Lausanne as a good base for Swiss exploring

Tip from Aoife: "Lausanne is a good base for seeing cities like Bern and Fribourg or exploring the wine regions of Vaud and Valais. Valais also has Mont Blanc, Matterhorn and heaps of other big mountain things."

She is right about the base, and worth one correction: Mont Blanc is over the border in France, above Chamonix. The Matterhorn is the Valais one, at the top of the Zermatt valley. Aoife's "heaps of other big mountain things" covers the rest of it accurately enough.

The case for Lausanne is that it is a small city with a big city's connections. Bern is an hour and ten by direct train, Fribourg forty-five minutes, Geneva airport forty. It has the only metro in Switzerland, which matters more than it sounds because the city is built on a hill steep enough to make walking uphill from the lake a genuine decision.

The wine regions are the part people skip and should not. Lavaux starts at the eastern edge of town: eight hundred years of terraced vineyard running down to the water, a UNESCO site since 2007, and a marked footpath through the whole thing from Lutry to Vevey that takes an easy half day. The trains stop at villages along it, so you can walk one stretch and ride back.

Valais is the other direction and the higher one. Same lake, different weather, considerably bigger mountains.

Posted 22 April 2003 by Ant in Switzerland, Eurail Blog Archives, BootsnAll Travel Community · updated by Chris