A slow day and short ride today. The bike is booked in for new tyres and a service in Innsbruck on 17th June, and when Vince checked the front tyre the other day he found  it’s looking quite worn – the hairpin bends seem to have taken their toll, so rather than push our luck we opted to stay at Cima Piazzi camp site in Valdesotto near Bormio for a few nights. We moved on from their this morning planning to take the Stelvio Pass north from Bormio – Italy’s most famous mountain pass – but we were turned back by a policeman because it was closed til 2:00pm due to a cycle race, so we had lunch at a cafe and stretched that out for two hours before the road was reopened. When we started the pass it was a dog’s dinner with cyclists still on the road plus support vehicles and motorbikes and cars, and the ride was slow with the traffic and Vince had to be a bit cautious due to the state of the front tyre, so near the top of the pass we peeled off left to Switzerland and dropped down into a pretty little valley where we found a campsite nestled between the trees, so we’ve set up camp here for the evening.

Lots of riders stopped at the cafe we had lunch at as they were all turned around as well, so we chatted with some of them ( a group of Italian riders and a lovely Dutch couple) for a while, and did some research on the laptop.

It’s only 150km to Innsbruck and we’ll probably push on tomorrow and complete that, getting there a couple of days before the service is booked, but we have some chores to do and we can go sightseeing a bit perhaps.

The weather here is fantastic, even though it was raining heavily overnight and again this morning as we packed up the tent. By stopping early today we’ve been able to dry out all our gear so we’re set for a good night. We had sausages and mashed potato for lunch – but it was Italian style – flat sausage meat and the mashed potato had cheese and runner beans in it, so that was an interesting combination. Dinner tonight might be a tin of ravioli boosted with our last potato and some carrots ….. Mmmmmm 🙂

At the new campsite we met an interesting Swiss man, Bernard, who is 72 and was very friendly and helpful….even wanting to gift us a Swiss cooking implement! Vince also chatted with a couple of German motorcyclists who have just come through the Balkan states where we will be headed shortly. The people you meet really help make the adventure take shape.

We woke up early and made our way down to the dingy meal area attached to our restaurant for a continental breakfast consisting of (for Vince) a cappuccino, cereals and stale bread and (for Karen) weak tea and cereals. It was drizzling outside as I retrieved the bike from the garage opposite our hotel and started to load it up, but we were so keen to say ‘Arivadechi’ to Madesimo we didn’t want to stay longer and pull on our wet weather gear, so we headed off into the light rain as quickly as we could. 

I’d plotted a zig-zag course to our planned destination – a camp site near Bormio, the base of the Stelvio Pass, with zigs occurring at Chiavenna and Tirana, and the zag taking place in Saint Moritz. The first section of riding took us on a roller coaster hairpin-encrusted ride down the side of a mountain that I wasn’t expecting nor really prepared for. This section of road (Pianazzo) was amazing – the road and it’s many tunnels and hairpins had been chiselled out of the mountainside, a bit like an ant-farm tunnel. The road was wet and chopped up, and the hairpins were so close together it was almost a continual spiral that we descended. Again, Karen was put to good work looking forwards for oncoming cars, difficult to spot in the twisty conditions. 

After leaving Chiavenna we took the more gradual and open road towards Saint Moritz, enjoying the short but twisty Moleja Pass, and then followed the beautiful road as it wound up the hills and past the lakes leading into Saint Moritz. We pushed straight through and then stopped for a bite to eat from our supplies a bit north of the town, overlooking a glacier in the distance that Karen had spotted through the trees. 

The next pass we took was the Bernina Pass, and this was a little gem. The turns were a bit more open than previous passes, allowing for a more flowing ride, and the valley scenery was beautiful. Karen mentioned over the Sena’s that the Bernina Pass goes through a UNESCO World Heritage area, and it was absolutely breathtaking.

The remainder of the ride into our camp ground at Valdisotto was relatively uneventful, the only real challenge was locating the actual camp ground as the GPS led us to someone’s house by accident, and from there we had to do some exploring to find the camp site.

