Now I know why we don’t ski at St Moritz; the only shops we could find were Chanel, Prada, Aspreys, Tom Ford, Dolce & Gabbana, etc. Oh, and two cups of hot chocolate and a shared slice of carrot cake costs SFr 17, about AU$20 or £12, so we’re slumming it in the campsite. But then again, we’re still getting the most beautiful views of snow-capped mountains, the campsite has really lovely showers with endless hot water, and I’m not going to moan about Eileen, so we’re not really slumming it at all.
We cycled through St Moritz Bad, past the casino and around the lake, to the train station. Unfortunately, they couldn’t sell us a two day ’Engadin Hiking Pass’ because their printer wasn’t working, hmmm, so much for Swiss efficiency. So we cancelled our plan to catch a train to Celerina and cycled, or should I say, pushed our bikes up to St Moritz Dorf instead. We locked up our bikes at the base of the Corviglia funicular and there we did manage to buy our Engadin Wanderpass, danke. Five minutes later we were being dragged up the mountain to Chantarella where we swapped to another funicular up to Corviglia. When we arrived, we had twenty minutes available to wander around and enjoy the view before boarding the next cable car to the top of Piz Nair at 3,056 metres above sea level.
After hot chocolates and cake, we boarded the cable car back down to Corviglia, because the footpaths up there were still under a lot of snow, but from Corviglia we set off on foot downhill. In places it was very steep, but I was very glad that we had decided to walk that section because the meadows around us were filled with the most incredible amount of wildflowers. There were plants we’re sure we haven’t seen before and at one point we stood in one spot and, within our sights, we counted over fifteen different varieties of flowers. All up, we must have seen over forty different flowers and those were only the ones that are blooming now. My favourite was the Frühlings Anemone, or Pale Pasqueflower, it was more like a small furry animal with a flower on its head; I had to keep stroking them, they were so soft and fluffy.
After about a couple of hours of hiking, we finally reached the Chantarella station and caught the funicular train back down to St Moritz Dorf. Cycling back downhill to the train station was much more fun than pushing the bikes uphill earlier in the day and now that we had our Wanderpasses, we rode the train for just six minutes to Celerina. Rodney wasn’t going to let me go back to Eileen and rest up just yet……!
We walked through to the end of the village and caught a gondola up the mountain to Marguns at 2,273m. At the end of the ride we had hoped to catch a chair lift to the top of Las Trais Fluors, but they weren’t running it, so we satisfied ourselves with a short stroll around gazing up at the basin above which was surrounded by craggy peaks; it looked like somewhere we would both enjoy skiing in the winter season. We bought a beer and an iced tea at the café there and sat in a huge double deck chair to drink them, we almost dozed off in the sunshine, in fact I think Rodney did.
So at 4pm, to wake ourselves up, we walked in to the gondola station and rented two trotti bikes and headed back downhill, 553 metres downhill. The route down was so steep and gravelly and I was struggling to hold the stiff brakes on my bike, so we swapped trottis and, sort of, zoomed down the valley. Passing through a pine forest, the pine needles on the trail added to the slipping under wheels and then we encountered a Mexican standoff with a couple of cows, who obviously felt that it was their pathway. After a few Germanic sounding shouts, we got them to move and passed through a meadow full of fellow cows munching away on the wildflowers. Every one of them had a bell on the leather strap around their necks and being amongst them was actually quite a noisy affair.
After passing through some more pine forest, we popped out just opposite the famous bobsleigh ‘The Cresta Run’; now the only remaining natural bobsleigh run left in the world. Back at the gondola base station, we returned the trottis before catching the train back to St Moritz. Our bicycles were waiting for us at the train station and so was a head wind all the way back to the campsite. I was exhausted when we finally reached Eileen and my legs were still throbbing when we went to sleep. I’m not sure I’m going to manage more of this tomorrow.
