The GoldenPass, and the lake at Lauenen

The GoldenPass is the panorama line I'd put off longest, because the famous version is so photographed I assumed it couldn't survive its own postcards. It mostly does. We took the newish GoldenPass Express out of Montreux, the through train that runs the whole way to Interlaken without the old change at Zweisimmen, and the reason it can is exactly what I'd come to see: the bogies change gauge underneath you, narrow to standard, while the train idles at walking pace through a shed. You feel almost nothing, a soft shunt and a hiss, and the nerd in me was delighted out of all proportion. Marc watched me be delighted and said nothing. He's used to it.

We'd come down the evening before and slept by the lake, mostly so we could start the climb in the morning. Lake Geneva flat and silver under the Lavaux vineyards, Chillon off on its rock down the shore. The line leaves the water almost at once and climbs hard, switching back above Les Avants with the lake dropping away below the window, which is what makes the raised front seats worth their small surcharge: you sit up where the driver would be, the track unrolling ahead and the lake getting smaller and bluer behind.

Over the top, into the cheese country

The top of the line is a different country from the lakeshore: dark-timber chalets, cows with the serious bells, and then Gstaad, which I'd braced to dislike and did, mildly, a great deal of money walking very slowly down a car-free street. It's only the door to better things, though, and we changed there for the postbus up the side valley to Lauenen. The bus is the kind of thing the GA makes you take for granted and shouldn't, climbing a road barely wide enough for it, the driver leaning on the three-note post-horn at every blind corner, dropping you where the tarmac ends with the valley closing in ahead.

The Lauenensee is why I'd routed the day this way. A small lake in a bowl under the Wildhorn, a couple of waterfalls coming off the far wall, one of them throwing itself off the cliff in a long ragged line because there'd been rain. The loop round it is nothing strenuous, an hour on the flat through bog and pasture. Marc found a warm flat rock and lay on it like a lizard while I went to the far end to watch the water come down, and lost track of the time.

Lunch was macaroni, and the best thing I ate all summer. A Berggasthaus above the lake does Älplermagronen the right way: macaroni and potato and mountain cheese and cream, a heap of fried onions on top, and a bowl of apple purée alongside that you're meant to eat with it and that I forget is not optional until the first forkful says so. Marc had the same. We didn't talk for a while, which between us counts as a review.

We came down the other way in the evening, the bus back to Gstaad and the train on toward Spiez, and the light went long and gold over the Simmental for a good forty minutes. I fell asleep before Spiez with burnt knees from a sun I hadn't dressed for.

— Tobi