Uncommon Switzerland

This is my new favorite guide of Switzerland: Petit guide de la Suisse insolite (Metropolis, 333 pages), a wonderfully written bilingual French-English booklet by Mavis Guinard, an American journalist living in Switzerland. She takes the reader/traveler in an unusual trip around the country, with unsurpassed lightness and insight, offering at every stop compelling narratives. She tells of Wilhelm Tell, of the first tourists in the Alps (the English romantics of the 18th and 19th century) and the first ascent of the Matterhorn, of the many writers that have found inspiration in the country (from Byron to Mary Shelley, from Conan Doyle to Stevenson to Nabokov), of Swiss peculiarities like pastoral calls, the Swiss marine fleet (Switzerland is a landlocked country), cleanliness, and dinosaur footprints, of the actual construction of the Swiss alpine railways and and of crazy projects like this one -- a plan (undated, probably end of the 1800s) to build a gigantic lift-plus-cable-car that was supposed to take tourists up the Jungfrau, one of the country's highest mountains:

Comments

[pam]

For just that drawing/plan, the guide is worth its price! Makes you wonder: Were those engineers drinking, suffering through a very bad winter of cabin fever, too lonely or all of the above when they dreamed up that idea ...

[hans]

It looks to be spanning Lauterbrunnen valley. In that case they were quite mad. The cliff face supporting the right leg is about 1000ft above the valley floor.