Last summer, Anita cycled around Switzerland. It was a beautiful route with some tough challenges along the way. Read her account here, along with some helpful tips.
Every so often, we’re ready for an active vacation—to be somewhere else and spend the whole day outdoors, exploring the countryside. And then, at the end of each day, to feel tired but satisfied from the exertion and the day’s experiences. I enjoy looking at maps, reading up on places, or hearing from friends—there are so many route options in Europe.
Since we’d gone hiking a few times last year, we wanted to go on another cycling vacation this summer. I think the big advantage of cycling over hiking is that you can cover an entire country or region—you can really cover some distance.
I wanted to go to a landscape that was really different from home. To the mountains, the Alps. And then a round-trip train ticket to get off to a good start right away. From previous bike-and-train trips, I’ve learned that you make things much easier for yourself if you first check carefully which routes have a direct train. If you do it the other way around—choosing a random destination and getting there with several transfers—the trip often becomes very demanding and also quite stressful with all that switching trains.
Fortunately, more and more long-distance trains have been added in recent years. That’s why we chose the NightJet, a direct sleeper train from Amsterdam to Basel and Zurich. If you’re not bringing a bike, you can simply book this online. You can’t do that with a bike (yet), so we handled that at the international ticket counter at Amsterdam Central Station.
There are tons of apps and plenty of route guides. Personally, I prefer old-school route guides, such as the Bikeline series. Recently, I came across a guidebook from the publisher Recreatief Fietsen titled “Cycling Through Switzerland: A Round Trip Along Rivers and Through Mountains.” It has the same oblong format as the Bikeline guidebooks from De Zwerver: Switzerland Travel Guides. For a previous trip, we’d already made a map holder where you can slide in the maps from the guidebook; we usually used 2 to 4 maps per day. As a backup, I had loaded a GPX file of the entire route into my Topo-GPS app, which came in handy when we were unsure of the way. That way, I could quickly check to make sure we weren’t cycling up the wrong mountain pass. But otherwise, I prefer not to be dependent on a screen while on the road.
The route described in the booklet consisted of three Swiss national cycling routes, which were linked together to form a large loop running largely along Switzerland’s external borders: the Rhine Route, the Rhône Route, and the Jura Route. Along the way, we also passed through Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and France, and skirted Italy. Just like the LAW cycling routes in the Netherlands, these Swiss routes were clearly marked throughout the countryside. So in practice, we mainly followed these Swiss route signs; I kept track of our daily progress on the maps attached to the handlebars, and occasionally checked the GPS to see whether we should turn left or right at an unclear junction.
We had given ourselves four weeks for this route. In the end, we cycled for three weeks, covering about 50 kilometers a day, and on our rest days we still had plenty of time to explore our destination or just relax with a book. So we had seven “rest days,” and as we neared the end, we took more and more of them—which worked out well. I noticed that I was getting more and more into the travel mindset, and it was also nice in the Jura to have a rest day after every day of cycling uphill. The guidebook also recommended this route—clockwise—so that by the time you reach the Rhine and Rhône, you’ll be well-trained enough to tackle the Jura.
We started and ended in Basel, but you can start anywhere along this loop, or even switch to a different national route along the way. So we first followed the Rhine Route, which was fairly flat for a long time and wound back and forth along the German-Swiss border, passing through old towns such as Schaffhausen, Stein am Rhein, and Konstanz. After that, you ride along the shores of Lake Constance, a huge lake in the upper reaches of the Rhine.
After Lake Constance, you’ll see the Alps looming in the distance, and once you pass Liechtenstein, the real climb begins. Eventually, you’ll climb a high pass at 2,000 meters, the Oberalp Pass. Then you’ll hurtle downhill and immediately start climbing again toward the Furka Pass, which is nearly 2,500 meters high. There, next to the Rhône Glacier, the Rhône Route begins. First, a steep descent with many hairpin turns and stunning views, followed by days of gradual descent through the Rhône Valley, past towns like Brig, Sion, and Martigny, and then on to thesecond major lake along the way, Lake Geneva, also known as Lac Léman.
Montreux and Lausanne lie along the shores of that lake, and somewhere before Geneva, you suddenly turn right and head back uphill toward the Jura. Strangely enough, the Jura was much harder to cycle through than the Alps, because there are constant steep climbs of a few hundred meters, rather than one big pass that you can spend a week mentally and physically preparing for.
We camped almost everywhere. I really liked the Swiss campgrounds; there are plenty of them, and they’re comfortable and usually in beautiful locations. At the very first campground near Rheinfelden, we saw lots of other cyclists and got some tips; one important one was to always wear a bike helmet, which I wasn’t really used to doing myself.
But you’re constantly going up and down at varying speeds, and although the route was mostly on bike paths or quiet country roads, you’d sometimes find yourself on a stretch of road with fast-moving traffic out of the blue; all in all, it was much safer with a helmet. A few times we didn’t camp but stayed in other accommodations instead.
Around the mountain passes, we were actually a bit worried about the thunderstorms that occur almost daily there in the summer, so we booked a hostel in Disentis (before the Oberalp Pass) and in Hospental (between the two passes). And in the final stretch of the Jura, there were almost no campgrounds left, so we found an ecolodge in St. Ursanne and a hotel in Kleinlutzel.
When going on a bike trip, it’s always a bit of a question how challenging it will be—or whether it will still feel like a vacation. Of course, that depends a lot on factors like your own fitness level and the weather along the way. But you can also influence it yourself by choosing the right mix of route, duration, and pace. I know there are cyclists who ride 100 to 200 km a day and enjoy it. Personally, I like to read one or two books a week in addition to cycling and have time to explore places along the way.
What’s really great about this route is that you travel all across Switzerland and see so many different landscapes and historic towns. And that you spend a long time in the German-speaking region at first and then move into the French-speaking region later on. And because it’s a loop, you really feel like you’ve accomplished something wonderful. And, as the subtitle of our route guide said, you’ll take a very scenic—and at times rugged—journey along rivers and through mountains.
I think going on hikes is one of the most wonderful things you can do in life—whether on foot or by bike, for a few days or sometimes a few months. I’ve always read lots of books with travel stories and let my imagination carry me away on other people’s adventures. In the same way, I hope my stories will inspire others to get out into nature. Have a great trip!
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