Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 2001

Saturday 23rd December 2000

So finally we're here. Middle class, middle-aged German voices fill a marble-columned, flower-patterned lounge that was earlier jangling to the anachronistic strains of 'Tequila' on a barrel organ. It's 9.20 and the kids are still up but the wrinklies have gone to bed. It's been a long day.

It began for me at 4.15 a.m. and a taxi ride through a dark, foggy, unusually-peaceful east London to City Airport. When I got there, the doors were still shut and the day shift were only just beginning to arrive for their daily duties. I fiddled with my mobile and sent a text message to while away the 30 minutes until Mum and Graham were due to appear. They arrived spot on time, as I knew they would, but a harassed airline employee, who could clearly see what was coming, informed us that our plane was currently at Stansted as City had been closed last night due to fog. At this news, a lacquered woman in fox fur with a Whistles carrier bag started to whine about her connection in Zurich and the rest of us tramped off to the awakening coffee bar to get some breakfast and wait for the coach to take us to Stansted. It finally arrived at 7.30 and I slept through a lightening sky as we trundled north in an unheated bus to our plane.

Once at Stansted, Furry Whistles was still moaning about her missed flight but hadn't succeeded at securing a place on an earlier flight despite spending next to an hour haranguing the Crossair staff at City. We finally got off the ground at 10 a.m., three hours later than scheduled in an MD-83 after our Jumbolino had been grounded. I was disappointed at not going in the Jumbolino because it has such a great name but the MD-83 is an 'executive jet' with big, squashy leather seats and lots of legroom. It also flies faster so we were only about one and a half hours behind schedule when we landed at Zurich.

A pell-mell rush through the airport, including my running up a down escalator to retrieve Mother, got us to the 13:30 train to Lucerne. It was smooth and plush and we glided into the station about an hour later. Another train swap with 25 mins to buy lunch and we were on the little, rattly local train up to Engelberg. It started off creeping through intermediate towns and villages along Lake Lucerne which was tranquil and misty, then headed inland and upward. almost like a funicular, it clawed slowly but tenaciously up through frosted evergreens on steep, snow-powdered peaks to the town.

Mum had picked Engelberg because it is 'ethnically Swiss'. It's certainly off the beaten track when it comes to skiing although it apparently has some of the best pistes in Switzerland. The proprietors of the Edelweiss Hotel are a cheery German Swiss couple, the wife coming to meet us and a few others at the station.

After settling into our pleasant and functional rooms, we took a stroll round Engelberg itself which basically consists of a couple of streets, one pedestrianised, of nice boutiques selling thick woolly jumpers, ski gear and Swiss souvenirs along with hair salons, pharmacies and a supermarket for the permanent residents. It's small, cosy, quiet and very Swiss.

The hotel is almost full to the gunwales and is obviously run on the participation principle. They have a programme of music, themed meals and sleigh rides for the week, all on the house, and the atmosphere is one of conviviality and hospitality.

Dinner was four-course and rich though not overwhelming. I think we'll be well fed this week and I'll be struggling to button up my jeans when I get home. I went for a walk into the town centre after dinner to see if Engelberg has any signs of nightlife but it was completely dead. This seems to be a quiet town and not a party town but maybe it's because it's just before Christmas and the place is full of families who want to escape from the drudgery and effort of Christmas at home.

I walked up and down the hill the hotel sits on and explored the main streets but there was nothing doing so I breathed the sub-zero air in deep and looked at the whiteness of a mass of stars in a velvet sky. Orion was almost obscured amongst its smaller, less familiar fellows that melt away in a light-polluted city sky but are clear and plentiful here in this translucent mountain air. It was too cold to stay out more than 45 mins so I came back to the dense and busy ambience of the Edelweiss to find Mum and Graham gone to their room and the bow-tied and tail-coated pianist strolling from the dining-room holding the hand of his little boy.

I'll save the partying for Australia and try to enjoy a family Christmas, even if that family is not entirely my own.

Christmas Eve

After yesterday's travel travails, I slept like a log last night under my thick duvet and in the dense dark of a mountain night. Graham had got up early to go skiing and I met Mum in the dining room at 8.45 for breakfast which was a continental cheese, meat and yoghurt affair. I had an unusually tasty boiled egg as well.

A return trip to the tourist centre in the main street yielded a reasonable walking map so Mum and I bought a few provisions, I checked my email accounts and we made plans for some serious hiking. We headed up a side valley along what was classed officially as a road but was more like a generous path towards a waterfall.

We started off by passing through the cemetery that is adjacent to the Benedictine monastery. The Engelbergers have a refreshing approach to burying their dead. Each headstone is unique - some are carved from wood, others from various stones, some are just unhewn lumps of rock merely inscribed with the name and dates of life and death. There are no mawkish sentiments, Bible quotes or 'fell asleeps' and each grave is decorated with dried flowers, candles, sprigs of pine and cones. I don't know whether this was just for Christmas or not but it gave the impression of being a year-round observance.

The path to the waterfall was flat and weaved its way between pretty wooden chalet-type houses. From the ground floors of a couple came the clanking of bells and mooing of cows being kept in for the winter.

The waterfall itself wasn't overly impressive as it's just a frozen trickle but in full spring snow-melt, it must be quite something as it tumults down sheer cliffs into a rocky stream bed in the valley. We downed tea and hot chocolate in the adjacent restaurant the continued a couple of hundred yards to a cable car which was just getting ready to depart. Mum's claustrophobia got the better of her, however, so we abandoned the idea of going up and picked another trail back down other side of the valley to the town. It turned out to be a closed langlauf trail. There's been very little snow here, certainly not enough for skiing at the level of the town. There are very few birds as well and no sign of mammals either, so the woods have that eerie mid-winter silence about them, only broken by the gentle splashing of the stream that runs along the lower edge of Engelberg.

