the real Switzerland

Yesterday I came back from a quick trip to Switzerland. Each August, Italian friends of mine take possession of a converted farmhouse in the Simmental, an unfashionable valley near Bern, and have a good time, enjoying clean air, dairy products fresh from local cows, strenuous hikes, relaxing hours in the municipal swimming pool, and loads of good food cooked in large batches. They've been inviting me to join them with increasing insistence for at least five years. I've promised to come for at least three. This year, the seemingly impossible finally came to pass.

To make the journey exciting, I came up with my very own Top Gear challenge. Flucha and I would leave work at precisely the same time, she in a car from Marseille, me on various forms of public transport, rail- and airborne, from London. First on parking 2 outside the Geneva airport would win. It would have been a tight race, had everything gone according to plan, but Flucha did a wrong turn and found herself visiting Gap. Nice place, but not where you want to be when you want to get to Geneva double-quick. It was inevitable that I got there first, with a lead so comfortable that it almost invalidated the idea of the challenge. A bit more than two hours later, we hugged our friends in Lenk.

The best day was the third when Flucha and I undertook a hike that was just within our capabilities, a bit more than nine hours of walking with 5000 ft of climbing. It was warm, the wildflowers were out in blinding force, and every half hour, the scenery changed completely. We started in the lush green of a wide valley, advanced through receding vegetation past forbidding cliffs and up slopes of debris to the highest point of the hike. Up there, the trail flattened but variety remained. The colors changed repeatedly between grey, brown and green, each vista different from the one before. We passed by gushing rivers that could have been in northern Canada, glacial lakes and roaring waterfalls. We ran into cows and were briefly held up by a shepherd dog when we got too close to the flock he was guarding.

The presence of livestock so high up in the mountains is a general feature of the Alps. I learned today that the technical term is transhumance, which describes the seasonal migration of livestock between valley in winter and high pastures in summer. All high pastures are organized around a small self-contained dairy farm where the animals return at night after a day of grazing. The farms are remote; there is no way of getting the milk into the valley. Cheese production is the almost logical consequence.

After maturing for a year, the cheese is sold locally, either directly from the dairies or from fridges placed in front of many houses in the valley. The fridges are an odd sight and a fine example of what a perfect place Switzerland is. Most fridges have a locked honesty box nearby where you drop the money for the cheese you choose. Some have second box, open that one, with change in case you need it. The cracker was a fridge with the entire honesty box open inside the fridge, stuffed full of notes and coins, more than 50 franks.

My friends commented that this wouldn't work in Italy. People wouldn't just take the cheese without paying but also the money if they could get their hands on it. Flucha thought in Argentina, people wouldn't bother with the content. "They'd take the entire fridge", she said to general hilarity. In Switzerland, honesty sells cheese quite naturally.

But Switzerland is a strange place anyway. I've come up with the theory that there must have once been a country, let's call it Suisse, of outstanding natural beauty, with diligent inhabitants, correct procedures and trains running on time. When the inhabitants' strive for perfection in their existence and surroundings reached a limit, they created a perfected copy in its place. In analogy to Disneyland, they called it Switzerland.

Upon payment of an admission fee of 40 franks (disguised as annual motorway toll), visitors can explore the country as they please. In the mountains they can see accurately mown meadows covering inclines up to 50% steep. They can hike to waterfalls and way beyond the tree line. Wherever they go, it's like a walk in the park, because it is a walk in a (amusement) park.

Visitors will see park employees leaning out of the windows of the most picturesque houses that immediately recall Christmas in Hyde Park. To keep a wall of fabrication, the employees will communicate with each other in an invented language that's not entirely unlike German but completely incomprehensible. When the visitors get home they can tell their friends about a beautiful place that didn't feel quite right, a place that was too perfect to be real. This place is Switzerland.