The heroes of Switzerland’s high valleys & More Trending News – UP Jobs News

The longest public transport journey in Switzerland is not what you might think. For one thing, it both begins and ends in the same place. And for another it is not on one of Switzerland’s famously efficient, much-photographed and fetishised trains.

Every day from the end of June to mid-October, a PostBus sets off from the resort town of Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland for a nine-hour lasso of the Alps. En route, it clambers over four of Switzerland’s lofty mountain passes, only clear of snow in summer, including the Gotthard, the so-called “king of the passes”, since the Middle Ages a vital trade route across the Alps, between northern and southern Europe. This summer marks the centenary of the first PostBus crossing of the Gotthard — though there is minimal fanfare for the humble bus — and I was lucky enough to be on the first run of the year.

We were an odd bunch boarding that morning. Some bus enthusiasts, some serious mountaineers with ice-axes, taking advantage of a fair forecast. Some mountain bikers with ropes, for God knows what. A couple of engineers en route to hydroelectric installations. And some, like me, who were in it simply for the chance to inspect the roof of Europe from a comfy seat.

I’ve travelled on a PostBus before, in thick winter snow, when it had chains on the wheels, its driver undaunted by black ice. So for the “Vierpässe” (four-pass) route I was expecting some kind of racing-driver-in-shades behind the wheel, not an amiable, soft-spoken gent who looked better suited to taking seniors on a jaunt to the seaside.

As the day wore on, bringing with it successions of hairpins and tunnels, meteor showers of Porsches and BMWs, waves of leathered bikers and Lycra’d cyclists, all testing their mettle, Marcus Bosch never once muttered, swore or braked alarmingly. All of this, and he kept up a regular commentary that had the Swiss Germans on board in stitches, the rest of us quite mystified.

It had rained overnight, so the Oberland was looking ravishing, the air clear and sharp. As we climbed away from Meiringen up the Grimsel pass, we witnessed a process that was to be repeated several times through the journey: first, buildings and houses thinning out and giving way to forests, then the trees melting away to Alpine meadows, studded with wooden huts.

These are the Alphütte, where seasonal workers tend to cattle brought up from the valleys to spend the summer grazing on the rich grass. In my student days I’d contemplated putting myself forward as one of these men; the pay is good but the isolation is daunting, unless you like the company of cows.

Then, finally, above the meadows and approaching the Grimsel pass, the mountains struggled free of vestigial greenery, and we were among bare rocks and white snow patches.

Swiss trains may steal the limelight but it is the PostBuses that are the heroes of the high valleys, connecting remote communities, taking hikers to distant trailheads and always announcing themselves with a distinctive three-note horn based on the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell”.

Those three notes first rang out across the Alps from a bus’s air compressor in 1924, but the post horn goes back far further, to the horse-drawn mail coaches of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their drivers would blow their coiled brass horns to signal their arrival and departure, sometimes adding notes to denote the number of coaches or horses. The first petrol-powered PostBus ran from Bern to Detligen in 1906, but it wasn’t until the years after the first world war that horses were replaced by motorised buses on a significant scale. Forty military trucks were converted to postbuses, giving a total of 104 vehicles by 1920. As well as post and people, they carried milk pails, sometimes even chickens — but right from the start, leisure travellers were an important component.

The Gotthard pass route, for example, was established in 1922 partly in response to the postwar economic crisis. With few foreign tourists, PostBus was keen to stimulate demand with new routes that would be attractive excursions for Swiss passengers. The railway tunnel beneath the mountain already offered a quicker, easier alternative, the journey over the top was simply an adventure. Passengers had to dress warmly because the PostBus used was often the open-topped Saurer “Car alpin”.

Today, there are more than 2,500 PostBuses — including two self-driving electric “Smartshuttles” in the city of Sion. Collectively, the buses notch up a daily distance equivalent to nine times around the equator. PostBus remains state-owned, its public transport division forbidden from making profits (though a recent scandal surrounding the manipulation of accounts to avoid subsidy cuts led to the sacking of senior managers). On average, half the funding comes from ticket sales, half from taxpayers via the cantons or city councils who commission the services and dictate the routes.

Wherever they are, PostBuses are all the same bright yellow, a colour apparently derived from the imperial colours of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, who established a postal service in the 15th century. Perhaps it’s a measure of national affection for the buses that since 2002 the shade has been protected by trademark in Switzerland, alongside only two other colours (Milka chocolate’s purple and Ovomaltine’s orange).