It was lunchtime when we got back into the town so we sought out a cafe for rosti with fried eggs. They were obviously overburdened at the cafe and we were there for nearly an hour before we got fed but they compensated us with free coffee afterwards.

Graham had had something of a rough morning as he'd developed back problems before even getting on the slopes so hadn't done much skiing. The pistes weren't in a very good condition anyway doe to the lack of snow. According to our hosts, winter comes a month later now than it did 20 years ago and the papers today were saying that 70% of Swiss ski resorts are struggling to make ends meet and may be facing closure. And they say global warming is just a blip in the statistics. I eventually decided against booking skiing/snowboarding lessons and hiring gear, the lack of good snow being one of the main reasons. I'll leave that for another time when I'll have a greater opportunity to learn it properly and get proficient enough to take a proper skiing holiday.

Graham was basically immobile so Mum and I decided to check out the monastery church. The monks were performing vespers(?) when we got there, swinging their smoking handbags, singing in Latin and swishing about in their golden surpluses. The monastery has the largest organ in Switzerland, according to the blurb, and when it struck up it certainly took us all by surprise, lulled into a tranquil state by the melodic chanting as we were. It's a typically sumptuous Catholic-style church but it was attractively decked out in variously-coloured poinsettias ready for services tomorrow. There was also a saint figure in a glass case who was basically a jewel-bedecked skeleton and deeply creepy.

We did a bit of window shopping on the way back to the Edelwiess. I'd already bought a clock in a tack shop earlier in the day in the shape of a mock chalet with a girl on swing in a 'Heidi' costume as the pendulum.

The Edelweiss had laid on a special evening as Christmas Eve is the biggest event at this time of year apart from St Silvester (New Year). We put on our thickest layers and headed out to the hotel garden with flaming torches. We sang 'Jingle Bells' in English then Suzanne read a Christmas story in German. I assumed it was THE Christmas story but after singing a German Christmas song, Peter read the story in English. It was actually a very sweet tale of a match and a candle. The candle doesn't want to be lit because it will burn out and die but the match persuades it to put up its wick for the flame as that way it will truly live by giving heat and light to others. After singing 'Silent Night' in our own languages, we had gluhwein and bitesize ginger cookies before getting ready for Christmas dinner.

Suzanne had changed into an all-white outfit in order to greet us all as we went into dinner and present us with hotel clips for our ski lift passes in the shape of an edelwiess flower. They go to such effort here to make their guests feel welcome and Peter and Suzanne are a source of boundless energy.

Another lovely four-course meal was served to us, including traditional turkey which came as something of a surprise. We finished the evening with port and our presents in true Swiss style and chatted to an English couple who, coincidentally, also hail from Tonbridge. They are big on music here and we have a resident pianist and violinist who struck up after dinner and kept us all entertained with jazz and classical numbers in the cosy, smoky warmth of the lounge.

Christmas Day

So this is Christmas, but it wasn't at all like the traditional British blow-out and veg-in-front-of-the-TV affair that we usually have to endure.

Graham's back was even worse than it was yesterday and Suzanne couldn't do enough to help him get more comfortable. She rang the on-call doctor and arranged and appointment then drove him down to the surgery. He got dosed up with painkillers, anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants then Peter brought him back to the hotel. He was then fitted up with a chaise longue and a bell to call for assistance if needed.

Meanwhile Mum and I walked back down to the sports centre, paid out SFr 12.50, donned hockey skates and took to the ice. We started off outside on freshly-laid, smooth ice on top of a couple of basketball courts. We had the whole rink to ourselves and left V-shaped striations all over the glassy surface. Mum decided she wanted to go inside so we took to the hockey pitch which we again had to ourselves on a newly-machined surface. It was great to have the whole thing to spin and speed around but it lacked atmosphere and their was no music. After a while, a family arrived - Mum, Dad, three young kids with hockey sticks - and it began to feel more like a proper ice rink. More people arrived and after we'd had a break and a drink, there were a dozen or so of us hurtling around the ice. A few teenage boys were practising their hockey moves in a roped-off section at one end and the rest of us went round and round in an anticlockwise circle unless we were feeling particularly maverick and went the other way. Cheesy pop music accompanied our slippings and glidings and I only managed to land on my bum the obligatory once.

Graham had been told by the doctor to walk so we strolled down into the village once we'd changed out of our snow gear at the hotel and had substantial soups and pickled salad in a cafe. We carried on walking down the valley until we reached a man-made lake that supplies much of Engelberg's water. There were a few ducks slumbering around the edges and a rotund dipper bobbed on the rocks at the shore. The skies thickened in the afternoon and the cloud began to descend over the tops. Skiers soon flooded into town from Titlis as the weather closed in. We've been promised 20-30 cm of snow tomorrow morning by Peter but we're not holding our breath.

We had tea in the tourist centre cafe and it was a decent brew for a change. I put milk in mine for the first time instead of lemon. Mum went back to the Edelwiess then and I took Graham along the valley towards Furenalp where Mum and I went yesterday for another short walk.

Back at the hotel we spent the time till dinner reading in the lounge. Dinner was a noisy communal affair. Buffet meals seem to be a Christmas Day tradition in this part of the world and that's what we had tonight - salad followed by a choice of three hot main courses and a vast assortment of calorific puddings. After dinner we chatted to Dave and Mary from Tonbridge (why does it always happen that we meet people from home?) and were then treated to a classical concert by our resident professional musicians. Christian and Fritz, the German violinist and pianist, played Schubert, Dvorak and an especially complex duet by Liszt. They were expert and excellent and played a mournful little encore as well. It was a real treat and was all part of the exceptional Edelwiess package.

I've just looked out of the window and even Peter's promise has been fulfilled - it's snowing!