Day 19 – To see or not to see the Walensee
After I left the house of my generous hosts this morning, I went along the Zurichsee. It was a quiet and easy ride with pleasing views of the lake and small villages on both sides. I decided that I already took enough pictures of the Swiss landscape and just cruised on through. That’s until I hit the Walensee, a relatively small lake. The views were astonishing: cliffs coming right out the water and getting lost in the clouds, picturesque villages on the surrounding hills, light green water.
I could not stop taking pictures. Every few hundred meters I would find a better view than before. That significantly slowed me down, but I was only happy to do so.
Approaching Liechtenstein, the second destination on my list of not-yet-seen countries, I rode along of a body of water that looked like a man-made channel. To my surprise, this was the Rhine, the second longest river in Central and Western Europe.
I finally crossed the Rhine and entered the Principality of Liechtenstein, a country with the highest GDP per person in the world and with one of the lowest unemployment rates, at 1.5%. In Vaduz, the capital, there is the Prince’s castle, the Kunstmuseum, the Landtag and… let me think, ah yes, a cathedral of course.
My host Bolaji is a Nigerian studying informatics at the University of Liechtenstein, and who won the SAP DemoJam competition in Barcelona last year. He assured me he is not one of the infamous “Nigerian princes”. Bolaji explained the complexity of the ethnic makeup of Nigeria, with more than 350 ethnic groups with languages that are as different from one another as German and French. He does not have much hope for resolving the differences between those groups, but he is optimistic otherwise. He likes to watch American talk shows. And football, of course. And so do I.
Today in numbers:
106 km – distance covered
4h58m – riding time
19 – days it took me to get to the second country on my never-been list
5 – countries visited so far
