We got up the next morning, got ready for breakfast, with a warm soup etc.. and moved our stuff to the bike. We were still very confused how to balance the load on the Monster as it was the bike fitted with the most carrying space, however the bike was overloaded and thus difficult to maneuver. The confusion led to a long intense discussion till we shrugged it off having made our points to each other and adjusted everything in the best possible way. The altitude and fresh air seems to be taking its toll, being from Delhi, we being not used to clean oxygen I guess!
Packed and ready to go, we started from the hotel at 11:15 AM and stopped every 250 meters for the next kilometer to take pictures and video of of our descent. We had booked a hotel 610 kilometers away (Hotel St. Nicholas – Near Mont Blanc) and it was to be a long ride. Similar to our ascent, we descended 35 hairpin bends on steep slopes to hit the plains.
We rode along narrow village lanes till we hit straight roads (not expressway) and passed through many a tunnels from a few hundred meters long to some of which going on for Kilometers.
We reached the town of Tirano at 12:35. Tirano is in Lombadia – a wine growing region. This year for me seems to be a trip to the best wine growing regions of the world. In March this year, I rode through California’s Napa and Sonoma Valley, Later in April, I drove through Bordeaux – one of France’s best wine growing region and now through Italy’s Lombardy.. Folks, it is turning out to be a wine tread for me.
After Tirano, we were passing through Cosio Valtellino where Sunny spotted a Canon shop and we stopped to buy memory cards and some other Camera’s stuff that we thought we were short of – but they did not have any of the things we wanted to buy. This store is family run and Mr. Magoni was so happy to see the Ducati’s that he started chatting us up. When he found out about our trip, he mentioned that his son is a fan of Ducati. He went inside and got us a lot of Ducati picture post cards that were made in his store.
His son, Andrea is a biker too and suggested a very picturesque route to us from there to Mont Blanc. We sat together on his PC and googled the route which he printed for us. It was still 400 + Kilometers away and we were not sure if we will be able to make it but we decided to give it a try. As we stepped out, we saw that the neighboring shop was a Chinese restaurant and we decided to take this opportunity to have a quick Chinese lunch (this time, for the first time in the trip at proper lunch time). The meal was delectable.
It was already 3:15 PM and we had fed our new route into the GPS so we set off. Just a couple of kilometers down, we could not find the road that the GPS was asking us to take and so we went back and forth to see if the damn thing would recalculate something. This Tom Tom device seems to be crap, at quite a few places it misleads us and makes us take wrong turns. xBhpians, even the GPS maps of a European country seem to be offtrack! After a lot of going down the wrong alley’s, we stopped in an Italian village and re-programmed the device and started off again. The route took us from Chiavenna in Sondrio which to what turned out to be another ascent on wild twisting roads. We went on this time not knowing where we were and soon landed up at another huge pristine lake with blue / green water. We promptly stopped and had a photo session.
We had stopped just before this lake, high up in the mountains – without knowing that it existed. It 4:50 PM and we realized that we will not be able to get to Mont Blanc in time. We had also been riding am to pm since the 28th and so decided to cancel the room reservation at Hotel St. Nicholas. At this altitude there was still signal in my mobile (sunny had exhausted the credit in his) and the reservation had to be cancelled before 6 PM to avoid a charge.
As soon as we mounted and rode 50 meters, Lake Montespluga lake appeared and so we stopped again twice for a photo shoot. We want to serve a visual treat to our friends in xBhp and do not want to leave any opportunity for the same.
After the photo shoot, we then crossed the village of Montespluga we started our descent and another photo shoot later, we crossed the Italian border into SWITZERLAND!!! We had taken a narrow offbeat path to reach here and boy, aren’t we glad we did it.
Sunny wanted to stop into the no man’s land between Italy and Switzerland to take pictures of the beautiful road winding down into the horizon from where we were but I persuaded him to desist from doing so as we were yet to cross the Swiss check post. A few hundred meters of Descent and we were at Swiss customs cum border control. We were duly stopped and our papers examined. the Cowl of my Streetfighter dutifully popped open at first try as I tried to fish out the bike’s registration papers that the Swiss border guards wanted to examine!!!! Grrrr —- it had given me so much trouble and had made me leave the panniers on the bike and carry all my underwear and other wares to the hotel rooms in hand!! After a thorough check, and general discussion about Laxmi Mittal who these border guards seemed to have frisked too (We are now that much closer to Laxmi Mittal since we were examined by the same border guards – I suddenly remembered the theory of 6 degrees of separation) and about Delhi and Taj Mahal in Agra where one of the guard had been and a lot of kisses and hugs later, we started our descent into Switzerland.
As we moved in, we realized that we did not have the pass to ride on the swiss motorway’s. One of the guards at the border had offered to make us buy a sticker each at 45 Swiss Francs each but we thought we could avoid the expressway’s and ride along on side roads. Sunny programmed the GPS accordingly but it turned out that the GPS kept making us ride on the service road besides the expressway and we kept zig-zagging under the expressway to both sides!! we were slow and no way in hell we were to reach anywhere if we continued like that. We stopped at a petrol pump at Solugen and duly armed our bikes with the coveted stickers and having rehydrated ourselves, set off again turning left.
Something about Switzerland – As we entered this country, the beauty of this place struck us. The cleanliness was awesome and it was as if, when the Swiss sleep, someone gets busy with a giant machine cleaning the whole country up, not just the roads and the pavements and the houses etc.. but also the mountains, the trees, the leaves and the rivers and the snow !!! 
Well we rode along the swiss motorways setting course towards San Bernardino for about a 100+ kilometers and took the road towards a place called Glunngen. It was still 70 kilometers away and the road was narrow and winding climbing into the mountains. We realized that we would not be able to reach before nightfall so at a place called Ronco, we decided to stop. It was 8 PM already. We saw a sign with a hotel and went there but this beautiful hotel in a small village of a few hundred people, perched on a hill overlooking a mountain stream flowing in full majesty had no vacancy. The people at this hotel suggested that we go back 11 kilometers to the village of Airolo which was bigger than Ronco and would have more hotels and thus possibility of getting rooms. We retraced our steps and the first two hotels on the main street of Airolo were full too. We went higher up into the village and the third hotel was also full but the lady in the reception found us rooms in a Hotel Motto which was anyways the last option left. As we stepped out, we saw a beautiful sunset.
At 9:30 PM we checked in and I watched the soccer match between Ghana and Uruguay sitting outside the hotel overlooking the courtyard where a village volley ball being played. It was festive atmosphere and it seemed that the entire village had gathered in a small square and was making merry, playing, singing, dancing, eating an Argentinian meal and watching the match on a large TV screen. With these memories, I decided go to call it a day and go to sleep.
