Day 18 - Paris to Zurich, Milan and Venice

Our train was due to Leave Gare de L'Est at 6.24 a.m. which meant we were up by 5.00 a.m. Breakfast in the hostel wasn't technically available until around 7:30 a.m but the young man who had been on night duty was kind enough to provide with coffee and croissants to set us up for the start of the day. We set off on the Metro to the station which wasn't very far away, close by the Gare du Nord where we had arrived earlier from London. We took four trains this day, the first a TGV Lyria to Zurich via Strasbourg and Basle. The first section runs on a new high speed line where the train runs for the two hours at 200 mph. It then runs quite quickly on regular tracks until it reaches Zurich.

TGV Lyria at Zurich Station

We had enough connect time for lunch in a pleasant station restaurant. Next train was the Cisalpino to Milan. This train tilts around the curves and is used on this route because in passing through the mountains and valleys it can travel faster than a regular train. These trains have had many problems and are often late or even cancelled but we were sort of lucky. The train we were to catch was indeed late and to make up some time we were put onto another train to Zug, the first stop on the route where the inbound train had been terminated. As a result we left pretty well on time for the twisty route to Milan through the St. Gotthard Tunnel. It wasn't all plain sailing, however, as we had a man near us very much worse from alcohol causing discomfort to the passengers at our end of the coach (backward facing seats again, by the way). It was sufficiently bad that they stopped the train up the line and the police got on board and carted the man away. This was doubly good news because we were able to take his forward facing pair of seats.

The train made its way up the valley to the pass using a series of spiral tunnels to gain height. They are constructing a new, much longer, tunnel and we passed by both entrance and exit as we went by. The old tunnel is 9.0 miles long. The tunnel reached a milestone just recently when they broke through. The new tunnel will be 35.4 miles long, making it the longest rail tunnel in the world. We entered the old tunnel and it took about 8 minutes to reach the exit portal. The train then winds its way down to Milan.

After a brief tea stop we took the train to Venice. Here we made a minor mistake because the train we chose was going on to Trieste, which meant it didn't get to the Santa Maria Station on the island but stopped briefly in Venice Mestre just off the island. So we had to change to a local train. Our train had been running late and we missed the train we wanted to catch and we faced a 30 minute wait on a rainy platform. The weather had been lovely until this point. To add to the misery the next train from Milan we could have waited for sailed through ahead of us and we arrived in Venice more than an hour later than we might have done, in the rain to boot. Until then the trains had been on time.

We bought a water bus (vaporetto) 24 hour pass that we would use the next day extensively. We were staying at another hostel close by the Rialto Bridge and we had seen a video showing us how to navigate from the vaporetto stop at Rialto to the hostel. It was related to a small hotel and you had to check in there before coming back to the hostel. Without the video this would have been quite challenging in the dark. We had a very nice double en suite room and the location was excellent.