Now we’re back on track! This is my county trip to Switzerland in 2014 and after starting in the wrong place, I’m now getting my days in the right order. Today is Wednesday and I’m going solo, off to my adopted home city of Neuchâtel and for a little spa afternoon at Yverdon-les-Bains.
The story so far… we’d spent two days driving down through France on Friday and Saturday, spent Sunday in arranging rooms and moving in properly to Anita’s B&B and then mooching in Grindelwald before going off to the Lauterbrunnen Valley on Monday and then to Our Chalet on Tuesday. And now, as I said, it’s Wednesday.
We were driver-less today and so we were left to our own devices. A few people had decided to set off early to be on the first train to the Jungfraujoch but I declined to join them. That’s partly because I’m unsociable and had been with them for the best part of five solid days, partly because the Jungfraujoch can induce altitude sickness – and did with at least one of our group, partly because you spend the majority of the journey in a dark tunnel and it’s too cold at the top to really enjoy it after all the effort to get up, partly because it costs about as much as the rest of the trip put together – and mostly because I wanted to go to.
I lived there between October 2005 and July 2006 as a language student studying French at a language school attached to the university. You can read all the posts about that so far here and I’ll be adding more as I continue my gap-filling. I’d popped by once or twice since then but I hadn’t really had the best part of a day to roam my old hometown for eight years. You bet I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity.
It’s a bit of an epic to get from Lütschental to Neuchâtel. You get the train to stop at the request stop on its way from Grindelwald down to Interlaken. Then you take the train from Interlaken to Bern. Then you change again to get from Bern to Neuchâtel. It’s not the most complicated journey I’ve ever done but it takes about two and a half hours, which means getting there and back takes a big chunk out of your day and currently costs about £32. I don’t think I’d paid full price for train travel in Switzerland since the first week of my year abroad – I had a half price card while I lived there and on subsequent visits, I always buy a pass of some kind and I save so much money on it that I feel like I’m profit by the time I go home. As we had a minibus, it simply wasn’t worth investing this time, although I’m pretty sure I did the sums.
So, two and a half hours later, I stepped off the train at Neuchâtel. If you’re not familiar with my adopted hometown, let me be your tour guide for the day. The city of Neuchâtel is the capital of the Republic and Canton of Neuchâtel, a French-speaking canton in the north-west of Switzerland. It borders France and the nearest town of any size over the border is Pontarlier and claims to speak the “purest” French outside of France. The Principality of Neuchâtel became the only monarchy to join the Swiss Confederation, which it did in 1815 and it subsequently had a small revolution in 1848 when it became a republic, eight or so months before the Swiss Confederation became a federation. Its king, Frederick William IV of Prussia renounced his claim on the republic in 1857 and Neuchâtel has quietly been part of the French end of Switzerland ever since.
Neuchâtel city, the capital, isn’t actually the biggest city in the canton. That would be La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watchmaking town up in the mountains, birthplace of Brutalist architect Le Corbusier and car maker Louis Chevrolet. It feels like a tiny village with very little going on besides watch factories and museums but it’s actually the fourth largest city in French-speaking Switzerland, after Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg.
I admit that I never saw Neuchâtel as a huge city. It suited me – it’s on the edge of a lake, the biggest navigable lake wholly in Switzerland (which means that although Geneva and Constance are both bigger, they overlap international borders), it has views across to the Oberland on clear days, it has everything I need within bus distance, or walking if I’m feeling energetic, but it also doesn’t feel like living in central London. Alexandre Dumas once described Neuchâtel as looking “like a toytown carved out of butter” for the fact that it’s quite small and a lot of its buildings are yellow sandstone.
On this day off in 2014, I arrived at about half past eleven. However, there are photos from the train window at just after eight. That doesn’t add up to a two and a half hour journey unless I spent an hour revelling in Neuchâtel station, even taking into account the possibility of having to add another change at Spiez. How odd.
Anyway. Neuchâtel station is at the top of the hill. There are various ways down but the two that I used in my old days were to walk down the lane that led to my student accommodation or to take the funicular to the Jardin Anglais. On this occasion, I walked. I would have arrived almost right opposite that tower but for some reason, I declined to take a photo of it and instead walked the old familiar walk down to my old language school and took a photo there. Back in my old days, I’d have taken the bus into town from here but I walked. I wasn’t here to sail past Neuchâtel, I was here to savour it.
I never did quite figure out the city centre. Today I wanted to find old haunts – the Mexican bar where we used to sit regularly, my favourite supermarkets, the shoe shop I used as a landmark. I took some photos of the streets, which I never did when I lived here, but I didn’t know my way around very well at the time and to this day, even with Google Maps, I don’t know where the bar was. I remember it was on a corner. When the plague is well and truly over, I’m going to go and spend a full day in Neuchâtel and take all the photos and visit the castle. Isn’t it odd how the one place in Switzerland I don’t feel like I know very well is the one I lived in?
