Biel Without Chess

TODAY is a rest day in the Biel Special Corona Amateur Tournament, so at 9.15am I was on a mountain train - Biel/Bienne has two - heading uphill for a morning of walking.

I took the one to Magglingen, which is actually a fully automated funicular. There is no driver, no guard, not even a ticket office - you buy your ticket from a machine.

This cost seven francs - about £6 - and seems a bargain when compared with regular Swiss railways.

The only other passengers were two middle-aged women who, as soon as they had sat down, dutifully donned masks, which are compulsory on all Swiss public transport (but not in supermarkets, despite what reception at my hotel told me).

I stepped out at the top onto a scene that could have been devised by the Swiss Tourist Board: cows grazing on a mountain slope below a small white-washed chapel with a Swiss flag in the foreground.

These were the only cows I saw all day, and it occurred to me later that perhaps they really were placed there by the tourist authorities.

I had chosen to walk the Twannbachschlucht-Weg, partly because although I would not be able to recall how to spell it, I was confident of spotting the name on signposts.

This is a great joy of walking in Switzerland - maps are largely superfluous as routes are usually very well waymarked, with distances given in hours and minutes rather than kilometres.

It was quite lucky that today was the tournament rest day as thunderstorms had passed through the area on the previous three days, producing short but sharp bursts of rain.

Today was forecast, correctly, to be "partly cloudy," which covers a lot of sins but meant no rain and, perhaps more to the point, no lightning, which is just as well as the walk begins at 450 metres above Biel/Bienne, which itself is more than 400 metres above sea level.

At first I walked through woodland that, if not dappled in sunlight, was clear and easy to navigate.

But soon cloud closed in, and for a while I was walking through it before the trail took me higher so that I was above the cloud I had been walking through, but below another layer of cloud above that.

I have often walked through cloud, and often walked above it, but I cannot recall walking above and below cloud at the same time - something I normally only experience on a plane.

The walk promised magnificent views of Lake Biel, but only occasionally did trees and cloud recede simultaneously so that any sort of view was possible.

I continued upwards and eventually reached a plateau of meadows at the same time as the sun broke through the cloud above.

A short diversion confirmed what I already knew - although I was definitely undertaking a mountain walk I was in reality only in the foothills of the Jura mountains.

One thing quite noticeable by its absence was wildlife. Yes, I could hear birds, although not many, and I saw two cats running away while I was more than 100 metres from them, and I saw the occasional dog being walked, but the most exciting creature I spotted was a butterfly, and I have no clue what species it was.

When you take a funicular up a mountain, and then ascend some more on foot, you can be sure there will come a time when you need to descend.

The first hint I got of what was to come was when I rejoined woodland and saw a stream babbling along on my left.

If I had bothered to discover beforehand what Twannbachschlucht-Weg meant in English, I would have found it translates, at least according to Google, as Twannbach gorge path.

Pretty soon I was in an amazingly beautiful and endlessly fascinating gorge that I fear my smartphone photos will not do justice to.

At first there were just hints of the ruggedness ahead.

But soon there were rocks that had been rubbed as smooth as marble by presumably millennia of flowing water.

At times the path had been cut into overhanging rock so that I felt I was walking inside the mountain.

Claustrophobia started to get to me, mildly, and I was pleased to see the path opening up ahead, although I decided maybe claustrophobia was not so bad when I saw a sign warning of falling rocks.

I guess the odds of being hit on the head by a large rock in a gorge are probably no higher than dying of some horrible virus, but the chances must increase, I would have thought, after several days of thunderstorms.
Be that as it may, nothing exciting along those lines occurred, but there was plenty else to see of interest.

All good things come to an end, and eventually I reached the end of the gorge, only to be stung for a two-franc fee (there had been no warning of this at the top).
By now the sun had burnt through almost all of the cloud, giving fine views of the town of Twann and its vineyards - I could see a restaurant from above - and of Lake Biel.

I could easily have stopped for lunch in Twann - the church clock chimed 12 as I walked the main street (the only street, as far as I could tell - the town is squeezed between the lake and the mountains).
Twann has an olde worlde look that I like, but I feared that an expansive lunch would dissuade me from walking back to Biel/Bienne along the side of the lake.

So instead I used a subway to get under the main road and railtracks that run pass Twann and separate it from Lake Biel.
As I headed back to Biel/Bienne, I had cars and trains on my left and the lake, or rather lakeside development, on my right.

Actually the houses were as attractive as the lake - more so, perhaps, only in a different way.
They petered out after a mile or so and I was able to get good views of the lake while admiring the productivity of mini-vineyards too.

By now the sun was getting to me, my shoulders were aching from having too much in my backpack (did I really need to take a book to read, a notebook, a diary and a bunch of tournament flyers?) and my legs were starting to give ominous twinges.
But perhaps I am being unnecessarily melodramatic - I got back to Biel/Bienne in one piece and headed for the old town.
By 2pm I was sat down to a lunch of cheese salad - I ordered sausage and cheese with boiled potatoes, but I could not be bothered to argue (I am not the type of person to cause offence if it can be avoided) - and lashings of lemonade beer.