I’ve wanted to go to Lake Como since I was a little kid. Not for all the reasons you might think, the snow-capped alps that plunge into the glass lake, the tiny historic villages tucked into the bottom of the alps, or the fact that it’s located in the heart Italy’s famous lakes district. No, nothing as romantic as that, I’ve wanted to go to Lake Como because I grew up in a place called Como just south of Sydney. I’ve always known that where I grew up was named after a town in Italy. I wanted to know what it was like, wanted to know what would make you name a suburb in Sydney after somewhere in Italy. As luck would have it, Como’s on the boarder between Italy and Switzerland, it was right on our way.

Angela, whose place we’d stayed at in Padova, said if we were going to Lake Como, Bellagio was the place to stay. We arrived at the lake late in the afternoon and followed the narrow roads around the edge of it. It felt like we were back in Amalfi, twisting roads with a drop on the right hand side down to water and cars squeezing past us on the other side. The drop this time though wasn’t as high as the cliff faces in Amalfi, there was at least a chance of survival if Pete misjudged one of the curves. I still couldn’t help holding my breath every time a car went past the other way.

 

We arrived in Bellagio absolutely busting. Public toilets and places to park on the side of the road are a hard thing to find in Italy, this time though we were in luck. We found spaces on the side of the road that you could park in for three euros and an automatic toilet which cost a euro each.

 

The kids were fascinated by the toilet.  You put in your euro and then an automatic door opened. If more than one of you went in the door wouldn’t shut, once the extra person went out the door was happy enough to close. I went into the toilet first because my bladder was so full I was sure I was on the edge of kidney damage. When I’d finished I had a bit of panic looking around for a button to press, but there was nothing. In the end I walked out. As soon as I was out of the cubicle the automatic door sucked shut behind me. It stayed that way for a good one, two minutes while Poppy and Kai were jumping from foot to foot trying not to wet their pants. There were all sorts of noises going on behind the door, water spraying, air sucking. When it finally did open again, the toilet was clean and had flushed itself. Kai said that the toilet must be an elevator that went down to a special cleaning spot and then came back up when it was finished. Poppy said she thought there were goblins or elves working in there, more likely goblins she said, it wasn’t the sort of work elves liked to do. In the end every one managed to get through the automatic door without leaving a puddle on the floor.

 

The place we found to stay was an old three-bedroom apartment just out of Bellagio. The main bedroom window looked out over the lake and at the top of Alps. There was a tiny village below us down on the lake we could see a church steeple at its centre. Everywhere we’d stayed in Italy we’d been able to hear church bells. It was no different in Como, every morning at six the bells woke us up echoing out across the lake and bouncing back at us off the Alps.

 

Bellagio was a three-minute drive from where we were staying. It was a pretty little town set on the side of a hill that reached up away from the lake. It was very similar in feel to both Amalfi and Sienna, cobble stone streets, houses and shops that shared rooves and walls, joining together to make a village which had at its very top, of course, a church.

 

One big difference though was the amount of money that seemed to be in the town. There were shops that I wouldn’t even bother opening the door of and grand hotels closed down for winter. The thing that made us laugh the most though was a huge palm tree, one of those ones with the big fat trunks. It was down on the lakeshore set in the middle of a garden square. The palm tree, like the grand hotel, was also shut down for winter. All the palm fronds had been delicately gathered up into a large material sack to protect it from the winter frosts that had already set in. No doubt when the warmer weather and the tourists retuned that palm would be unwrapped to enjoy the sunshine.

 

The kids were happy with the place we stayed at, there was a big TV that they could watch funniest home videos in Italian, (the Italians love to laugh at cats), a big back yard that stretched up behind us on a steep slope with swings and a slippery dip and ‘all day frost’ which the kids were happy to call snow. But they’d had enough of Italy. It was as if now that we were close to Switzerland they could somehow smell it in the air. It was all they talked about. Jack in particular. ‘What day are we catching the train to Switzerland?’ then, ‘Couldn’t we go a day or two early?’ and, ‘Who’s going to be there to pick us up?’ and of course, ‘How many days after we get there are we going to the snow?’

 

We were staying in Bellagio four days. Pete and I decided in attempt to keep the kids happy we would drive up over the boarder into Switzerland and see if we could find some snow. So on our third morning we drove the van onto the big barge that travels up and down the lake and headed for Colico at the far tip of lake Como. From the barge the Alps towered up over us and we could see all the little villages nestled between the lake and the Alps.

 

We drove off at Colico and headed in the direction of St Moritz. For once the roads were easy to find and the signs easy to follow, I think we only took one wrong turn. St Moritz was further away than we thought. We stopped at The Boomerang café on the way for coffee and hot chocolates. It was right on siesta time, there were Italian men coming in and out all the time, standing at the counter for their glass of wine or tiny concentrated shot of caffeine. Pete had a coffee, one of the weaker kinds with lots of milk in it, latte I think, and the kids all had a hot chocolate, the sort of hot chocolate you have to eat with a spoon and so sweet that there’s no way you’ll be able to sit still in a car for another hour.

