Keeping the family connection alive, I went with them into Switzerland where they share their time between Lausanne and their chalet at Commeire, a collection of small former farmhouses in the Alps near the Italian border. A heatwave had struck Europe with temperatures ramping up to the high thirties for the best part of a week. Everyone was wigging out and seemingly permanently on the verge of collapse. I could have been more sympathetic, I suppose but this fell like a normal Sydney summer to me…a bit uncomfortable but somehow familiar.
Obeying an internalised drive to Keep Doing Things despite the weather, on a recommendation visited an intriguing project in suburban Geneva. The Renaturation of the River Aire is a project which had an ecological ambition to remove a concrete drainage canal and restore the original river’s alignment. The winning competition entry instead kept much of the canal infrastructure as a park and immediately adjacent, through an ingenious arrangement of earthworks and grading, created an area which would continue to be shaped and eroded into a new watercourse. The park was extremely popular (at least until the heat ramped up) and in a remarkable coincidence it turned out that my cousin’s sister-in-law lived about 25m from the canal. I got an insider’s view of not only the way the project had changed the area (mostly positive with a few gripes about noise) but also more of the story about the political wrangling that drove it forward.. Despite its benefits for the environment it needed a bunch of manoeuvring to propel it through local and federal politics, questions about land ownership etc. Seems like these are universal problems.
Renaturation of the River Aire
The temperature in the mountains was about 15 degrees less so we headed up there for supposed relief. But all it did was change the form of torture from climatic to culinary. There’s a strong tradition of ‘apero’ in the village, with whoever happens to be around coalescing through some unknown magnetic force to share wine, food, wine and more wine before everyone goes their own way for dinner to eat and drink some more. Very pleasant, but somehow turns into a headache the following morning.
Chalets in Commeire
The heat at lower altitudes continued so it seemed logical to shimmy up to the Col du Grand St-Bernard, the mountain pass eked out duringthe Roman era and now named after the Monk who established a hospice to assist stranded travellers in the 11th century. As impressive as the history of the location is, it’s impossible for it to outdo the physical beauty of the landscape, at once both rugged and delicate, with alpine wildflowers emerging from melting snow as it coalesced into rushing cascades between impossibly angler steep peaks.
On the Col du Grand St Bernard
The Zollverein in Essen, a former steelworks