Locarno Part 1

Locarno is located in southern Switzerland, on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore, just 6 miles from the Italian border. The main language there is Italian. So I had two days there to get used to greeting and listening to everybody in Italian before coming back to Zürich and having to switch back to German again. I keep reverting to English because I can't remember which language to speak to people and English pops out of my mouth before anything else. It will take some getting used to - switching between all the languages spoken around Switzerland. It didn't help that Martin still spoke German to everybody in Locarno while I spoke English and we just ended up confusing everybody.

Here's the view from our hotel room balcony:




Our first night in Locarno we wandered around looking for a place to eat and eventually happened upon a nice Italian restaurant (I'd say 90% of the restaurants in that area are Italian). It had a beautiful outdoor terrace on the 2nd floor in a residential area. Larry/Frankie it was a lot like vino divino's outdoor upstairs area but with dos artistos food. But the prices ... not so nice. The food was delicious but prices for restaurant meals are outrageous. An entree will run you $35 ... and that's for pasta. If you want fish or beef it'll be more like $45. So Friday night was my birthday dinner by default and then Saturday evening we just got pizza for dinner to save some money (a simple dinner of salad, pizza, and a bottle of wine costs $70 though - and that's cheap).

Saturday morning we set off on a hike in the hills of Locarno. See the top of the ridge in the pictures taken from our balcony above? Well that's where Martin wanted to hike to. But we thought about it and realized that maybe that's not the top of the ridge or the highest point we could possibly get to. It turns out that a tram/funnicular runs up to the top of that ridge, and so we took that up, and then continued to hike up about another 2,000 feet to get some really amazing views. I argue that the 360-degree views of the snow-capped Alps we had in Locarno are the best views I've ever had while hiking. I think the views I had while snowboarding in Banff were just as good, possibly better. Martin said he would also rank the views we had in Locarno in his top 3, with Banff and Mt Ranier probably being the other 2.

So, here's the view from our first lookout, about 1,000 feet up on our hike:



Keep in mind that these snow-capped peaks were all around us.




And here's a view of Locarno and Lake Maggiore from our first lookout (so our hotel is somewhere down there):



And some paragliders (there were a lot of them taking off from up here):







If you look closely in a lot of our pictures, you can see some paragliders up in the sky. Sometimes we'd just look up and, bam, there are five right there:



I will post the rest of our hike in Part 2. We took about 150 pictures total over the 48 hours we were in Locarno and Bellinzona. The pictures will be available in their entirety on Facebook and also on Kodak. I will send out links in an email once I put them up.