We started something new that we are very excited about and are now taking full 360x180 degree panorama's. These are high-resolution panorama pictures in which you can rotate in all different directions, so you can look around, to the top or to the bottom and can fully experience a place.
Our first successful attempt to doing this was the local train station, which came out well. Have a "spin" with the below picture. More to come in the near future!
Yesterday, I went skiing at the closest "decent" place to go skiing, which is Stoos. There are a couple of places closer to Zug, such as Rigi, but these places tend to be very small ski-areas and not really of any interest to me, so Stoos, with a height of 1922m (6305 feet) really is the local hill for skiing purposes. By public transport, it takes a bit over an hour to get there from where we live.
Conditions for ski-ing were fabulous: there has been tons of snow over the last few weeks, the sun was shining and the skiresort was not too crowded. Although the sun was shining on the ski-slopes, there was a thick fog in the valley, as is so often the case around here, creating some really nice views with peaks sticking out through the clouds.
Although pictures do not fully do the views justice, here are a few images for your enjoyment. As always, click on the images for larger versions:
All the best for 2010!!! I cann't believe we are already a decade into the 2000's! I hope 2010 brings you all the happiness, good health and financial security you are looking for.
As usual, we took it easy on New Year's Eve. We are not big on party's, which seems to be the most common way to celebrate New Year in Switzerland, as in many other places. We had a nice meal at home, watched some TV and watched the fireworks shot by individuals around us. The fireworks started as early as 21:00, but started getting really big at midnight with many people shooting of fireworks, some of them passing frightfully close to our balcony. In fact, we hardly ever saw as many fireworks for New Year as here in Zug!
We also went through a 750 ml bottle of DeuS beer. Well, it is not really a beer as it doesn't appear to contain any hops. It is more a barley wine that gets served very cold (put it in the fridge for 12 hours followed by the freezer for 20 minutes before serving!) in champagne-type glasses. It's had a very fruity flavor and has a high alcohol content of 11.7%. We enjoyed it for the special occasion, and the beer is a great replacement for champagne, but it is definitely not a beer one would drink on a daily basis.
We didn't get any good pictures of the impressive fireworks that were happening all around us, but we did get some nice pictures at Europapark, which we visited last week on our way to Belgium. During winter, Europapark is very nicely decorated with tons of lights and special shows for the occasion, including an Asian dance/acrobatics show and a circus performance. You can find more information here.
As always, you can click on the link to get a larger version of the photo. Below are two shots from the Russian part of the park. One is just a sparkly decoration, the other is the Euro-Mir coaster, decked-out for the holidays. The Mir is one of the earliest coasters that has a car which rotates as you move along the track.
In a yearly tradition going back 39 years, one of the events in Zug is the "Zuger Messe". The Messe (German for "fair") consists of a number of large tents in which different retailers and restaurateurs set up their merchandise. You can find all kinds of stuff at the fair such as vacuum cleaners, different foods, electronics, furniture, information about skiing in Switzerland or Austria, live animals, etc. There are also several restaurants and bars, often with live music.
There are over 500 stands at the Messe and it is spread over two areas that are close together. Last year, the Messe attracted 80,000 visitors, so it is considered one of the highlights of the year.
We quite enjoy going there to find some weird and interesting items that we otherwise do not find anywhere else and to enjoy the atmosphere.
The fair also has its traditional "Riesenrad" (Giant Wheel). This is an artistic interpretation of the wheel by night:
This is a write-up I recently did for a colleague visiting Switzerland from Dubai, United Emirates. It lists some of the highlights around where we live, Zug. I am posting it to the blog as I thought it may be useful to others that plan to come this way:
There is no snow, yet, apart from some of the high mountain peaks that tend to have snow all year round. The weather may be great, but it can also be quite rainy this time of the year. Note that sometimes the top of the mountains are above the clouds, so it can be dry there when it is raining in the valeys. Also note that the weather can change easily in a short duration, so always take the appropriate clothing if you go on a mountain (rainjacket, etc.)
Here are a few websites you should be aware of that will help you with planning any trips you may want to make: http://www.sbb.ch is the public transport site where you can find schedules from anywhere (not only the train) to anywhere. As public transport in Switzerland is excellent, it is really a great way to get around if you are visiting. In fact, I don’t have a car and use public transport instead as it is so good. Bear in mind that in many cases, the trainride in its own right is actually a great experience and provides some beautiful views. http://map.search.ch/ is a really good map website for Switzerland where you can not only find locations, but can also public transport stops. Even better is that you can then right-click on bus and train stops and tell it from or to where to go (e.g., Zug) and it will show you how to get there and how long it will take you. http://www.myswitzerland.com/en/home.html is a website about visting Switzerland that has tons of information on where to go and what to do
Also note that for many of these trips, you will get a much better price if you buy the whole ticket at the train station as they give special discounts. If you plan to travel a lot, you may also find this useful: http://www.tell-pass.ch/index.cfm?page=0&lang=E. It is a pass that allows you unlimited travel within Central Switzerland (which is around Luzern, but not Zurich) for 2 days within a 7 day period (the other days, you get half price discounts) and gives you special discounts for other activities. I do not know all the details, but may be worth checking out. There is also a Swiss Travel card that gives similar benefits, including access to 450 museums: http://www.swisstravelsystem.ch/en/ and is valid for the whole of Switzerland.