 

Once everyone had their shot of caffeine and couldn’t stop jumping we headed back to the car. We hadn’t realised when we stopped that we’d stopped next to a police station. As we walked back to the car, well bounced, four policemen came running out, machine guns slung across their shoulders. They jumped in a police car, slammed their doors and raced off down the hill with their sirens blaring.

 

On the way up the mountain we’d driven past several groups of parked trucks. Each group had about twenty to thirty semi trailers in it. The truckies were out of their cabins, huddled around fires they’d made on the ground and in big old tins. At every group of trucks there were one or two guys directing traffic, slowing the cars that were passing to a crawl. I’d been worried they weren’t going to let us pass at all, but they had.

 

Apparently the truckies were striking over the price of petrol, one euro and ninety cents a litre. It was hard to imagine truckies having the power to change the price of petrol, but then, when I thought about the constant line of trucks on the autostrada, I thought maybe it wasn’t so impossible after all.

 

‘Do you think they’re going to go and break up a camp fire?’ I asked Pete, watching them speed off down the road.

 

‘They’re going to go and break up something that needs some serious holes put in it,’ Pete said, climbing into the van.

 

We didn’t have to drive far before we reached the boarder gates. I was holding onto all six of our passports ready to hand them to Pete when the guard at the gates waved us over to stop. Pete wound down his window. The Italian guy on gate duty walked around the car looked in the back and then came back to the window. He said something to Pete in Italian.

 

‘No capish,’ Pete said, ‘English.’

 

‘Where are you going?’

 

‘Oh, just up to St Moritz.’

 

‘Four children.’

 

Pete nodded, ‘Yep, four.

 

The guy smiled and waved us on not even asking to see our passports. I imagined him laughing and going back to tell his mate who was shut up in the warm box at the gate, ‘Four kids, can you believe it?’ I was beginning to think they all thought we were good practising Catholics.

 

We’d entered Switzerland. The houses were no longer randomly crammed up next to each other, but were more evenly and orderly placed and not every spare piece of land was growing something, there was actually land that had just been left. The most obvious difference though was the roads, they were wider with clear lines marked down the middle and there were places that you could pull off on the side of the road.

 

By this time we were way up in the Alps, you could no longer see the lake down below and it looked like there would be snow just around the next corner. The road was following a wide fast flowing creek; the water was an icy green colour.

 

We found snow way before St Moritz. The kids still on their chocolate high started squealing and bouncing in the back.

 

‘Snow! Snow! It’s everywhere. We can build a snowman and have snow ball fights, and go tobogganing on our bums.’

 

‘Yay!’

 

When the snow started to fall lightly on our car I chickened out, telling Pete I didn’t want to go any further. We didn’t have chains or snow tyres and the last thing I wanted to do was to try and explain in Italian why we had been complete idiots.

 

We found a place to pull over where the kids could get out and play. It was freezing, about zero I think, with flakes as big as my thumbnail floating to the ground. The kids were out as soon as the car stopped, bare hands plunging into the snow, throwing snow balls at each other, giggling their heads off until they realised their fingers were about to fall off. Then they came back and got their jackets and gloves on but had to make do with sneakers and jeans. I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to bring snow boots and pants.

 

My shoes had holes in the bottom of them that I’d discovered walking through puddles in Rome, so there was no way I walking around in the snow. I stayed sitting in the car with the left over heat from the heater, happy to watch the snow silently float to the ground.

 

Pete and the kids disappeared into the forest behind the car. They came back half an hour later, their feet and shins frozen, with stories of hills they’d slid down, frozen creeks they’d found, and a snowman that they’d started to build but had to leave because they were too cold. Nobody complained of how cold their toes were or the fact that their jeans had begun to stick to their shins. They just wanted to know when would be in the snow again.

 

The second last morning in Bellagio Pete woke up with a bad head cold. We needed food for breakfast; if he wasn’t getting out of bed the only way to get it was if I drove the car.

 

The kids were all awake watching some Italian cartoon show.

 

‘Anyone want to come to the shops?’ I asked.

 

‘No.’

 

‘No.’

 

‘No.’

 

From Jack, Noah and Poppy, none of them even looked round.

 

‘You driving mum?’ Noah asked looking up from the TV.

 

‘Yep. You want to come?’

 

‘You sure you want to drive?’

 

‘Yep.’

 

‘I’ll come, just in case,’ Noah said.

 

‘Just in case what?’

 

‘Just in case.’

 

It felt instantly strange getting into the left side of the car and putting the key in the ignition. I kept repeating mum’s mantra in my head, ‘keep yourself in the middle of the road, keep yourself in the middle of the road.’ It took a few goes to find reverse. It was one of those weird gear sticks where you have to pull it up before you push it over, but eventually I found it and then we were off.

