Zurich; Sunday, 17 April, 2022

I had a bit of a lie-in, which turned out to be a mistake as the queue for food at breakfast was a bit of a scrum by the time I got down, and it took quite a bit of hunting to find a table that was available.

From the hotel I wandered down into town and over to the Landesmuseum, not to visit the museum but to pick up the river bus service that leaves from the quay just outside the museum. The ferry runs down the River Limmat through the heart of downtown Zurich and out into the top end of Lake Zurich before returning to the Landesmuseum, providing a good hour long water tour of the city for the price of the public transport day ticket.

After completing the river tour I headed a bit further away from the city centre and took the Dolderbahn, a cogwheel railway, up the side of one of the city centres bigger hills to take in the views. From the top of the Dolder there is a pleasant 25 minute walk up and onto the ridge to a wooden lookout tower that has views out over Lake Zurich and the Eastern side of the city.

Rather than heading back on myself I continued on down the other side of the hill to pick up the bus – in this case the bizarre double articulated trolley bus – back into the centre of town where I changed onto the S-Bahn service out to Uetliberg, the city’s mountain.

From Uetliberg, running along the ridge of the hills that look down on the Western side of Lake Zurich there is a pleasant walk to the TV transmitter and Cable Car at Felsenegg, where you can catch the cable car back down to Aldiswil and the train back into Zurich.

By a weird coincidence the distance from close to the S-Bahn station at Uetliberg to close to the cable car station at Felsenegg is exactly 1 billionth of the distance across the solar system from the centre of the sun to the median point on Pluto’s orbit. Consequently the Planetweg or Planet Way has been built which takes the 1 billionth scale and runs with it. A scale model of the sun starts the walk and within the first few hundred meters you’ve already passed Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars (as well as controversially the dwarf planet Ceres), before the distances start to stretch out. The walk takes you along the ridge passing Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and then the innermost pass of Pluto before reaching Neptune and then the median pass of Pluto close to the cable car station.

Stopping to take in the views along the way, and to read the information at each of the planets took just over 2 hours, which is about the same time as the Tourist Board says it will take on their website (and not the 1 hour 20 minutes that Google claim it takes to walk). You can extend the walk another couple of kilometres beyond the Felsenegg cable car to the furthest pass of Pluto from the Sun, but from there it’s either back tracking to the cable car, or a 50 minute hike down the hill to the station in Sihlau. I decided to stop at the cable car and took that back down the hill and picked up the train in Aldiswil back into Zurich.

Back in Zurich I headed back to the hotel to freshen up and then quickly grabbed dinner in a cheapish fast-food restaurant in the arcade below the Hauptbahnhof before returning to the hotel for an early night.