June 29, 2012
Hills that go on all day: Gampel - Gletsch
I WENT CYCLING earlier this year with a friend who hadn't ridden a bike for 50 years. To him, hills were small intrusions into a car-borne life. It came as a dark shock to find there are hills in southern England that take quarter of an hour to climb.
"That's nothing," I told him. "There are hills on the continent that take all afternoon." Mike's jaw fell to the road with a dull thud.
Today we rode just one such hill. In fact we spent all day on it and we still didn't get to the top. I should explain now that the Furkapass is the second highest in Switzerland and that, like the Puy Mary but even more so, it starts with a lot of arduous climbing that doesn't actually count as the mountain. Not if you're a cartographer or a geologist; if you do it on a bike, a loaded one, it counts painfully.
Our morning gave us five kilometres of tough climbing right from the start. Miserable climbing, too, because the road was narrow and twisting and it wasn't hard to perceive that everyone else resented our presence. They didn't blast horns at us but their rushing of gears and laboured acceleration made their point.
When it wasn't cars or lorries, it was motorbikes. Their riders were faultless in their behaviour, for they are distant cousins, fellow outsiders on the road and as aware that they are likely to come off worse in an accident regardless of fault. But that doesn't mean I like them. Not in the numbers we had today. My resentment rose to the point that I began preparing my election manifesto for the day I stand for president. Riders of four-stroke motorcycles, other than Harley-Davidsons, will be untroubled by my legislation. Two-stroke riders will be flogged. They cause too much noise, ear-wax rattling noise. They will be flogged and put in the stocks. Harley riders, I have decided, will be flogged, castrated and then hanged. And even that is too good for them.
Well, despite these irritations we climbed through ever pleasanter countryside, the valleys of a greenness that exists otherwise only in Aer Lingus advertisements. Their edges pulled down to us from the sky and bathed us in an emerald warmth. As we climbed, the air grew cooler but the green remained and the blue of the sky stayed just as perfect.
But that noise... There must be a reason there are so many motorcyclists in Switzerland, and from all over Europe.
"I want to go through with this," Steph said wearily as we passed the glacier that is the source of the Rhône, "but I could never recommend this road to anyone. It's superb on a motorbike with all those bends but it's not a road for cycling, I'd recommend anyone else to take the train."
We decided to ride half the main col, the first six kilometres.
By then we had ridden 62km uphill with around 1 000 metres of climbing. In other words, if all our climbing had been stacked vertically, we would have been a full kilometre nearer the sky than we had over breakfast.
Gletsch, our target for the night, revealed itself as nothing more than a giant hotel, a tiny tourist office, an antique weather station in a small grassy park, and a chapel of which the door was open in the hope that someone would visit.
Our hearts sank when we saw several dozen motorbikes lined up outside, with the last of the leather-suited brethren hauling bags into reception. Surely we hadn't suffered their noise all day only to be turned away from the only accommodation in town?
We held our breath, the only breath we had left. And it worked. A neatly efficient Swiss woman who fulfilled every national stereotype short of dressing like Heidi gave us a key, announced an enormous price we were going to pay regardless, and we collapsed on to our bed and groaned at the ceiling.
Ah, the joys of being a cycle-tourist...
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