Vacuuming up Vaduz
The Guinness
In the capital Vaduz we checked out the Old Castle bar, having been told at the youth hostel we were staying, it may serve Guinness, but it was a Murphy’s outlet – easy mistake. With no pub serving Guinness in sight I was pleased to find some cans on sale in the small co-op supermarket. We therefore had afternoon tea on a bench outside and a picture of me drinking a can of Guinness was snapped looking rather pensive, concerned that there may be a public drinking ban in Vaduz.
Having a can of Guinness in central Vaduz
When we walked back to the hostel my son Gareth suddenly said “Look Dad, a Guinness sign”. Sure enough, there in the middle of Schaan, no more than a village to be honest, was Central Bar with a Guinness sign outside. I popped in to check it wasn’t a mirage but no, it was true, they had draught Guinness on tap.
Well spotted son
After tea of wraps and toasties I took my time to explain to the barmaid Veronika the purpose of our visit and the task I was asking her to perform. Fortunately her grasp of English was good so she has a slightly less shocked and suspicious look on her face compared to the other photos I have of people carrying out the same task.
Well done for understanding my challenge Veronika
We took a Ryanair flight to Freidrichshafen, Germany and then train and bus to Liechtenstein. It wasn’t difficult to find the train station at Freidrichshafen airport, spitting distance from the departure hall (with a following wind). The station was no more than a platform with a ticket machine. The German railway company Die Bahn runs an excellent website, not just for Germany but for much of Europe. Before leaving home I was able to type in the name of the bus stop in Liechtenstein that we wanted and instantly get details of a journey lasting less than two hours involving three trains and a bus, going from Germany, through Austria and Switzerland and into Liechtenstein.
High up in the mountains
Getting There and around
The only problem was that I betted on there being a friendly multi-lingual ticket desk attendant at Freidrichschafen airport station rather than a dumb machine. Added to this a violent hailstorm appeared out of nowhere and there was no cover over the platform. It was like being part of a bizarre game show – “you have just three minutes before your train arrives to figure out how to buy tickets in a foreign language from a ticket machine and to make it more difficult for you and to amuse the audience we will pelt you with ice cubes”.
Good stuff this public transport and hard to miss it by the bright colours too
Team Makeup
The family were joining me on this trip as was a new recruit, Penny, another of life’s great optimists.
Margaret & Penny - it will warm up soon, it's only June
Accommodation
We stayed at the Youth Hostel which was between the towns of Vaduz and Schaan, themselves only 2 km apart. It overlooked fields down to the River Rhine and beyond the snow topped mountains of Switzerland.
Our Youth Hostel accommodation
Sightseeing highlights
Vaduz has a number of museums and galleries on offer and we chose the modern Museum of Fine Arts to visit. It’s only a couple of rooms. One room was full of pieces from the Prince of Liechtenstein’s private collection. He specialises in 19th century Viennese Biedermeier art – paintings so real they could almost be photographs. That’s actually the thought process behind them – wealthy people of the time used to hire artists to take with them on vacation or battles to capture important moments. One can see the drive behind inventing the camera – it must have saved lots of time. Battles must have been held up for days as the different sides posed for the latest painting. The battle scenes such as the one of the Austrian Prince defeating of Napoleon were interesting in that there was no blood in sight – a sort of sterilised form of photography.
The modern looking museum
We took a bus to Malbun, Liechtenstein’s ski resort. We purchased ‘targeskarte’ – day tickets for the bus. As the bus climbed steeply into the mountains two things happened, snow gradually began to appear in the surrounding countryside and the other passengers disembarked. By the time we got the terminus at Malbun, 1600 meters elevation, we were the only passengers remaining on the bus. The town was deserted, all skiers had evidently gone home and the walkers not yet arrived. It was a late spring throughout Europe and evidently unusual for Malbun to be still deep in snow. On the outskirts of town we saw groups of animals emerging from burrows and leaping though the snow. They turned out to be Alpine Marmots, a beaver-like animal that hibernates in winter and emerges normally in spring to play in flower filled Alpine meadows. Today they looked just a little confused. I poked my head down a drainage pipe I had seen one of them retreat into. Its defence mechanism was to let out a very loud whistle like shriek – not unlike the one I let out a fraction of a second later as I jumped backwards.
In Vaduz one afternoon I slipped off to visit the Stamp Museum dedicated to philately (as opposed to heavy-footed people). It was obvious it wasn’t the height of the tourist season in Liechtenstein – wherever we went we appeared to be the only people present – perfect for travellers who like to think of themselves experiencing something unique.
The giant stamps in the Stamp Museum
Rush hour in Vaduz
Quirky moments
We passed some workman had just finished digging a neat hole and were tidying up by vacuuming up any loose dirt.
I paid about £1 at the tourist office to have my passport stamped with a Liechtenstein stamp – that should confuse American immigration control next time I go there.
My Liechtenstein passport stamp - more a tourist gimmick than an obligation
Lasting Memories
Liechtenstein may be the fourth smallest country in Europe but Vaduz is probably the smallest capital – it’s even smaller than Torshavn in the Faroe Islands. Blink and you miss it. You’d be hard pushed to have a good game of hide-and-seek here. The shops are smart but the cafes paradoxily were unbearably smoke-filled.
Some claim that Vaduz is the most boring in Europe and not a place generally associated with people wanting to satisfy their ‘wanderlust. That may be, but for people like myself, who like the outdoor life, it was very appealing.
Out of the City
The bus service was excellent so making the most of it we went first to Sargans, just over the Swiss boarder. It’s famous for being the home of bovine-loving Heidi. None of us had any wish to go to the Heidi theme park so we chose instead to wander around the town. Up at the castle we bumped into the Liechtenstein football team on their way out of some sort of photo-shoot or civic reception.
An unusual table design in Sargens
After wandering through the ‘old town’ of Sargans we caught a bus, back through the length of Liechtenstein and into Austria to the town of Feldkirch. The Rossle Park café bar not only brewed its own tasty beer and served tasty food but had some very unusual urinals, comprised of a sheet of glass in front of a rock face.
Rossle Park café bar urinals
Food
In Lindau, on our way back to the airport we had time for coffee and cake outside a café in the warm sunshine on the shores of Lake Constance – an excellent end to a very pleasant few days in good company.
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