Why you shouldn’t skip the museums in Switzerland
Justine Tyerman is a New Zealand journalist, travel writer and sub-editor. Married for 36 years, she lives in rural surroundings near Gisborne on the East Coast of New Zealand with her husband Chris. In this piece, she explains why you shouldn’t skip the museums in Switzerland.
The bright young thing has just finished university with straight As and excellent career prospects. She announces to her parents at dinner that she doesn’t think she’ll take up that great job offer after all. She’d like to go travelling for a year instead… to Asia or South America. She may as well have said Syria for the impact it caused at the table.
With horrific visions of the sweet ingénue being kidnapped and held to ransom, the quick-thinking parents – and indulgent granny – come up with a brilliant plan.
They purchase a Swiss Travel Pass (STP) as a graduation present for their restless offspring and send her off on a nice safe adventure around Switzerland by train, boat and bus. The idea catches on and soon she has a group of travel-mates whose parents and grannies have also shouted passes for their young ones.
The pass allows the holder to travel on all public transport in Switzerland and those under 26 get a 15 percent discount. The clause that caught the eye of the granny was the free entry to more than 490 museums across the country which allowed her to justify it as an ‘educational’ trip. However the snow-boarding youngster fancied the clause which offered holders 50 percent off most of the mountain railway fares.
So off she went with her parents’ and granny’s blessing to beautiful Switzerland.
Strange though it may seem, she soon discovered museums in Switzerland were not boring dusty old edifices but modern, high-tech interactive places of wonder.
One such museum is Espace Horloger (watch-making museum) in Le Sentier, the cradle of “grande complication” watch-making in Switzerland.
It’s a mix of old and new with display cases housing precious, ornate antique clocks such as an 18th century porcelain clock from Germany, the world’s thinnest wrist watch by Audemars Piguet created in 1946, a pop art watch by Andy Warhol and Reverso watches made by Jaeger-LeCoultre.
There’s dazzling, über-modern state-of-the-art technology, Ludotemps and workshops where you can design and build your own virtual watch on huge touch screens, and interactive tables where visitors can learn about the different skills of watch-making.
A 3D movie showcases the natural beauty of the Vallée de Joux and the history of watching-making in the valley, an industry which began in the 17th century when farmers set up work benches in their homes as a means to occupy themselves and make a living during the long snow-bound winter months.
The region is still home to some of the most prestigious brands in the world including Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre and Patek Philippe.
A close relative to Espace Horloger is the Land of Mechanical Dreams, an enchanting music box museum in Sainte-Croix.
The CIMA Museum (Centre International de la Mécanique d’Art), the Museum of Music Boxes is the world capital of musical automatons, a fairy-tale place where adults can revert to their childhood fantasies and youngsters can learn about a form of music and movement that existed long before electronics and the digital era.
The creations are astonishingly life-like: an acrobat balances upside down on a couple of chairs, Pierrot the clown writes with a feather quill, a child raids food from a sideboard, Prince Eugène writes at a rosewood table, Mozart plays a grand piano, and a tiny bird with beautiful plumage sings joyfully in a golden cage.
The intricacy of the movements and the mechanisms behind such elaborate creations are astonishing.
Geneva clockmaker Antoine Favre-Salomon is credited as the father of modern automata, having invented a musical pocket watch in 1796. But modern craftsmen in St Croix are still custom-making music boxes for customers who are looking for a unique gift for a special occasion, evoking the romance and nostalgia of the past.
Never in their wildest nightmares did the parents imagine the STP would allow their daughter entry to a place like La Maison de l’Absinthe in Môtiers, Val-de-Travers.
This picturesque part of the Swiss Jura is known as the enchanted land of the green fairy, la fée verte, the birthplace of the infamous, oft-vilified, powerful spirit absinthe, banned in Switzerland in 1910 for allegedly driving people insane and causing them to commit heinous crimes. The legend goes that those who over-indulge in absinthe, hallucinate and see green fairies.
The history of absinthe, an anise-flavoured spirit distilled from the wormwood plant, is cloaked in mystery and intrigue. It became wildly popular in the 1800s and developed a cult-like following with the art nouveau set like Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde and Toulouse-Lautrec, some of whom became seriously addicted to it.
The distillation of absinthe continued in clandestine stills in the Val-de-Travers where authorities largely turned a blind eye to the practice until it was eventually legalised again in the valley in 2004, albeit with strict regulations.
Ironically, La Maison de l’Absinthe occupies a former district courthouse, opened in 1750, where a number of illegal absinthe distillers were once hauled before a judge, convicted and jailed.
There are also museums devoted to dinosaurs, folk art, stained glass, ceramics, chocolate, photography, fashions, textiles, wine-making, William Tell, Sherlock Holmes, Napoleon, Wagner, Picasso, Swiss peasants, Roman history, natural history, trams and even straw hats.
That’s not to say there are no dangers in Switzerland. When I was in Grindelwald, I got licked by a cow with huge horns - she was so pretty she looked like a bovine movie star. And following my Swiss sojourn, I needed to sign up for bootcamp after managing to delude myself into believing Swiss chocolate and cheese were health foods. The spectacular Swiss scenery is dangerous too if you are attempting to focus attention on the road - so it’s always safer to travel by train.
* Justine Tyerman travelled courtesy of Switzerland Tourism.
To learn more about Switzerland visit www.myswitzerland.com.
To book the Swiss Travel Pass: visit www.myswitzerland.com/rail.
Flights are available with Swiss International Air Lines www.swiss.com.