Monday 5 July 2010
Today the start of our Switzerland adventure. Arcene kindly took us to the boat in Breskens at some ungodly hour making remarks about how crazy we were to carry those heavy packs on our backs. On arrival in Vlissingen it is quite a sprint to get to the train, I think it is quite cruel to leave such a short gap between arrival of boat and departure of train. The train quite conveniently took us directly to Schiphol without too many stops and we were well in time (read: way too early) for our Easyjet flight which was delayed on top of it. Easyjet does this free seating thing which makes for chaotic boarding as most everyone wants a window seat, not that it mattered because it was cloudy most of the way.
In Basel one takes a bus (bus 50) from the airport to the central station and there we sorted out our train tickets and travel plans, turned out that a 50% pass would work out cheapest for us. After that we followed the instructions from the backpackers to get to their place, fortunately not far, and settled in. We got a pleasant surprise when we discovered that the stay at the backpackers entitled us to free rides on the tram so of course we made use of that to make a quick discovery tour of town.
We had a quick peek at the main attraction, the river Rhine, before heading back to our lodgings to make supper and meet some of the other crazies staying there, a very diverse group including Japanese, Ukranians and even Hollanders.