Once located, the next challenge was for Karen to deal with the Camp Commendant, who wanted our passports before checking us in. Karen flatly refused 🙂 We were allocated a cute little campsite up a horrendeously steep hill – it’s paved but an absolute struggle getting the bike up there. Nevertheless, I got the bike wedged into our little plot, Karen pitched the tent, and then (thanks to a local supermarket in Bormio that has a real butcher) she cooked a delicious steak with pepper & mushroom sauce, and mashed potatoes, carrots and peas over our single-burner Dragon Fly for dinner ….. MMMMMMmmmmmm – what a great way to finish an excellent riding day 🙂

Yesterday we’d discovered that the E35 & 2 roads were out, the only north-bound roads leading out of Andermatt, so that required some rejigging of our riding plans to avoid (to Karen’s distinct pleasure) re-riding the Grimsel & Furka Passes. Instead, after packing up our gear and loading the bike, we headed east over the Susten Pass, which was an absolutely brilliant ride. The road rose up through the lush forest before the trees fell away, replaced with rocky hillsides that the twisty road had been carved in to. Numerous tunnels had been cut into the rock to allow the road through, and in one spot a waterfall flowed over a tunnel and cascaded into the valley below, providing a beautiful sight as we climbed up the mountain side. We crested the pass and dropped down into the valley on the far side, making our way towards Wassen, a few km north of Andermatt and the point at which we could pick up the 16.9km long Gotthard Tunnel going south, and through which we travelled to avoid the road blocks around Andermatt.

Popping out of the tunnel in Airolo I hunted around for the start of the Gotthard Pass – the idea being to follow that north back to Hospental (near Andermatt), as from there we knew we could get to Andermatt and the start of the Oberalp Pass. The GPS was struggling to get a good fix on our location deep in the alps, and with roadworks and diversions to contend with I couldn’t easily find the road I needed, so we took some time out to have a ham & cheese roll and a coffee (coke for Karen) at Bar 69 in Airolo, giving me a chance to get my bearings. 

Lunch finished and paid for, we headed up the cobbled street and back into the woodlands, finding the start of the ‘alternative’ Gotthard Pass road – this is the pass we’d ridden in a north-south direction a few days earlier, and now we were redoing it in the reverse direction. The road was a delight to ride, and in places felt like a roller-coaster experience as some of the hairpin bends were suspended in thin air, and there was nothing beyond the flimsy barrier at the edge of the bend, except a long long drop to the valley below. The top of the pass was covered in snow and the views were lovely, but rather than stop we pushed on into Hospental and towards Andermatt, where low cloud cover had dropped down to ground level and made for eerie riding.

We took the cobbled road through the centre of Andermatt and found the start of the Oberalp Pass in the cloud, and headed east up the pass. In some spots the cloud cover lifted a bit and we could get glimpses of the cloud below, and in other places cows had massed alongside the roadway, laying down in the grass and chewing away, oblivious to the few cars and bikes passing by them, with just a few feet to spare. The pass was steep but short, and before long we’d crested the summit and dropped into the valley on the far side, following the twisting river almost all the way towards Chur, peeling off at Tamins to start the 13 south to Splugen.

We deliberately ignored the GPS that encouraged us to switch to the A13 motorway and stayed instead on the older, narrower 13 that ran almost parallel to the A13 in many places, but which offered a much more enjoyable ride. The road entered a narrow, deep gorge, and snaked its way up the hill. At one spot Karen noticed some huts carved into the rock face of the gorge.  We eventually popped out of the gorge and the road narrowed down to a single lane as it entered Splugen. 

From Splugen we headed straight south towards Madesimo in Italy, our overnight destination. The Splugen Pass was single lane only, and I lost count of the number of hairpins we wheeled around as they came up so quickly. It was a challenge to keep moving forwards at times up the steep and narrow track, and Karen was hard-pressed keeping a lookout for oncoming traffic dropping down from the roadway above us.

We eventually made the snow-covered summit, and shortly afterwards crossed the border into Italy, only indicated by a small hut flying the Italian flag. The road surface immediately  deteriorated, with pot holes and broken sections all over the place. We followed the high valley and lake for a while, before dropping down towards Madesimo. 

Madesimo was a ghost town, and our hotel – probably the only hotel open for guests in the town, was straight out of Stephen King’s “The Shining”. We’d booked via booking.com our room in Madesimo because it was 1/2 the price of a room in Splugen, just 22km to the north, but we knew nothing about the town. In winter it’s probably full of life & people, but to us looked like a set from “Dawn of the Dead” as no one was walking the streets. We got our room key – top floor, furthest from the lift (completely opposite to Karen’s request) and I noticed that no other keys had been handed out to other patrons. The ground floor foyer was almost completely dark, and we had to walk down some stairs to catch our lift up to the top floor. Our room was also very dark and oppressive. Karen  lifted out our wet camping gear and spread that out to dry, and then we went for a walk through the ghost town, looking for signs of life. We eventually stumbled across the only bar open in town, and had a drink or two, before walking on a bit further to the only restaurant open in town – a quaint pizzeria. Unable to read Italian we just picked two different pizzas from the menu, hoping for the best. Pizzas eaten, we walked back to our hotel as the evening grew colder in the night chill, locking our door in the hope that would be enough to deter any marauding zombies as we slept that night ….