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After a 27-minute stop on the top of Grimsel pass to admire the views and the lakes of milky snowmelt, we began descending the other side and discovered that Marcus had another kind of warning up his sleeve. The three-note horn was sonorous and resonant but this one was more conventional and insistent — and now he was using it urgently. We were pulling up to a roadworks whose traffic light was controlling a single lane, but the bus must have masked the light from an impatient sports car behind. It came hurtling past just as the first bikers were emerging from the other direction. Marcus hooted, the car jammed on the brakes, and nobody got hurt.

The next pass was the Nufenen, at 2,478 metres the highest in Switzerland; Marcus said that passengers sometimes suffer from altitude sickness. Midday found us making a long descent into the southern canton of Ticino, where everyone we picked up was suddenly speaking Italian. The meadows were sprinkled with brightly painted boxes, some on trailers: beehives, brought up for the summer, to flavour the honey with herbs and wildflowers.

The Ticino town of Airolo is where the Gotthard’s road and rail tunnels emerge. Marcus announced a 90-minute lunch break, so we all decamped and I compared notes with fellow passengers, one Swedish, one Croatian and one Hungarian, all of whom worked in Zurich. They’d read about the journey as one of Switzerland’s undiscovered gems and thought it was a cool way of seeing several passes in one go. I was pleased to hear that they too struggled with understanding Marcus’s jokes. “I’m sitting next to a German,” said the Swede, Anders Mårtensson, “and he doesn’t understand them either.”

Up on the top of Gotthard I broke my journey, having had enough passes for one day. I found a room in Gotthard’s rudimentary hospiz, with a shared bathroom down an echoing corridor, not realising that there was a far fancier option in the vicinity.

I stumbled upon La Claustra’s entrance that evening: a flag, a billboard, and a gaping doorway into the rock. Inside was a long, cold and dripping tunnel, leading eventually to a fleet of bicycles and a metal door under a neon sign that read “Hotel”.

“The bicycles are for guests to go out to make their phone calls,” explained owner Rainer Geissmann, whom I met where the tunnel opened out into well-lit underground caverns. “We have no phone signal and no internet in here.” And yet La Claustra is an elite address, he maintained. Its unique setting, with 17 rooms, wellness area and restaurant in purpose-built constructions 45 metres below the surface, attracts a clientele looking for novelty and retreat. Its overnight rate — £312 per person — includes a seven-course dinner, but then there isn’t really anywhere else to go.

The Claustra was originally dug as a fortress and still has its (deactivated) heavy artillery in situ. The Gotthard is such a strategic transport link between central Switzerland and northern Italy that the Swiss decided during the second world war that it should be extensively defended. So they built an even bigger underground fortress, Sasso san Gottardo, just across the pass. It remained combat-ready, its guns capable of picking out targets in Italy and garrisoned by up to 500 soldiers, until 1998, and top secret until three years later. These days, its dank corridors and command rooms are open to summer visitors, a sobering contrast to the bright skies and holiday activity outside.

Next day, I had several hours before the bus came round again, plenty of time to watch the motorbikes, cars and cyclists arriving in flocks to rest momentarily on the pass like migratory birds on a wire. Also here, for a pit-stop of water and hay, was a horse and carriage in PostBus livery, a historical re-enactment that carries tourists on a daily five-hour journey up and over the pass from Andermatt to Airolo for SFr680 (£588) per head.

The last leg of my journey was quite different. From having been a buzzy hiker distribution service, the bus had become an exercise in tired hiker retrieval, and the driver was not interested in pointing out any landmarks, even when we saw Andermatt spread out like a welcome mat on the valley floor below us, the crimson ribbon of the Glacier Express train pulling out from its station.

Here, we had another 30-minute break, enough time to inspect the new district created by Egypt-born billionaire Samih Sawiris, who is transforming Andermatt from a garrison town into a luxurious ski and golf resort. There are new hotels, and quantities of smart apartments being sold, which presumably explained why there were young couples wearing Versace posing for Instagram on the old river bridge in town.

And so to Susten, the last pass on the journey, which turned out to be the most unassumingly scenic. Despite being equally high, and overhung at the top by the rump end of the Stein glacier, nature didn’t seem to bare and gnash its teeth here to the same extent as with the other passes. The walls were braided with waterfalls, and the road had been designed to climb calmly up one side, with occasional short tunnels that artfully framed the most striking views.

Our PostBus’s last significant stop was at a bend on the descent from Susten, where a mobile trailer was unburdening relieved cows of their milk. Judging by the way in which the beasts waited patiently in line, their flanks steaming gently and their cowbells tinkling pianissimo in the evening sun, I thought that it didn’t look such a hard life for the hired hands after all.

For a moment I regretted not having signed up for that while young. But then I remembered I had a hotel room with dinner to look forward to, back where my long journey had begun.

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