DAY 195 - SIERRE TO SION 10.2 MILES (20,400 STEPS)

3 November, 2011

10.2 miles (Total: 1921.3 miles) 20,400 steps (4,144,201 steps)

There is a routine beginning to emerge as I set off from Schlosshotel Art Furrer in Brig and head down to the station in Brig to get the train to Sierre. I have always found that routine is a welcome thing on this walk; so often it is a different pace to stay every night and the experience of having a base and knowing where you are going to return to that evening is a very welcome experience.

Today was just a bit frustrating as my normal experience is that major towns are a day’s walk apart. I suppose it makes sense, but these settlements were formed before highways and high speech rail links and therefore tend to reflect the travel patterns of people even before the horse and cart. For all of our technological advances, we haven’t increased the distance that the average person is able to walk in a day or two for perhaps two millennia. That distance is set at around 30km or 20 miles. For some reason, the proximity of Sierre to Sion was much closer than this, and though I felt that I was physically able to go on for another five or ten miles there was no point, as this would have brought me well short of the next stop on the railway line – Martigny, so I stopped in Sion.

Sion is quite a place and I would have enjoyed spending longer there. It is a busy town with large squares, historic buildings, and busy restaurants and cafes. The city has lost out twice in recent years in bids to host the Winter Olympics – I can see why it ran Torino and Salt Lake City so close. The history of the city is worth studying as it became the centre of the First Helvetic Republic, which was a first attempt to create a unified Swiss nation following the invasion of Napoleon. Although the Helvetic Republic did not last, the idea of a unified Swiss nation had been born and was later brought into fruition in 1848.

I return to Brig with energy to spare, and use it to catch up on a mass of emails and blog entries, which I have been working through with one hand typing.