Fair Weather Bikers

They poisoned me! The bloody pizza place poisoned me. After around 2 hours in bed I awoke to very bad stomach pains, I quickly put on my sandals and ran to the toilets. And that was that for the next 3 hours, back and forth, back and forth.

Finally it passed and I got a few hours sleep. I got up at around 7am feeling a little worse of wear. Nig had also not been very well, but not as bad as me. We had coffee and toast and leisurely packed the bikes. I binned my sandals I had wrecked with all the running about during the night.

Fortunately it was a very nice day, and the scenery was instantly stunning when we set off. We heading into the mountains towards the St. Bernard Tunnel. We had decided to take the tunnel rather than the pass for a number of reasons including as I wasn't feeling too great, we'd heard the road over the pass was dodgy, and we were doing another better pass later in the day.

The road to the tunnel was very nice and included a section which was like a tunnel around the side of the mountain with just columns on the outer side giving a good view of the mountain and surrounding area. Then we reached the pay booth for the tunnel. It cost us 13 euros each! 13 bloody euros - we were not amused, but by the time you get to the tunnel, it is a long way back to the pass, so we paid it. We will do the pass next time. The tunnel was dull.

On the other side of the tunnel it was cloudy and fairly cold and as we dropped down to the low-lands the traffic increased. We stopped at an automated petrol station to put more layers on and saw a heavily customised Goldwing pull up. He filled up and set off just before us, we set off and saw him pull into the next petrol station down, I think he must have been doing a tour of petrol stations.

We continued into Switzerland and unfortunately out of the mountains. We were heading east towards the Grimsel Pass, but this meant we had quite a few miles along the lowlands through Switzerland. We had decided not to buy the Swiss vignettes which meant we had to stay off the motorways, which we thought would lead to a more interesting ride. We were wrong, the roads were tedious, 50 mph away from towns 25 mph in towns, no overtaking anywhere, and a lot of Swiss drivers did not like bikes. We decided to ignore the no overtaking nonsense, but even so it was not a nice ride.

We stopped for lunch at a McDonald's, it cost us £9 each for a Big Mac Meal! Petrol was also considerably more expensive. Whilst eating our lunch both Nig and I decided that we didn't like Switzerland very much.

Shortly after lunch though things got better. We started heading back into the mountains and the roads and scenery improved dramatically. Just before we joined the Grimsel Pass we stopped to put a bit more gear on as it had got noticeably cooler and it would be much colder on the top of the pass.

The pass was excellent, but quite busy so we had to be very careful with our overtakes. We climbed above the snow layer, and were both very pleased we'd layered up! We were incredibly lucky with the weather, it was a cloudy but the cloud was laying just above the top of the mountain allowing us very clear views for miles, and the views were amazing.

On the climb up the scenery had been green snow capped mountains, with trees and white and blue rivers, but once over the summit it turned rocky, with patches of green and two dammed lakes, one khaki and one emerald green. The contrast was startling!

We rode a short distance down before stopping at a little cafe-van. We got a large flask of tea for 3sfr (just short of 2 euros) each. It doesn't get much better than sitting on the side of a mountain in the Alps with your motorbike enjoying a nice cup of tea!

While we were enjoying our cuppa, a car with Italian plates parked up. The occupants got out and a young man came over and said 'Guten tag' to us. We both replied the same. He asked us something in German, but we didn't understand and told him so and he wondered off. We got up to leave and he said 'Auf Wiedersehen' to us, then the others in the party had a natter with him and and came over and asked us in English where we were from. It turned out he thought we were German which was why he was talking to us in German! He was from Moscow and was touring Europe with his family, they had hired the car in Italy.

The road continued to be excellent all the way down the mountain, we went through a small town then started heading back into the hills. The roads continued to be very good and obviously very popular with motorcycles as there were a lot of biker meeting places and bars.

Our camp-site (Camping Hofstatt-Derfli) was very nice. We were still quite high up so we had stunning views of the mountains dotted with a few log cabins and there was a lovely smell of pine drifting in the air. The facilities on-site were also excellent. Everything was inside a large wood lodge. The toilets and showers were the best we'd seen on this trip, there was a room for washing-up and washing your clothes, and there was a heated living room with lots of table so you could eat inside if it wasn't so nice outside.

There was also a kitchen which you had to hire to use, and bizarrely you hired it on a per-meal basis, meaning if you were cooking for 4 you had to pay 4 times the standard price. Personally I think it makes more sense to meter the gas and electricity, but we didn't need to use it so it didn't matter to us anyway!

You could order bread for the morning from the camp-site which we did, but other than that there was no on-site shop, so we jumped on the bikes to get some food. Luckily we found a shop a few minutes before it closed and got some ravioli and a few beers. We had a bit of bread left over from Aosta so we had ravioli on toast which was very nice.

As night set in it got quite cold, so we decided to relax with our beers in the living room. We had a few games of Jenga, which Nig had never played before. Then we turned on the TV and found a channel playing English speaking programs all of which seemed to be American police type shows. We spent the rest of the night watching CSI Miami, some SWAT thing (which was pretty bad) and Life (which was truly dreadful!) Ordinarily we wouldn't have been interested in these, but it was nice to unwind to some crap TV!

We retired to the tents and for the first time during this trip I had to get full zipped into my sleeping bag. I was asleep in seconds!