Of course, we didn’t spend that much time in the city centre so I ambled down to the lakeside. I popped into the post office – it’s quite an imposing building and as per any good post office, it’s also a stationers and a tourist information office. It’s where I kept the grant I was given by the Swiss government. I insisted on keeping the card when I closed that account. Come to that, I had to keep the deposit for my room in an actual Swiss bank, which would probably have been the Banque Cantonale Neuchâteloise, which is somewhere else I haven’t been in a long time. I haven’t seen Harry Potter but I have a very dim memory of BCN looking a bit like Gringotts inside.
Out of the post office and back down the marina, past the beach huts and in search of our other favourite bar, which was a room underneath the Hotel Beaulac, frequented by virtually no one but us. The standard order was “une grande pression, s’il vous plaît, un vin rouge et un chocolat froid”. It was a really nice spot to sit on a sunny day and look out at the water. Gone, or just not open? Or could I just not find it?
I’d rarely walked along this bit but I wanted to see l’Église Rouge. Its actual name is Basilique Notre-Dame de l’Assomption but I always called it the Red Church because… well, it’s red. Actually, it’s artificial stone that was dyed red on-site to look like Alsace sandstone. I hadn’t realised that it celebrated its hundredth birthday while I was living there. I could see it from my window; I was woken by its bells at the weekend and it was my favourite sight.
Had I ever been inside it? Maybe once, but I remembered nothing. So on this day I went inside. Yes, it’s a nice church. Red and white and shiny mahogany pews – it’s no bare stone Norman cathedral but it’s striking. I really should have visited more often when I lived opposite it.
I returned to the Jardin Anglais via the university, which meant little to me because although I was enrolled there, everything was in the ILCF. I walked back past my language school, past the used book shop Athena used to own and to the funicular. Well, there was a nostalgia factor in walking down a hill but did you expect me to walk back up it? The funi takes three minutes and costs… well, I seem to remember it costs 2fr. I think these days it would be an ordinary short-term ticket, which is 2.60fr full price and 2.10fr reduced price for children and half price cardholders.
To complete my day in Neuchâtel, I should have gone out to the little supermarket on the side of the station and bought a baguette to eat on the train. Maybe I did and just didn’t bother photographing it. I lived out of that little shop – baguettes, bottles of chocolate milk for journeys, Milka and the occasional bag of sliced bread and cheese slices for toasted sandwiches if I was feeling special.
This was the first half of the day. The second half was to go to Yverdon-les-Bains, a spa town which happens to be one stop on the Geneva or Lausanne trains. Considering it nests at the end of Lake Neuchâtel, I was astonished to discover in the last month that it’s actually in Vaud canton. It’s another place I should have explored more – adding to this Neuchâtel 2023 itinerary all the time! – but I’d only been there once, to visit the Centre Thermale, filled from the hot spring that gives the town its -les-Bains suffix. On my visit in 2006, it cost 17fr (€11.75), according to the ticket in my scrapbook. In 2014 it was €19 for three hours and today it’s 22fr (€21), which is showing something interesting about Swiss francs vs Euros.
I was there in February 2006 when it was snowing outside and I’ve loved the combination of hot bath and cold snow ever since. Of course I went back! I couldn’t remember exactly how to get to the baths and clearly hadn’t had the brains to either look it up before I set off or even to check whether the baths were open. Google Maps says it’s twenty minutes on foot or take the 602 or 604 bus from outside the station, which will take 13 or 14 minutes, hardly any quicker than just walking.
The place is a hotel and it’s an interesting-looking thing. I don’t have the right architectural words for it but it’s not yellow sandstone or Le Corbusier-concrete. A small complication was that one of the pools were closed and they were limited the people coming in and I had a little difficulty in getting a ticket because of it but at last I was in! In hindsight, I should have done this bit first, when it was still reasonably quiet in the morning and then gone to Neuchâtel on the way home.
The outside pools were cooler than I remember – borderline too cold. Apparently at Yverdon they deliberately lower the temperature of the outside pools in summer to make it more cooling. Ok, I’ve definitely sat in hot tubs on hot days and not enjoyed the warmth like I would earlier in the year but I wasn’t here to cool down so I eventually had to go back inside. The trouble with inside was that there wasn’t as much of it as I remembered and local families were treating it like the local pool. Too many kids yelling and hurling inflatables around. I know I hate kids but the sort of carry-on you’d get in the baby pool down the road isn’t what you want when you’ve just paid premium prices for a spa experience. That’s not being unreasonable, is it?
I don’t know if it just wasn’t as good as my dim and hazy memory of my first spa or if I’ve become more discerning over the years but it was underwhelming. For all I’ve just added it to my Neuchâtel 2023 itinerary, I actually probably wouldn’t go back. Switzerland has got to have better thermal spas, right? Leukerbad looks nice, although apparently has a lot of children.
After that, I have no photos at all. I probably made my way back to the station, got a snack at the shop there and then took the train straight back to Lütschental. I remember one of the group who’d been up the Jungfraujoch either skipping dinner or departing it abruptly because of altitude sickness so I must have got home early enough to join the group meal. Or maybe this was the next day? I don’t have any photos of anyone except me on Thursday, so it’s possible she missed the expedition.
But that’s a story for next month. Thursday on our Swiss trip, Reichenbach Falls, Brienz and a ride on the Brienzersee ferry.