Crossing the border — David Szmidt
What you’ll actually be doing is traveling to Buchs (SG), which is how it’s written on timetables. (If you see a destination with two letters in brackets after it, this refers to the canton in which the town is located, avoiding confusion over places with the same name). We’ll come to Buchs later.
Here, Liechtenstein is visible over the Rhine, and is accessible either by foot or by public transport. We decided to walk, as the entire point of our trip was to see if we could walk across an entire country in one day. On foot, you basically just get the thrill of walking across a border. After all, you are just on a fairly unattractive main road.
Your best option is to get a one-day bus ticket. This covers Buchs and pretty much the whole of Liechtenstein for €12. Yes, it’s a lot of money for one day but hey, get used to things being expensive.
To be honest, though, we used buses a lot. It’s not a wide country, but it is relatively long, meaning the walk from Schaan to Vaduz, while seemingly not that far, is about an hour.
Walking and hiking in Liechtenstein
As I mentioned, the idea was to walk across the country in one day. This would prove to be ambitious for a number of reasons: weather, terrain, time… the three important things, basically.
We arrived in Buchs at 7 am, dropped our bags off at our Airbnb, and set out to walk to Schaan. On the map, this seemed like a hop, skip and jump over the river, but in reality took around 40 minutes in weather that already looked a touch unfriendly.
After looking for somewhere for breakfast (nope, the only thing on offer was a “gourmet” version of a Spar supermarket), we decided that those mountains weren’t going to climb themselves… but were further away than we thought. In the end, we caught a minibus up to the village of Planken. We were the only people on the bus, and the driver just dropped us off at the trailhead, which was nice of him. Planken was a pretty little place, the clean air and silence disturbed only briefly by a car passing through, blaring Nothing Else Matters from an open window.
The plan was to hike to a hut around five kilometers up the mountainside, and from there to the Austrian border, however once we began, it became clear that things would not be that simple. We knew it would be steep — we know how contour lines work — but it soon became obvious that some sections of hiking trail needed hands as well as feet. Couple this with the fact we were soon above the treeline in thick cloud with little to guide us, and after a while, we decided discretion was the better part of valor and embarked on a loop walk instead. (We would also discover later that the mountaintop hut that had apparently promised lunch wouldn’t even be open for another week, so we dodged a bullet of disappointment there.)
To be fair, once we’d descended back through the clouds, the views were great. Oddly geometric fields, compact villages and distant Alps made the whole thing look like the isometric landscape of an early SimCity game.
Schaan and Vaduz
By the time we descended back into Schaan, it’d started raining and we were very hungry. And oh boy, let me tell you now: if you want to get lunch in Liechtenstein, you’d better turn up on time or not at all. Everywhere was shut. And an awful lot of places were named ‘Wanger’ — car dealerships, bars, independent shops — so as an Englishman with an occasionally childish sense of humor this, at least, amused me.
We got the bus into Vaduz to see what was there. The answer was: a small football stadium, a castle closed for renovations, a small pedestrianized section that could have been Peterborough or Ipswich if either of those places had an appetite for expensive watches, stamps and private equity investments — but little else. The only food recommendation we got from anywhere was a place called the New Castle which, on inspection, was both empty and pricey (even by Vaduz standards).
It was raining quite hard now and we’d been traipsing around for a good half an hour to find somewhere to just serve us something basic and hearty — schnitzel and potatoes would have been perfect — but to no avail. Eventually, we took the bus back to Schaan and had one last stab at finding somewhere. Restaurant Rössle looked decent from its pictures, all wood paneling and ceramic steins, but again, upon entering we found the place deserted aside from one barmaid who seemed genuinely surprised to see us.
She informed us that the chef was there for one hour every day, so food was impossible. Would we like a drink? No, sorry, we really need something to eat. Was there anywhere else open?
“Hmm… maybe there is one place. It is in Vaduz… the New Castle.” Ah, Christ. Was that really the only option in what basically amounted to the entire country? She looked at us with a combination of amusement and pity: “I’m sorry. It… well, it is Liechtenstein.”
Indeed.
Epilog: Liechtenstein to Switzerland
It’s a poor lookout for anywhere if the most exciting destination for a Friday evening is Switzerland, but it appeared that this was the case. Back in Buchs, we explored the tiny, pretty streets around Werdenberg Castle and its lake, and eventually found ourselves the only patrons in an unpromising-looking bar called Luxor. It was a lot nicer on the inside than the exterior suggested, and was run by a loquacious chap who’d had a beer specially brewed for his pub (which was decent), and who offered a home-made pizza consisting of a cream and cheese topping served on a base made from a giant pretzel (which was not). It was also the second time we’d heard Nothing Else Matters that day, so that was something.
The following day we were leaving, heading to Munich for a couple of days. In the beautiful morning sunshine (typical), we could see our hiking trail clearly on the mountainside. We’d done well to get as far as we did, but had we continued, we’d have encountered snow, which we definitely weren’t prepared for.
That, at least, cheered us up. In a day of achieving nothing at all, the one thing we’d genuinely wanted to achieve would have thwarted us anyway. In hindsight, such abject failure at every turn felt like an achievement in itself. Thanks, Liechtenstein.
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Publish date : 2023-06-13 07:00:00
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