Chiesa de Valmolenco, Italy
The morning had a perfectly clear sky but the weather looked bad for the following day. We had breakfast and started to look for a hotel for the night. Destination of the day was Bernina Pass and latter St Moritz but when we looked on Internet we could not find any hotels with 3-4 beds around St Moritz. However lots of hotels were coming up in Austria, very close to our destination so we book one, Jufa Montafon, close to Feldkirch.
Like everything outside Switzerland the hotel prices in Austria are a fraction, about half, of the hotels in Switzerland. When we asked latter in Austria how can be such a large difference, they just snubbed the Swiss, “they have their country and their own money”…
We could have taken a walk in Chiesa from our hotel but we decided to park in the village for a very short visit. We found such a beautiful Enoteca from where we could not resist to buy some liquor and we left relatively quickly but late toward Bernina Pass. Named also Bernina Strasse, is a road the crosses the mountains from Tirano, Italy to St Moritz. It has also a great train that is listed by UNESCO being the highest non-cogwheel, train the world.
Tirano
In Tirano we took a short walk and bought some food and admiring the train that was going on the town’s streets and latter in the villages on the way, we reached the pass at 2400 meters. A barren landscape welcomed us on top where after the regular pictures we decided that we should do a hike. Here we noticed one of the Swiss obsessions: near one of the cabin, it was a huge PAID parking on top of the mountains. This I noticed in many other places but here it looked so ridiculous because at any time you could park either right near the parking place or anywhere else for free, However the Swiss parked in the paid parking place…
Bernina Pass – Alp Grunn
There were several hikes and we picked in the end one following an alpine lake and going to a chalet restaurant named Alp Grunn. We got more info from other travelers on the way. The Alps are full of hikers, mostly Swiss but also Japanese, Europeans, etc. The path was full and it looked like a very popular route. It was a very pleasant walk following a huge
Alpine lake, dammed at one point on one side and on the other side the train tracks, where occasionally was coming the charmingly red Tirano-St Moritz train.
After about one hour and a quarter we reached Alp Grunn, in an amazing location, overlooking an open valley toward Tirano from where you could see the train coming on 360 curves in order to be able to climb the steep mountain.
Besides the chalet was located right under a steep mountain that had in the middle a large glacier. Magic location! Right under the chalet was the Alp Grunn train station from where trains were passing almost every 20 minutes.
We had a quick lunch admiring all these views crossed by red trains and we took way too many pictures. Time being again too late we rushed to take a train back, for one stop, CH5/person, to Ospizio Bernina, the station right under the Bernina pass. The language spoken in the area is Romansche, a Romanesque dialect, and many sign were displaying words in it but we did not hear anybody speaking it. We stayed too little in the area….
St Moritz
We took the car from our non-paid parking place and we zipped down the mountain to the very glitzy and expensive St Moritz. After Zermatt, Megeve, St Gervais and Chamonix we did expect a very beautiful resort or at least interesting. However the feeling was the opposite. Walking in the center on streets that have mainly new and clean building we found just fashion stores and expensive hotels with no personality. You could have been anywhere in the world and the only thing that gave some sparkle to this boring place were the Alps’ peaks that were shining in the sunset. We drove around after that still thinking that we missed something and we left disappointed like in no other place in this trip. In a way the blandness of St Moritz was good because it was very late and we had to drive to Feldkirch and latter Bartolomeoberg in Austria where the hotel was located. We got out from St Moritz on Julierpass, that is way less interesting than Bernina pass, and we drove on the highway non stop through Chur arriving in Feldkirch around 10 pm. It took a while to find the pedestrian area that was still full of restaurants, but not many serving dinner at that time. Luckily we found one and we got our Wiener schnitzel dinner with Austrian beer and around 11 pm, after short walk in the beautiful Feldkirch center we left to Bartolomeoberg, about 13 km away. We found the hotel that turned to be a modern construction highly used for kids summer camps. The rooms’ modular furniture, with two beds but each piece of furniture could accommodate some other bed, up to five that were hinged down making the room very flexible in terms of accommodation.
The lady from the reception was waiting for us, it was 11:30 pm, and right after she gave us the key locked the reception leaving me with no sheets for the bed. In the morning when we asked why it happened they said that they noticed that we wanted a 3-bed room but we listed only two people. Very precise and ….German! In any case we slept very well in the quietude of the village till we were woken up by some guys who started early in the morning to cut the bushes right under our window……
Follow us on Instagram