I assume you will be staying in Zug and therefore will focus on things to do near to Zug:
One of our favorite local trips is to onto Rigi (http://www.rigi.ch/en/welcome.cfm ), which is the closest mountain to Zug. It is not super high, but it provides really great views of the surroundings. It is particularly nice to do a full tour around the mountain: take the train to Arth-Goldau, change to a mountain train that takes you straight to the top of Rigi, with some stunning views along the way, do some walking and looking out on the top and then come down on another mountain train (one is red, the other one blue, don’t remember which one is what), but this time, take the mountain train to Viznau with some more fantastic views. Then take the boat from Viznau to Luzern, which is where we had our meeting. The boat ride is stunning on nice days. I recommend first class so you can sit upstairs. After you enjoy Luzern, which is beautiful, take the train back from Luzern to Zug.
The mountain we visited with the IT team last year Titlis (http://www.titlis.ch/index.php?id=134&lang=en ). You can also visit it during summer. To get there, you would want to take a train from Zug, over Luzern, to Engelberg. Another very nice trainride that gives you some nice views over the lake. The last section of the train goes steeply up the mountain. In Engelberg, you may need to walk about 10 minutes to the mountain station, which is SW of the station (easy to get to). You can then take a few cablecars all the way up to the top of the mountain, which is over 3,000 meter. There is snow at the top all year round and they have a number of activities such as visiting an ice cave and sledding at the top of the mountain. It will take you a couple of hours to get from Zug to Engelberg.
Another favorite of ours, which is relatively close to Zug, is Stanserhorn (http://www.stanserhorn.ch/m171_m06/cms/EnHome.asp ), which provides beautiful views of the mountains and has an easy path to walk around the mountain at the top. It is a pleasant walk and you really get a great view of all the mountains and lakes around, including places such as Jungfrau and Eiger. In order to get there, you would need to take a train to Stans and from there go up the mountain.
And then finally, there is Pilatus (http://www.pilatus.ch/default-n159-sE.html ), which also provides stunning views of the surroundings and is about 2000 meters. Again, you can make a lovely roundtrip by taking a train to Luzern, and then switching to the bus to a place called Krienz. From there, you take the cablecar up the mountain (you have to change halfway and can also do some activities at this halfway point). Once you have soaked in the views at the top, you take a train back down (if I remember right, it is the steepest train in Switzerland) to a place called Alpnachtstadt. From there, you can again take a lovely boatride back to Luzern.
The Vierwaldtstädtersee, which is the lake by Luzern, is incredibly beautiful. The boatrides above go over this lake. If you want to do the full length of the lake (an incredibly beautiful boatride), you can take a train to Fluelen and take the boat to Luzern from there. The boat trip is about 2 to 3 hours and is really worthwile.
If the weather is not that good, you can visit Luzern, where our IT conference took place, or Zürich, both very nice cities, although I prefer Luzern. Also bear in mind that it is really not that far, by train, to visit Bern, which has a very nice town center, or Geneva, with its famous lake. You can easily go to these places in daytrips from Zug.
If you are looking for a beautiful trainride, you can take the following traintrip: Zug – Erstfeld – Andermatt - Sedrun – Disentis – Chur – Thalwil – Zug. It does take a few hours (not sure how long exactly), but takes you past some beautiful places, including the “Swiss Grand Canyon”. The train also goes to over 2000m, so you are actually in the mountains without having to do anything apart from changing trains a few times. Obviously, you can also get off along the way and enjoy the local area and mountains.
A “famous” trip, that I have not yet made, but has been recommended by me, is to visit the JungFrau (http://www.jungfraubahn.ch/). You would need to make an overnight trip for this, though, and stay in Interlaken, as it is too far to get to from Zug and back in one day (getting up the mountain takes a while). The trainride over Sarnen, Brienz to Interlaken is also stunning. If you go there, I recommend returning from Interlaken over Bern as that trainride is also very nice next to the lake and doing so does not add that much time.
I’m sure there are many other great things to do, but these are the first things that came to mind.
