Just your everyday average Swiss Hay Maker

I’m at the 2012 Adventure Travel World Summit in Lucerne, Switzerland, where hundreds of world’s foremost adventure travel experts have congregated to share insights, make new friends, and drink extreme amounts of beer. (Every morning is also an adventure.)

Before the summit, we were offered a number of day adventures in and around Lucerne. I signed up for something called Crazy Cable Cars. I didn’t know what to expect. This was Switzerland, after all, and Crazy is just not something the Swiss do very well. (They might consider it briefly; but then, after weighing all the options, they would deem it impractical.)

I took the 8:15:34 AM train from Lucerne to the canton of Uri. There I departed the train and followed my guide up a hill. She told me there would be some hiking involved, and I assumed this was it. But no, this was just a “walk up to the hike.”

The Swiss like to keep warm. Either that or they hate trees.

At the top of a well-manicured, precisely engineered, flawlessly executed rural village I came to a shed, or outhouse, where what looked like an apple crate rested. This was the cable car. And it was indeed crazy. It was built by farmers, who live up on mountains like goats. To be a farmer in Switzerland is to be forever trying not to be pulled off of mountains by gravity.

Um, so where’s the real cable car?

Only two people could fit in the “cable car.” What you do is you call up someone at the top of the mountain, who then pulls some handle, at which point you are taken up the steep mountain, with nothing between you and certain death but some old wood and a faded seat cushion.

I pretended I wasn’t scared by talking fast and laughing in a manic high-pitched way for no reason at all. Luckily, it was a rapid ascent, and I was soon able to exit the car. The view from the top was amazing. The Swiss have somehow managed to even train their weather, making sure their clouds hover in such a way as to make the scenery even more majestic.

Most of Switzerland is this ugly.

Once at the top, there was a short, easy hike that was pretty much straight up and not very easy. All of the hiking trails in Switzerland, like everything else in the country, is meticulously marked. (To get lost in this country would take a lot of work.) The trails are color coded according to how challenging they are. Red and white indicates something “easy,” which is what I was on. Blue and white indicates something a “little challenging” which means you would probably almost certainly die.

After about an hour of walking up the rest of the mountain, we came upon a typical Swiss man, walking his dog and cutting hay. He looked like he had just walked out of a postcard.

Just your everyday average Swiss Hay Maker

After saying hello and petting his dog and assuring him that we wouldn’t bother his cows, we walked to a restaurant with commanding views of the valley. There we had a typical several hundred thousand calorie Swiss lunch consisting of pasta, cheese, bacon, fried onions, potatoes, beer, strudel and coffee.

Bloated, half dead, a food coma about to hit any minute, it was time for the second cable car. Compared to the first one, this one looked like a luxury sedan. It even had a roof! It was a steep descent though, and more or less went straight down, as if whoever built it couldn’t be bothered with the laws of gravity.

It’s all downhill from here

The cable car is coin operated, like an old pay phone. You put a coin in at the bottom, push a button, and it either yanks you up the hill or sends you down. It was all I could do not to be thrown against the far side of the car as it made the steep descent. Below, off to my left, there was a spectacular waterfall that cascaded down the cliff to a bottom so far below I never did see it. I would have taken a picture if my hands were not wrapped tightly around a handle that offered some comfort but would do nothing at all in an actual emergency.

Back at the bottom, my food coma was long gone, replaced by the exhilaration that comes at the end of a fight or flight episode – the giddiness of survival. We walked back to the train station just in time to catch the 3:21:42 PM train back to Lucerne. It’s just one of thousands of such adventures this tiny country has to offer.

The Uri Canton has 39 aerial tramways, some of which are not so crazy. For more information, go here.

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