Trois pays en une journée et un aveu/Three countries in a day and a confession

Saturday was the day to travel from Geneva to Alba.  It meant travelling through three countries – Switzerland, France and Italy, but they are borderless in the sense that one does not have to present a passport. 

The morning started with breakfast with our hosts Fred and Max.  Fred worked in a restaurant and unlike Max had limited English.  Max on the other hand was fluent in English and French, and his first language was German  (having grown up in the Mosel area of Germany and completed his first degree in Berlin).  Max came to Switzerland a few years ago to study for a master’s degree in psychology, so had to learn a new language very quickly.  Fred was Portuguese and Swiss.  They were renting their apartment but had recently bought one in France just over the border.  The cost of the new apartment was a third of their apartment in Geneva and had the bonus of an extra bedroom.  Apparently there is a metro station being built where they have bought which will make it easy to commute to work in Geneva.  Apparently you do not want to go by car due to congestion. 

The population of Geneva city is about 200,000 - the same as Wellington and the wider metropolitan area is also a similar size.  In contrast to Wellington,  the public transport system is brilliant and is very efficient.  People seem to use it all times of the day.  In addition, during the weekend there is a reduced price ticket which makes travel for a day very reasonable.

We took the tram to the city and had a little wander around.  It looked very interesting but due to the need to pick up a rental car, we did not have time to see a great deal.  We took a train to the airport and then found the French sector where we picked up the car. 

This is the part where I make my confession. Generally I am rude about SUV’s as I believe them to be big vehicles that guzzle too much fuel and that most people have no need for such a bit piece of metal as most of the time there is only one or at the most two people in them and they probably are only used for commuting to work. In my opinion they have become a status symbol !   However, much to my disgust that is what we were given - a Ford Kuga.  I would have been happier with a smaller vehicle because it is easier in the small villages where the streets are narrow and also when having to park in parking buildings.  Not only that it uses more fuel, although it is a diesel so at least in France it will be cheaper to fill. One advantage is that it has the GPS built in and all it needed was for me to change a few settings to convert to English – thus a much faster option for inputting information.

To avoid having to pay a motorway toll of 40CHF (about $NZ60) we had to find a way out of Geneva airport to the city that avoided the said motorways.  This proved to be quite a challenge as the GPS was set to go via motorways.  Thus I made a number of mistakes until we finally got on to the right roads and fooled the GPS.  Consequently we were late to pick up our bags from our accommodation however our hosts were very understanding.

Figuring out how to avoid the motorways made it simple to leave Switzerland and before we knew it we were in France heading for Chamonix on some back roads.  Eventually I reset the GPS so we could travel on the auto routes – much faster than the back roads but seriously expensive.

We stopped at Chamonix.  I had thought we might take the telepherique to the Aiguille du Midi but the weather was cloudy and wet so there would have been no views. Also, we were rather late and still had about 250km to go to Alba in northern Italy. 

After a snack and coffee we headed for the Mont Blanc tunnel.  The tunnel is literally bored through the base of Mont Blanc.  We got quite a shock at the price of the toll €43 (about $NZ70) and the only compensation was that once we had been through the tunnel we then must have paid for about another 20 tunnels to go through.  They just kept appearing.  After the tunnels there were more tolls until we got to about 10 kilometres from Alba.

That was not the end of the excitement for the day.  Rain started pelting down about 20 kilometres from Turin and continued until we were well past Turin and on the road to Alba.  I kept thinking there was going to be an accident given the volume of traffic, the amount of water on the road and the speed of some of the cars.  Suddenly the traffic slowed, hazard lights went on and we started moving very slowly. We quickly discovered what had caused the slowness - a Porsche 911 must have aquaplaned and gone in a full circle.  It must have just happened, but remarkably no-one was hurt and it did not seem like any cars were hit. 

I made only one wrong turn – and that was missing the turnoff to Savona but with help of the GPS and Bev we were able to take the next turn off and get on the right road. 

Finally, we arrived in Alba, the last part of the journey being over some narrow country roads that definitely needed some work.  The GPS took us to an address that did not seem right.  When I looked at the GPS again I found there were two addresses to our destination and when I put in the other, the right one became apparent and we easily found the place. 

Our next challenge was getting into the place - not so easy as the Aunt from whom we were to pick up the key spoke no English and we spoke no Italian.  The key was not in the mail box per our instructions.  Eventually someone using sign language took us to our building and our host’s neighbour who had a key, let us in.  She was a delight and very helpful despite having only one or two words of English. 

We have found the apartment to be wonderful.  We had a lovely pizza  from just around the corner for dinner along with a bottle of local wine which we got from one of the few  remaining shops that were open.