What a sudden drop in temperature. Last week it still was 25-30C (75-85F), this week the temperature barely is going over freezing with daytime temperatures of 6C (42F).
With the cold temperatures, we are also getting the first snow. Well, almost - the snow is not yet hitting Zug itself, but is clearly visibly on the surrounding hills and mountains, including our "housemountain" Rigi. Still a month or two before the ski-slopes start opening, but the early snow should help providing a good base for upcoming snow ... at least, if the temperatures don't rise all much again in the next few weeks.
Here is a picture of snow-covered Rigi from our balcony. You can clearly see the snowline is not that much higher than the houses in the foreground. Not the best picture, but wanted to share the news with you:
October is a beautiful time to visit Switzerland: It is much less crowded than during summer, the weather is still very nice (at least it was this year) and the trees are changing colors, making for some beautiful scenery. Oddly enough, September was much less pleasant this year with cold and wet weather (with snow on the mountains).
We tried to capture the beauty of the fall in Switzerland in a series of photos which we took during two separate trips on the Klausen pass. The first time around, we had to turn back because the pass was closed for snow. The second time around, the pass was fully accessible.
Click on the image to visit the photo album containing these pictures. Enjoy!
BTW, if you ever need to check whether a pass / road is open in Switzerland, this page shows the current status of all the roads.
One of the things we noticed about living in Switzerland is how honest (most) people are: when anyone looses and object, others go through efforts to try to get it back to them. Typically, if people don't know who the object belongs to, the finder places it in a very visible place so the person who lost it can easily find it back.
Case in point was the following sign which we noticed at the noticeboard at the entrance to our building. Someone had found an earring and did not only not just take it, they went through the trouble of creating a sign and attaching the earring to the sign so the person who has lost the earring can easily find it back.
The sign reads "who has lost this?"
The same honesty applies when you leave your bag or suitcase sitting somewhere - you typically do not have to worry about someone taking it.
August 1st is a big holiday in Switzerland, very similar to 4th of July in the US. We were less interested in all the speeches that happen on this day in cities and towns across Switzerland, but we did attend some spectacular fireworks nearby, one in Fluelen, a town at the end of Vierwaldstädtersee (Lake Lucerne) and one on Buergenstock, a small mountain (1100m) overlooking the Vierwaldsädtersee and Lucerne.
Not only are there very nice professional displays, on the first of August, many people also shoot fireworks, sometimes big ones, privately. In the run-up to the holidays, you can buy fireworks everywhere, including at the grocery store.
Here are some pictures from the fireworks we attended in Fluelen. As always, click on a picture to get a larger version:
A few weeks ago we took a daytrip to the top of a nearby mountain, called Rigi. We took a train to Arth-Goldau (about 25 minutes from Zug) and took the blue mountain railway up to the top of Rigi.
After we explored the top and had some lunch, we came back down with the red mountain railway, which took us down to the other side of the mountain to a place called Vitznau.
From Vitznau, we took a beautiful boat ride on Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne) to Luzern (approx 30 minutes) where we took the train back to Zug.
The views from the top were beautiful. Click on the panorama below to see a full screen view of what we saw on the top:
And check out the other pictures of this trip in the gallery:
Last Sunday, we suddenly heard an odd sound coming through the windows. We were curious to find out what it was, so went outside to check it out.
Sure enough, there were a couple of men playing alphorns right outside of our window on the courtyard! The alphorn is a traditional Swiss instrument that looks like a very large trumpet, made from wood.
I had the chance to try to play one of those instruments a while back in a team building exercise at work and, like most people at the event, found it very difficult to even get a note out of the instrument, let alone actually playing a tune on it!
You can hear a short recording of what we heard by clicking here. If you listen carefully, you will also hear cowbells in the recording. This is another typical Swiss tradition, where all the cows have large bells hanging around the neck and you can hear them from far away! We have five of those cows on a nearby field and constantly hear the cowbells ringing.
Here are a few pictures of the two men playing the alphorns:
We did it again ... and added another country to our list. We moved back to Europe - Switzerland this time. More specifically we ended up in Zug in the German speaking part of Switzerland.
Although we are getting used to moving around (this is Johan's 8th country and Karl's 6th!), moving internationally continues to be a big adventure every time. We moved out in South Africa at the end of January and moved into our new place in Zug mid-February. We are still up to our necks in boxes, trying to shoehorn a medium-sized house into a city apartment, but we're getting things sorted out and starting to feel at home in our new location.
Changing from South Africa to Switzerland takes some getting used to, particularly since we moved from
summer in South Africa to winter in Switzerland. And, of course, everyone tells us we're having record amounts of cold weather. The snow-line has come down to visit the city folk, and enough snow comes off the balcony railing to make a couple snowballs. In South Africa, we'd still be using the pool.
