Basel, a hinge between three countries

It is a little dishonest to file Basel in a rail journal at all, because the best thing I do here has nothing to do with trains. We'd come up for a long weekend and the plan, if you could call it one, was to get into the Rhine before the day went stupid. The thermometer outside the pharmacy on Klybeckstrasse read 31 when we walked past it just after nine, and Marc said, the way he always says it, that it would be cooler by the river. He was wrong, but only a little. Basel sits low in a basin, the Black Forest off to the north and the Jura to the south, and on a still August morning the heat just pools and stays put.

First, coffee. We started at café frühling on Klybeckstrasse, the Kleinbasel side, which on a Saturday opens at nine and roasts its own beans under the Kaffeemacher:innen name. I had a flat white better than most things I drink in Zürich, and I am enough of a coffee snob to mean that as high praise. Marc worked through a plate of brunch eggs while a steady stream of people came and went carrying rolled-up, fish-shaped bags in loud colours. Those are Wickelfische, the dry bags somebody here came up with twenty-odd years ago, and by mid-morning half the city seems to be holding one. You roll the lip over a few times to seal it. It keeps your phone and your shoes dry, which I tested and can confirm. It is not a life-ring, whatever a panicking visitor might assume, and you do not tie it to yourself.

Into the river

The classic float runs from the Schwarzwaldbrücke, down by Museum Tinguely, to about the Johanniterbrücke, so thirty to forty-five minutes of drifting. I treated it like a route to plan: leave your towel and shoes at one ladder, climb out at another downstream, mind the gap. I'll say the thing nobody puts on the postcards. The Rhine here is no crystal alpine trickle. It's a big grey-green working river, fast, with barges going by, and the current does the work for you. You swim with it, never against. We went in near the Tinguely museum and the water grabbed us straight away, and for about half an hour Basel slid past sideways, the Münster up on its terrace, the Mittlere Brücke, one of the little ferries crossing ahead of us.

There are four of those ferries, no motor at all, pulled across by the river itself on a high cable. The ferryman angles the rudder and the current does the rest. Silent. The one we passed was over by the Münster; they're all named after Kleinbasel festival figures and have been crossing since sometime in the forties, though I could never tell you which is which. We climbed out at the Johanniterbrücke ladder, legs like rubber, and a Bebbi grandmother behind us did the whole thing in a swimming cap without once getting her hair wet.

I'd planned the weekend around trains and spent the best half-hour of it floating face-up, looking at a cathedral. I'm not going to pretend that's a worse way to see a city.

The corner, and the fountain

In the afternoon we took the Tram 8 out toward Kleinhüningen to find the Dreiländereck, where Germany, France and Switzerland meet. It's a tall pylon with the three flags on a spit of land in the port, the actual tripoint out in the river a hundred-odd metres off. I'd built it up in my head and it turns out to be a relaxed riverside spot with a restaurant on it, which I like a great deal better than a fenced border.

That same Tram 8 is a small marvel on its own: an ordinary green city tram that trundles straight over the border and terminates in Germany, at Weil am Rhein. Half of Basel rides it out there on a Saturday to shop at the Rheincenter by the crossing, where German prices on butter and coffee are a standing local joke and a real saving, and rides home with the bags to prove it. Two things surprise you the first time. Your Swiss GA is no good the moment the tram crosses the line, so you need a separate ticket for the German stretch, which half the carriage always seems to have forgotten. And it's the Germans who check, not the Swiss, and they do it on the tram itself: an officer works down the carriage near the border, and you fish a passport out between stops. Coming back, nobody so much as glances up. We didn't shop for anything. I just wanted to ride a tram out of the country and back.

Then back over to Grossbasel, to Theaterplatz, where the Tinguely fountain clatters away in its shallow asphalt basin, ten black metal contraptions flinging water at each other. It's officially the Fasnachts-Brunnen, a Migros gift from the seventies, and kids were standing at the edge getting soaked on purpose, which felt like exactly the correct use of it.

One more border thing, because it amuses me. Basel SBB is billed as Europe's largest border station, and it has an actual French section tucked inside, so you can leave Switzerland without leaving the building, no passport, nobody so much as looks up. I checked the departures from the Perron. The German DB trains, the ICE 372s heading up to Frankfurt and Hamburg, cross over at Basel Badischer Bahnhof, which sits on Swiss soil but runs under German customs. We're not catching one this trip. Tomorrow we float the river once more, and then it's the regular run back south.

— Tobi