Lausanne

Approximately three-quarters of Switzerland is mountainous, so at first it might not seem the most appropriate country in the world to tackle on a pushbike. Mountains do, however, tend to go hand-in-hand with rather more traversable valleys and lakes, and it was the latter that interested me most in terms of cycling, as last time I had checked, water didn’t generally slope upwards.

I set my sights on the next major Swiss city eastwards, the French-speaking Lausanne, which lay further along the shore of Lake Geneva, a hefty forty miles away. I set off nice and early along the road out of Geneva on what was a cold but fresh and sunny day, with a row of waterfront houses separating me from the shore occasionally offering tantalising glimpses of the sparkling blue body of water.

The first fifteen miles of the ride went by effortlessly in my dedicated cycle lane, and I celebrated my progress by turning down a side street towards the shore to rest on a lakeside bench, eat my curry sarnies and rehydrate. The water was incredibly clear as it lapped gently by my feet. I watched a chap wander down to his moored boat and play with it for a bit. He seemed awfully content. I could see why.

Back on the bike, an unexpected and most unwelcome couple of climbs had me labouring, and my stops became increasingly frequent. As a respite from the busy road and its gradients, I peeled off to follow a national cycle route signposted Lausanne. Initially, this hugged the lake, but pretty soon took me literally around the houses, passing through numerous residential districts and then across farmland. Any other time I would have appreciated the little tour of provincial Switzerland, but with my TwatNav telling me there were still ten miles to go to my goal and with me wheezing like an asthmatic Darth Vader I just wanted to get there as quickly as possible, with a view to sleeping for several days.

As I approached Lausanne I hit the metaphorical Wall, a mental and physical boundary which had me leave the saddle to push Ron by the handlebars through the city’s outskirts, through the park with its Roman remains and finally into what I thought was the centre. Alas, no. In a cruel case of city planning which will make me forever hate Lausanne and each and every one of its occupants, the centre was not around by the lake but up a long hill at a ridiculous gradient. I crawled up it at a grandmother’s pace, my leg muscles taking it in turns to seize and complain, and finally reached my chosen hostel not far from the train station.

Since experiencing the international feel of Geneva, my strict policy of only using the local language had relaxed a little. I started to check-in in French, but quickly lapsed into English. The girl on reception was having none of it - though by the friendly grin on her face in a playful rather than offended way - and kept on speaking in French about complicated things such as door codes and lockers. I nodded sagely, headed to my room, and then asked the Parisian chap that had just checked in previously to tell me what the hell she had been on about.

After a few hours of kip I found that my legs thankfully still worked, although sitting on hard chairs was still a definite no-no. I wandered out up past the station and staggered up the shopping district, which was another insane gradient of a street. Must have been great to sledge down when the snow came, I thought.

Lausanne felt like a more genuine city than Geneva, but that was mainly due to its authentically unattractive and haphazard city planning. With neither a great deal going on, nor any decent English language films showing at the pictures, I decided on an early night to repair my broken body ahead of my journey tomorrow into German-speaking territory - for the first time on this trip.

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