The following pictures from both sides of our move give a glimpse of some of the differences (click on the image to get a larger version of the photo).
More about our adventures in Switzerland will undoubtedly follow!
In our post of June 7, 2007, we mentioned the "Birds of Eden" bird park. Right nextdoor (same parkinglot) is another animalpark called "monkeyland". Monkeyland is a monkey sanctuary (who would have guessed) where different types of primates roam around in a section of forest.
When you visit monkeyland, you first end up in a visitor center with restaurant, where you can observe the monkeys around you and have something to eat or drink. If you are not paying close attention, the monkeys may steal some of your food though! Entrance to this area is free and is a great experience.
If you want to see some of the more shy monkeys and want to see monkeys in their natural habitat, you have to take a paid tour around the forest with a guide. The guide takes you along the different paths, including across a suspension bridge, and points out different monkeys along the way. As the monkeys are free roaming, you never know what you may end up seeing where.
We really enjoyed this sanctuary on the Garden Route and actually went there a couple of times. You can have a look at some of the photos we took during our visits there by clicking on the picture below.
This is our third New Year in South Africa and we are still not used to celebrating Christmas and New Year in the middle of summer! Hot weather (the last few days it has been approximately 30C/86F) does just not seem right for this time of the year. Particularly when you see Christmas trees, hear Christmas charols and people shoot fireworks for New Year. We celebrated by making several trips to the beach and going swimming in our pool at home ... in the mean time we are hearing about cold weather in Europe and the US. What a different experience!
All of this will change soon: in February, we will move to Switzerland where Johan will take up his next position in the company. We will move out of our current place by the end of January and will make a little trip to Cape Town, both for leisure as well as for work, before we make our final move. The move may prove quite a shock as we will go from summer weather in South Africa to winter weather in Switzerland, which will take some adjustment!
A couple of weeks ago we visited Wavecrest, a beach resort on the wild coast in the Transkei, approximately two hours drive from where we live. Going to the Wild Coast is always a great experience as it is one of those places where you really feel like you can have a whole beach for yourself. You also drive through a more remote area to get there and experience a very different side of South Africa. Here are some pictures of our experience. As always, please select the picture to see a larger version.
Panorama of the lagoon and the beach - click on the picture to get a full screen version and experience the location!
We use Panorama Factory to create our panorama's. Not only does the tool do a fantastic job at stitching pictures together, it also works under Linux and Mac. As both of us run Ubuntu at home, this is an important criteria!
Pretty rocks by the beach:
Two people canoeing on the lagoon:
In order to get to wavecrest, you drive on a dirtroad in the remote Transkei area. The Traskei is a hilly, green area and feels very remote and poor. This picture shows one of the the views along the way. Judging by the size of the dwelling, the family living here must be of pretty well of:
Driving on dirt road takes some getting used to. You have to drive carefully as there are animals on the road, such as this cow:
Our website has gone very quiet lately, mainly due to being extremely busy. For those of you who are wondering, we still are alive and well and still are in South Africa.
In general, living in South Africa is like living in any other developed country with reasonable good road infrastructure, good housing, shopping malls, telephone, etc. It would be easy to forget that one is actually living in Africa.
It is amazing to think that all those stories happen so nearby and you are not really aware of it on a day-to-day basis. However, we are also reminded about the fact that we are living in Africa every time recently we have electricity cuts. This happens on almost a daily basis, often for several hours at a time. Much of this is due to "load shedding" as there is not enough electricity to go around, so the power company turns of different parts of the country at different times. It would not be that bad if it would be announced when such cuts would happen, but the power company, Eskom, and the city, who send us the bill, cannot agree on who should inform the public so nobody knows when the cuts will strike. What we do know is that the problem is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it has become such a normal event that people hardly react when it happens. The other day I was in a business meeting when the electricity, and therefore the lights, projector and airconditioning, went of. People just continued to talk as if nothing has happened as it is such a common occurrence. Similarly, you learn to live with it at home.
A few weeks ago, the electricity outage caused our ADSL Internet connection to go down ... and stay down for 8 days! The local telecommunications monopoly, Telkom, had many issues countrywide resulting in waiting times of up to two hours for phone support. The people providing the support often did not know what was happening and our ticket was closed automatically after a few days, even though the problem was not solved! Mind you, for all of this, we are paying among the highest ADSL prices in the world for very poor speed.
Welcome to the Wanderers. This webpage contains the adventures of Johan and Karl, the worldwide wanderers. Johan, originally from Belgium and Karl, originally from the US, move internationally regularly and currently live in Zug, Switzerland.
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