Swiss Ticino Untour, Spring of 2004
by Vivian Pratt, Dedham, MA
We just returned from a wonderful Ticino vacation. We went the last two weeks in May and found the weather very much like New England - changeable. It was sometimes hot, sometimes cool, sometimes sunny, sometimes rainy. Bring rain gear and light jackets.
Much has been said in other Trip logs so I will try to only add something different.
We stayed in Residenza Motta in the Old Town and were very happy with the apartment. However, the town is larger than I expected and we didn’t see the water unless we went looking for it. If you haven’t signed up for an apartment yet, here are some tradeoffs. Some of the apartments are near the train station and some have water-view balconies. Our apartment was near more good restaurants and the ambiance of the Old Town. It’s still only 10 minutes from the train station and the water to our apartment but you tend to spend more time where you live. Costs. We were warned that Switzerland is very expensive and, in general, it’s true. But we didn’t end up spending a lot of money. For food, we ate breakfast in the apartment and usually made a picnic for lunch. We often had cocktails at the apartment before going to dinner. In the evening we would usually spend around $40 for a nice meal, including a drink and an entrée for each of us. If we added salad or dessert, it would come to around $50. That’s not too bad. But we often ordered pasta and refused to go into a restaurant that had very high prices.
A restaurant not in the Untours guides - Govinda. It’s an Indian/vegetarian restaurant in Locarno on Via Borghese 14. Very good and very reasonable but no liquor and it’s not open very many hours.
If you go into the fancy clothing shops, the prices can be outrageous. But we kept finding bargains. We like to look in second hand shops for clothes and there are also open-air markets with bargains. I found a shop in Bellanzona that was going out of business and bought a very nice (new) Italian leather jacket for about $40!! I also bought a Swiss watch in the Milago supermarket for about $40 after looking at countless very expensive watches in jewelry stores.
Trains and buses and boats. There’s a small train schedule called Ticino that you can pick up in the train station and carry with you. There are individual (multi-colored) bus schedules for each bus line that can also be easily carried.
The complete train and bus schedules in the apartment are huge. We were always going back and forth to Lugano through Bellanzona and found that if we didn’t want to bother checking the schedule, we just showed up at the station and caught the next train, which was always less than ½ hour later. Then in Bellanzona, there was usually a connecting train within a few minutes. In Lugano we twice just randomly got onto the next boat (free with the pass) and ended up taking long boat tours of the lake, very relaxing and beautiful.
As artists, we were impressed with the sculptures everywhere in the towns (follow the sculpture tour on Monte Bre, there’s a brochure with a map). But less impressed with galleries and museums. The big art museum in Lugano was closed so before making a special trip, try to find out if a museum is open.
In general, just follow the advice and suggestions in the Dream Book and you can’t go wrong.