The Wrong Way for a Pizza by Brain Mooney

Author:Brain Mooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
ISBN: 978185418816X
Publisher: Thorogood Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

“Take care,” he said. “You look nervous.”

“I am.”

My plan was to cut northwest from Lausanne to the town of L’Isle at the foot of the Jura. But I had been warned by the receptionist at the hotel where I planned to stay that there might not be room for me. The Swiss army was engaged on summer manoeuvres in the Jura – doubtless preparing for a French invasion – and the officers could just requisition the entire hotel. I wondered, if that was the case, whether they would lend me a tent. And so I struck out on the Avenue de Morges, stopping for tea and a croissant at a bar in the suburb of Rennes, the sole European among a crowd of coffee drinking Moroccans. Soon after, in the pretty town of Bussigny, I said a final farewell to the Via Francigena, exchanging its route into France that I had followed in 2010, for the higher tracks over the Jura slightly to the west and aiming for Dijon and Paris rather than Besançon and Rheims.

Getting started entailed a few early uncomfortable kilometres along a busy cantonal road where I was left in no doubt that, going about their daily business in the valley, the Swiss didn’t like strangers walking in the path of their cars. But after crossing the River Venoge I transferred to footpaths and lanes, and, with the rising ground, the country opened out into undulating sweeps of arable fields which, with all their neat echelons of pale gold bales, could have been Wiltshire but for the near stifling heat. The village shop in Gollion provided me with an Emmental sandwich, and the village restaurant profusions of cold tea and a table outside at which to sit for a while. It was only when rather dressy customers arrived – Gollion is within Lausanne’s catchment, and the menu is on the gourmet side – that the yellow rucksack and walking boots began to attract awkward glances.

The afternoon of my last full day in Switzerland was a gentle stroll along narrow deserted roads, sometimes no more than tractor tracks, that led me past large arable farms with red-tiled houses where it was hard to imagine that I was in the same country as the cities of Geneva and Lausanne, let alone one that produced the tough pastorals of Goffried Keller. Occasionally the road would dip, the serene arable slopes separated by sudden wooded dells into which the track would descend before emerging at another expansive headland. I was enjoying the idyll while I could: by now, the Jura were taking shape ahead of me, an unbroken range of shadowy heights that I would have to cross to reach France, and on which I noticed an ominous build-up of cloud.

L’Isle, 26 kilometres from Lausanne, lies at 1,200-odd metres at the end of a local railway line; it is where La Venoge has its source at the foot of the Jura in six different springs that combine to send the young river on its winding journey to Lac Léman.

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