Boundless Horizons

Day 5 – Travel from Zermatt to Strasbourg

As I mentioned yesterday, today we’re travelling to Strasbourg, with changes at Visp and Basel. Our original train was the 9:37 from Zermatt, arriving in Visp 10:46, and giving us 11 minutes until the 10:57 Visp to Basel. Everything that I’d read suggested that connection was plenty of time… until flooding meant that we could only take the train from Zermatt to Tasch, and would need to take a replacement bus from Tasch to Visp. Although the replacement bus was really efficient on the way up, we opted to set off an hour earlier on the 8:37am train. I really didn’t want to miss either of our connections and have to work out which alternative routes our tickets were valid on!

We headed down to check out, and arranged for a little electric taxi to the station. We had one last breakfast in Zermatt to set us up for our travels, and then we were off! The train to Tasch departed on time, and the bus was waiting across from the station to take us to Visp. This was a regular coach with luggage storage underneath, and departed quickly. We were in Visp by 9:45am, with lots of time to wait for the connection. I left Rhys with the luggage while I went to the supermarket to grab supplies for the next leg of our journey.

Our next train was the 10:57 from Visp, arriving in Basel at 13:01. We once again grabbed seats on the upper level. The journey through Interlaken had more amazing views of mountains and Thunersee. I spent the entire journey looking out of the window taking it all in. Our stop in Bern was interesting as the train pulled into the station, then I guess the driver changed ends because we headed back out the way we came in, essentially using the city to do a three-point-turn. We arrived in Basel on schedule… only to find the doors in our carriage didn’t work. Fortunately we had 20 minutes until our connecting train, but a couple of women near us only had a few minutes to get to their next train! This was really frustrating, as we had to drag our luggage into the next carriage to get off.

I’d looked up the route through Basel station in advance because our platforms were nowhere near each other – we arrived at platform 11 and departed from platform 31. Our train left Basel on time at 13:21 and arrived in Strasbourg at 14:39. This was a regional TER train rather than the IC services we’d had on our other journeys. It definitely felt older and a little shabbier than the other trains, but the seats were comfortable. The views were less interesting on this journey, as we headed north through the countryside. The otherwise peaceful journey was somewhat interrupted by an older couple arguing with the ticket inspector. My French isn’t good enough to catch what they were saying, but Google Translate’s live translation feature came in handy by transcribing it for me! Their tickets weren’t valid for this train, but they’d missed their original connection. Exactly the scenario that we set off early to avoid!

As with Geneva, we booked a hotel across from the train station to make it easy to drop off luggage. And I was really glad we didn’t have far to go because it was 30°C and super humid! Our hotel was Ibis Strasbourg Centre Gare, and we booked one of their superior rooms as it was only a few Euros more. Importantly, the hotel had air conditioning! The room was bigger than a standard room, and also had a little Juliet balcony with a view of the train station. The room was comfortable and I’d definitely stay there again.

Something we really like to do in a new place is to take a boat tour to see more of the city. The Batorama has regular departures through the day, and they operate both covered and uncovered boats. We’d considered booking in advance but decided to wait in case of travel problems, so while we were in the hotel room we pulled up the web page. The weather forecast said rain was on the way and the tour departing at 6:30pm was going to be a covered boat, so we opted for that. Booking on the website on my phone was easy and they sent an email with our tickets attached as a PDF with a QR code to scan when we boarded.

A 24 hour travel pass covering trams and buses was €4.60 which we bought on the CTS app. The other benefit of staying near the train station is that lots of transport routes pass through there which made getting around easy. We took the tram to Porte de l’Hôpital which was near the boat dock, though the rain started as we were walking over Pont du Corbeau towards the cathedral. We grabbed seats under cover at Café Montmartre and ordered a couple of beers while we waited out the rain.

Once the rain stopped it was time to board our boat tour. We showed the QR code on my phone, picked up some complimentary earphones, and took our seats. The complimentary earphones seemed to be the same as the ones we had on the Hop On Hop Off bus in Barcelona last year, and let us listen to the recorded audio narration. The 20 Centuries of History tour lasted 70 minutes and took us from the dock near the Cathedral, along to La Petite France, around the Grand Île up to the European Parliament, and back to the Cathedral. It was a really relaxing journey, and we were glad we booked a covered boat when the rain came on again!

After the boat tour we decided to find somewhere for dinner, ideally serving tarte flambée. Au Vieux Strasbourg is a traditional Alsatian restaurant near the cathedral which was exactly what we needed. We both opted to go for tarte flambée with onion and bacon, and it was delicious. We stopped at Jeannette et les Cycleux for a cocktail to end the evening, then hopped on the tram back our hotel.

A successful first evening in Strasbourg!