with a velvet cloth of different shades of green with creases.
One can sit and praise the beauty for hours and hours. Soon it was time
to leave as it was getting cloudy. We came down to Montreux and took a
train to Lausanne from where we took a ferry to have a tour on the lake,
so we went to Evian les Bains on the French part and returned back.
That night I slept in Geneva at Amit's hotel.
Next morning we met at Montreux station and took the sight-seeing train to Interlaken. This was an amazing trip through the green grasslands with cattles, mountains, lakes and tunnels. We got off at Saanen station and walked along the river through the grassland with cattles to Gstaad. This walk was special for us as this was the shooting place of a famous bollywood romantic drama movie DDLJ which was released in 1995 when we were kids and all was worth-it.
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| Saanen station |
We took another train to Spiez from Gstaad. When we reached Spiez it was already afternoon so we couldn't go to Interlaken but anyway Spiez was beautiful enough to enjoy our afternoon. We caught the last train back to Montreux, the train was empty no one except us in our coach, it was all dark outside. We reached Montreux late at night then we went to Geneva to see Amit off as he was flying early next morning and we came back to Lausanne and dropped-dead.
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| Grassland along the way |
Next day started late, Uday showed me Lausanne city and EPFL. It is a beautiful city with lots of greenery, I was impressed by self moving cupboards of EPFL library and took out journal Nature 1953 to see the research paper where the molecular structure of DNA was explained by Sir J.D. Watson and Sir F.H.C. Crick. In the evening we had a walk along the lake and called it a day as next morning I had my train back to Trieste.
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| Me, Uday and Amit (left to right) at Montreux |
A beautiful and memorable trip came to an end and I regained back my energy for some more lab work. :-)
