Zurich - Trip to the Rhine Falls

Approaching the Rhine Falls by Boat

I had the pleasure of a visit from Idette towards the end of July. Since I’m moving back to Egypt in October, this may be the last time that she’ll have the opportunity to visit me in Switzerland (although I ended up back in Switzerland last time I moved to Egypt, so who knows what the future holds).

When I visited Idette last year, I mentioned that I was thinking of maybe moving to Schaffhausen, so I decided that this would be a good place to take her (so that she could see what might have been). Also, on thinking of your typical image of Switzerland, it has to be mountains and lakes, and although we’d taken a boat – sorry, ship, they get quite annoyed if you call them boats - on Lake Zurich before, we hadn’t really seen any Swiss mountains together. Therefore, I thought a trip to Pilatus may be in order.

I’ve done both of these trips before, but it was so long ago now that it’s actually pre-blog. Consequently, it’s maybe worth splitting up the trips into two blogs, as both places are well worth a visit.

The day of Idette’s arrival was a perfect summer’s day.

It’s easy to get to Schaffhausen, as it’s a direct train from my local station and takes about 50 minutes. However, I forgot to look up the route that the train takes. You might think that if it’s a direct train, why would I need to be bothered by the route? Well, in Switzerland, the ticket system is really complicated. You try to buy a train ticket to Schaffhausen from the machine and it will give you two options for tickets depending on which route you are taking or it asks you if you want a day pass for a whole load of zones instead. Well, I had no idea which way the train went and I had no idea what all those zones were that the machine was listing. I just wanted to get the train that goes to Schaffhausen from my station. Why should that be so difficult? In my hurry to get the train, I plumped for the ticket listing all the zones, but I think it was three times the cost of what I needed to pay, actually, and the zones covered a far greater area than where we were going! Lesson learned, but it’s a bit late now. I don’t know why they have to make it so complicated.

Anyway, I shouldn’t dwell on this as the day was superb (even though I say so myself!). We wandered round the old town a bit and had a coffee and cake (always a good idea). Idette’s husband had informed her that there was an IWC museum in Schaffhausen (Gerard, I think I remember you buying a IWC watch once and Paulo commenting that you’d spent your bonus early!); watches are obviously a guy thing. I’d never been there, so we went to visit that – of course, if you aren’t horrendously rich, some of them are just out-of-this-world expensive, but the older ones with the fancy casings were interesting to look at and I could appreciate the work gone into them. The pieces are tiny! It takes you through the history of the watch design, so it’s actually quite absorbing. I teased Idette that she should buy one for her husband, but if he was hoping for one, he didn’t get it (unless she bought one at the airport!).

We then walked along the Rhine to the Rhine Falls. There was some construction going on, so we got a bit lost at first as we couldn’t get to the footpath as directly as I had done before. However, we managed. It’s a great place for a stroll as you have the Rhine to your left and some beautiful private properties to your right; you can see the river getting gradually more and more turbulent the closer you get to the waterfall. Also, after the town, it was a bit cooler down by the river, which was a pleasant respite.

And then, lo and behold, at the end of the walk, you turn a corner and there are the Rhine Falls. The surprise was spoiled a bit as you see them already from the train as you go to Schaffhausen, but it’s still a lovely prize for having walked that far and it’s always something else to be right beside them. The Rhine Falls is the largest waterfall in Europe, at least in terms of breadth.

The Falls were gushing pretty hard when we were there; I guess the summer heat was melting all the ice. There’s a load of spray in the air and, of course, the thunderous noise of the water crashing down en masse. We took one of the boats that take you along the river and under the Falls. As you travel further down the river, the land on the left is Germany and the land on the right is Switzerland. How cool is that?

To my surprise, there must be good Swiss-German collaboration, because our Swiss boat picked up a group of swimmers from a German beach further up the river. They stayed on the boat with us while it went under the Rhine Falls (then you really can feel the spray from the water and actually you can’t see much because it’s just a mist of water droplets), which is exhilarating as you can sense the danger of getting too close; one woman on our boat seemed to be really enjoying it and just laughed the whole time. On coming out from the waterfall, the boat then let the swimmers jump into the water so that they could swim all the way back to their beach. What a fun thing to do! It really made me want to live in that area.

We had perfect weather the whole day and in the evening we had the open-air cinema booked by the lake (VIP tickets). I’ve already written about the open-air cinema before, but there are some new things, so I think I’ll combine that at some later point into a blog of three open-air cinema visits that I’ve done recently.

But it was a fun day out!