Tag Archives: cycling

Mountain Biking the Lauterbrunnen Valley

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View of the Lauterbrunnen valley on the way to Stechelberg

For CHF 35, you can rent mountain bikes from Balmer’s hostel, which is a decent deal for a full day of biking. (Hint: we were later informed by other travelers that you can go around the corner to rent bikes for just CHF 20.) Armed with a map of the Jungfrau region, the activities guide at Balmer’s suggested biking to Wildersil, through Zweilutschinen to Lauterbrunnen, where we could stop for lunch. From Lauterbrunnen, you can bike to Stechelberg, take the gondola up to Murren, then bike down the mountain back to Lauterbrunnen and Interlaken. The route is mostly gravel, with some short sections of dirt and pavement.

The trek from Interlaken (567 m) to Wildersil is flat and fast, about 15 minutes or so of biking. Once you pass Wildersil though, everything goes rapidly uphill. The toughest ascent of the route is a bit outside of Wildersil. Remember, there is no shame in getting off your bike to walk up the hill, unless your other friend is leaving you in the dust.
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Back Roads of the Italian Countryside, or My Daily Commute

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Note: This post is mostly geared towards UNISG students, so it will be fairly useless to you unless you need to get from Bra to Pollenzo.

Living in Italy, you start to realize that there are always two ways of doing everything, the official system and the back door in-the-know route. Take the process of acquiring a permesso di soggiorno residency permit, required for all non-EU citizens staying in Italy for over 90 days. In Bra, you can either go to the Post Office, pick up an application kit and struggle to figure out what to put down so as to not have your application rejected, or you can go to the Al Elka-L’incontro center for foreign citizens, which provides consulting services and staff who fill out the application for you. Granted, the center is only open for 7 hours a week, on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, but that is different gripe. Ah, Europe.

Similarly, there are many ways to get from my apartment in Bra to UNISG campus in Pollenzo. There is a bus available and one of my flatmates has a car, but I have opted to make use of my bicycle and bike to class daily. This has led to some scary, ahem, entertaining rides to class, since intercity Italian roads strongly favor wide trucks and no shoulders. And so, I set out to find an alternate route to school besides the one suggested by Google Maps, and began exploring the back roads between Bra and Pollenzo. After a week of exploration, I had discovered a number of small dirt-lined roads, some of which were unpaved and lined with gravel (e.g. a bike flat waiting to happen), others which were just as crowded with traffic as my original route. Then Laura, one of my classmates, told me that she had learned the perfect route to get to campus from an undergrad student. Free of traffic and thoroughly paved? I jumped to follow her.
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First Day of School!

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In an effort to uphold my reputation as a crazy cyclist, the first thing I did upon arriving in Bra was to beeline to a second-hand bike shop and pick up a used bike. I am now the proud owner of an old school Atala, decked out with fenders, a bell and a basket. Fast she is not, but for 60 quid I could probably do worse.

The University of Gastronomic Sciences campus is about 6 km away from Bra, which is about the length of my old commute to the Fed. However, biking to class is considerably more difficult/hair-raising than going to the Fed because the route involves riding down a two-lane highway with a very, very steep, winding hill. Unless you are comfortable with biking downhill with lorries whizzing past you on a road with no shoulder, I don’t really recommend biking. As I flew down the hill this morning, I was traveling so quickly that my eyes were watering. To be fair, vehicles are courteous and do try to move to give you enough space, but there’s really not much room for error. Going back is even more hilarious because you now have to tackle going up the hill. Despite my best efforts, the bike slowly ground to a halt about halfway up the hill and I settled with walking the rest of the way up the hill. Perhaps I should have bought a bike with more than one speed.

Potential deathtrap? I thought about wearing a helmet but Valeria, my Italian flatmate, insists that no one aside from kids wear helmets in Italy. Also, it would ruin my hair.

The UNISG campus in Pollenzo is housed in the refurbished Agenzia di Pollenzo, built in 1833 for Carlo Alberto di Savoia, king of Piedmont-Sardinia at the time. As such, it looks like a castle, with turrets and an inner courtyard, and a church on the premises. About 4 billion euros were spent in restoring the grounds and modernizing the facilities for university usage, with funds contributed from Slow Food and local Italian governments. Today, the university serves 300+ students, and the grounds include a Michelin-starred restaurant (Guido), an upscale hotel, and Italy’s only wine bank, which carries and preserves wine from every producer in the nation.
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