Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
benches, which all looked as if they had been painted that morning, and the absence of even a leaf on the
paths of the little lakeside park. Street sweepers were at work everywhere, sweeping up leaves with old-
fashioned brooms, and I had the distinct feeling that if I dropped a chewing-gum wrapper someone in
uniform would immediately step out from behind a tree and sweep it up or shoot me, or possibly both.
They don't seem to eat sandwiches in Locarno. I walked all around the business district and had
trouble finding even a bakery. When at last I did find one it seemed to sell nothing but gooey pastries,
though they did have a pile of what I took to be sausage rolls. Starving, I ordered three, at considerable
expense, and went outside with them. But they turned out to contain mashed figs - a foodstuff that only your
grandmother would eat, and only then because she couldn't find her dentures - and tasted like tea leaves
soaked in cough syrup. I gamely nibbled away at one of them, but it was too awful and I put them in my
rucksack with the idea that I might try them again later. In the event I forgot all about them and didn't
rediscover them until two days later when I pulled my last clean shirt from the rucksack and found the rolls
clinging to it.
I went into the station buffet for a glass of mineral water to wash away the stickiness. It was possibly the
unfriendliest place in Switzerland. It had eight customers but was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking.
The waiter stood at the counter lazily reaming beer glasses with a cloth. He made no move to serve me until
I held up a finger and called for a mineral water. He brought a bottle and a glass, wordlessly placed them on
the table and returned to his cloth and wet glasses. He looked as if he had just learned that his wife had run
off with the milkman and taken all his Waylon Jennings albums, but then I noticed that the other customers
were wearing the same sour expression. It seemed chilling after the boundless good humour of Italy. Across
from me sat an old lady with a metal crutch, which clattered to the floor as she tried to get up. The waiter just
stood there watching, clearly thinking, Now what are you going to do, you old cripple? I sprang to her aid
and for my pains was given a withering look and the teensiest of 'Grazie's', then she got up and hobbled
out.
Locarno, I decided, was a strange place. I bought a ticket on the two o'clock train to Domodossala, a
name that can be pronounced in any of thirty-seven ways. The man in the ticket window made me try out all
of them, furrowing his brow gravely as if he couldn't for the life of him think what nearby community had a
name that might cause an American difficulty, until finally I stumbled on the approximate pronunciation. 'Ah,
Domodossala!' he said, pronouncing it a thirty-eighth way. As a final act of kindness he neglected to tell me
that because of work on the railway lines the service was by bus for the first ten kilometres.
I waited and waited on the platform, but the train never came and it seemed odd that no one else was
waiting with me. There were only a couple of trains a day to Domodossala. Surely there would be at least
one or two other passengers? Finally, I went and asked a porter and he indicated to me, in that friendly why-
don't-you-go-fuck-yourself way of railway porters the world over, that I had to take a bus and, when pressed
as to where I might find this bus, motioned vaguely with the back of his hand in the direction of the rest of the
world. I went outside just in time to see the bus to Domodossala pulling out. Fortunately, I was able to
persuade the driver to stop by clinging to the windscreen for two hundred yards. I was desperate to get out
of there.
A few miles outside Locarno we joined a waiting train at a little country station. It climbed high into the
jagged mountains and took us on a spectacular ride along the lips of deep gorges and forbidding passes,
where farmhouses and hamlets were tucked away in the most inaccessible places, on the edge of giddy
eminences. It would be hard to imagine a more difficult place to be a farmer. One misstep and you would be
falling for a day and a half. Even from the train it was unnerving, an experience more akin to wing-walking
than rail travel.
It struck me as inconceivable that anyone could be confronted by such grandeur and not be
overwhelmed by the beauty of it and yet, according to Kenneth Clark, almost no visitor to the Alps before the
eighteenth century remarked on the scenery. They seemed not to see it. Now, of course, the problem is the
reverse. Fifty million tourists a year trample through the Alps, delighting in and despoiling its beauty all at the
same time. All the encroachments associated with tourism - resorts, hotels, shops, restaurants, holiday
homes, ski runs, ski lifts and new highways - are not only altering the face of the Alps irreparably but
undermining their very foundations. In 1987, just a few miles east of where I was now, sixty people died
