The Good, The Bad, and the Chilly

Location:
Switzerland

Motorcycle, Swiss Alps, Extreme Cold

By Shaan Kirpalani

So there we were, me and the motorcycle, on the side of the road, a few kilometers south of the Grimsel Pass in the Swiss Alps at 2700 meters above seal level. It was almost June, and it was snowing. The motorcycle appeared to be ok, but I was a little uncomfortable there at the side of the road, shivering uncontrollably in my underwear as I tore through my backpack, putting on every article of clothing I had: four pairs of underwear, four t-shirts, and a pair of swim trunks. These articles all went on my person in record time. First, underneath my jeans which had icicles on them–thanks largely to the freezing rain I drove through 1000 feet in altitude earlier. Then, underneath my soaked leather jacket which had acquired a peculiar wet-dog-dead-cow odor. As I struggled to get my head back into my helmet, normally a pretty straightforward endeavor now made incredibly difficult by the fourth of my four t-shirts wrapped around my head, I thought to myself, “I’m on vacation.” As I lazily accelerated back onto the road, I then screamed “I’m on vacation!!” and would, for the next three hours, chant this along with a variety of other obscenities to keep my mind off the fact that I could no longer feel my feet.

I didn’t want to be there. I’m not brave. I felt ripped off, I wanted open road, alpine vistas, and bugs in my teeth. Instead I was drafted into my new post as an explorer into the frontier of “Gloomy Inescapability of Unnecessarily Prolonged Levels of Incredible Bodily Discomfort Land.” I wanted a good experience, and was getting a bad one. Instead of putting clothes on to stay warm, I wished I was taking them off. Rather than wrapping that damn t shirt around my head and having it keep falling into my face every five minutes for the next three hours, I wanted to be dunking my head into one of the many alpine lakes I passed because it was so hot outside. Rather than those alpine lakes being partially covered in ice, I wanted them to be teeming with 21 year old Swiss girls, who, like me, were so hot after being stuck on the bus on their way back from their swimsuit competition in Italy, they just had to stop and go for a swim*

*Being hot “like me,” not coming back from a swimsuit competition, “like me.”

Rather than stopping at every ski hut I came across up there in early summer and shivering my way into the restrooms to thaw out my purple, stiff hands under the hand dryers, I wanted to roll into those ski huts, dried out, red-necked, and thirsty. Rather than going to the cafeteria to drink yet another cup of coffee, and cursing, in my head, “I hate Switzerland, and Swiss people, and I hate how warm they are–their stoopid warm cars with their stoopid heaters, and their stoopid maps, which they can read better than me, and their stoopid weather forecasts, which they paid attention to before they drove up into the mountains and decided to take their stoopid Swiss cars instead of their stoopid Swiss motorcycles,” I wanted instead to be sipping on a cold beer and remarking with my new Swiss friends at just how wonderful life is and how lucky we were to be up here, shirtless on a sundeck at the top of the world, remarking, “Hey, I think I can see all the way to Italy from here!” and, “This round is on me guys. Nope, sorry, Helmut, I can’t stay and sing another song for your guys, gotta keep movin’!” Rather than putting on my wet gloves, and lazily accelerating back into the cold through first gear into second, I wanted to be putting on my sunglasses and slamming my bike into first gear, then leaning hard into a tight turn accelerating through second, back into the sun.

Then, the bad is over. And instead of wanting to be enjoying the moment, I am. The stormy alpine pass is behind me, the sun is again on my face, and my clothes again become dry with each kilometer of my late afternoon descent into the warm air of the Aare river valley-a vista so beautiful, so electrified by its contrast to my earlier ascent into the mountains, that as I sit shirtless in the sun, almost at the top of the world, on a little green hill off the motorway, sipping a beer, waiting for my socks to dry off, I smile, wishing I had someone to share it with, and learn, again, that the good and the bad will always have a mountain between them, and if you’re lucky, it’s a mountain in Switzerland.

Further Information

Travel tips: Remember, its the mountains, and although it may be summer, weather changes fast in alpine environments

Must see/do at this place: The views, weather permitting, are amazing.

You should avoid here: Snow, motorcycles. The combination of those two, specifically.