 

All was good on the initial turn out of the driveway and on to the road. Noah, sitting in the passenger seat next to me, kept saying, ‘You’re doing well mum, you’re doing well.’

 

Then a car came the other way.

 

I squealed and hit the break bringing us back to about twenty kilometres an hour.

 

‘How much room have I got on your side Noah, how much?’

 

‘You’re fine mum, you can move over a bit this way if you have to.’

 

The car went past us without me scraping it or the wall beside us on the road.

 

Then we turned right.

 

‘You’re on the wrong side of the road mum, you’re on the wrong side of the road mum, you’re on the wrong side of the road mum.’

 

‘Shit, shit, shit.’

 

Noah was laughing as I pulled back onto the right side of the road. I made my breath slow down. Everything was OK, no cars coming the other way, no damage done.

 

Then the van started scrapping up against some vines that were growing on a wall running along the side of the road.

 

‘Mum, there’s concrete under that vine. Mum! Concrete! Mum!’

 

I was about to say ‘I know,’ but I didn’t have to, the sound of metal scrapping on concrete answered for me. So the van was a bit wider than I thought, or perhaps the road narrower? Noah by this stage was laughing so hard that he had to wipe his eyes.

 

Luckily I found a car park that I could drive straight into and reverse out of without too much drama. By the time we got back from our two-minute drive I was shaking so much I had to sit down. Noah though had no hesitation in telling everyone about my driving expertise and said he thought there was a bit missing off the side of the car. Pete, to his credit, didn’t say a word.

 

That afternoon we caught the boat into Como so we could find the train station and book tickets to Basel for the next day. The train station was as difficult to find as it had been in every town except for Rome. We found it after asking three different people. It was tucked up the back of the town on a hill.

 

After making sure we’d memorised the route we’d have to drive to the station the next day we walked back down through the main part of Como, cobble stone roads, churches and old buildings with Christmas lights strung up between them. The lights were just being turned on as the sun was disappearing. At the bottom of the town, down opposite the lake, a Christmas market with an ice skating rink had been set up. There were fairy lights every where and rows of small stalls selling hand made Christmas craft, Santa’s and angels made out of wood and tin, knitted beanies with side flaps that hung down to keep your ears warm, dried sausages, bread and slabs of Christmas sweets, nuts with toffee, nougat and huge circles of choc chip biscuits.

 

The kids wanted to go ice skating but it was going to cost us a hundred euro to get them all on the ice, so the answer was again no. But this time the promise of skating in Switzerland was real for them, they knew the train to Switzerland was only a day away, so they were happy to stand and watch the Italian kids skate whilst munching on the thirty euros worth of Christmas sweets.

 

The next day, Pete dropped me, Noah, Kai and Poppy at the train station with our eight months worth of luggage, then Pete and Jack took the car back. I’d got the easy end of the deal, buying the train tickets and then waiting. Pete had to find where the Euro car depot was and then try and explain why there was a scratch down the right hand side of the car and a bit missing off the trim. When he came back he said the scratch and missing trim had been easy to explain. With his best smile he simply shrugged his shoulders at the woman behind the counter when she asked him if the damage had been there when we hired the car. In the end she signed the piece of paper that said everything was fine. She was also OK with the fact that we were returning the car with only half a tank of petrol. Apparently the truck strike was making it difficult to get petrol in Italy. Amazing how far a nice smile can get you.

 

The train was comfortable with heating and plush seats. The only problem was the lack of room for luggage. All our bags had to stay with us. We managed to get the two smaller bags up onto the racks above our heads, but there was nowhere for the big bags to go. Luckily the train wasn’t crowded so we were able to take up a whole two extra seat spaces with them. The kids weren’t impressed, four hours in a train squashed up next to bags. This, plus the fact that they couldn’t wait to get to Switzerland and see their reles made for a never-ending train ride with the constant question of, ‘Are we nearly there?’

 

I tried to distract them by asking them what they were going to miss about Italy. Noah said he wasn’t going to miss people staring at him, that he wasn’t going to miss feeling like a freak as he walked through the towns.

 

‘But what are you going to miss?’

 

‘Don’t know, can’t wait to get to Switzerland.’

 

Jack said, ‘Pizza, panini, pasta, lasagne. I hate lasagne! Steak, I want steak. I can’t wait to get to Switzerland and have dinner with Sami.’

 

Sami’s Pete’s cousin who’s a butcher.

 

I gave up on distraction after that and looked out the window.

I watched the mess of houses crowded on top of each other and scrappy backyards pass by, then industrial sprawl then more houses. About half an hour in to the trip the train went into a long tunnel which cut through a mountain, when we came out the other side it was as if we’d entered another world. We were in a valley in the Alps and everything was white, the trees, the mountains, even the train tracks, snow must have fallen the night before. You could hear the silence of the outside world as our train glided through. The kids sat staring with their faces stuck to the window. We had entered Switzerland.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.