Sleeping with the windows wide open to try and make sleeping in a furnace a little bit possible meant we were serenaded by the church bells next door throughout the night. Also it turns out that 5am is particularly exuberantly celebrated in Liechtenstein. Something to do with a centuries old custom calling farmers to work, and the religious to prayer. Yeah I’m pretty sure they have literal alarm clocks now, mate. This is on me to be fair, I do have ear plugs but I find them so bloody uncomfortable. In hindsight what’s another layer of discomfort on top of feeling like you fell asleep next to a dragon that breathed on you all night?

Rather than catching the bus into Vaduz like normal humans we decided to walk via the ruins of Schalun Castle. Trails in Liechtenstein are well marked and maintained, and are a joy to sweat to death on. There was a significant quantity of uphill to deal with which I enjoyed the fuck out of because I am a masochist, and it took absolutely ages to get anywhere on account of the fact we had to stop frequently to admire the scenery. Nothing to do with me being a touch overweight at the moment and needing an excuse to stop and try and convince my lungs we weren’t dying. Nope. Not at all. Once you’re at the top (and, in fact, the whole way) you’re rewarded with some fantastic views. Largely of Switzerland to be fair. You do spend a lot of time in Liechtenstein just admiring Switzerland.

The ruins are small, I don’t think it was ever a vast, sprawling network of secret tunnels and intrigue. As well as the what remains of the castle there’s a bench and a couple of fire pits, but like proper ones with grills on for cooking. They even provide the wood. There’s a shed nearby full of wood. Can you imagine this shit in the UK? It’d be horribly abused by dickheads within days. Someone would probably set the shed on fire and you’d be stepping over vomit and broken glass. The grill was clean too, and there wasn’t a scrap of litter anywhere. That’s something we’d noticed when we arrived in Vaduz the previous day, how clean it all is aside from the fag butts around doorways where people tend to smoke. Anyway. We chilled for a short while and had a little snacky snack before making our way down down down into Vaduz, via Schloss Vaduz.

There are five castles in Liechtenstein. Three are ruined and we just saw one through the sweat trickling into our eyeholes, two are intact and this was one of those. You can’t visit it because the prince lives there and he’d likely take umbrage to tourists traipsing through his living room while he’s trying to watch Traitors or whatever it is princes watch. You can, however, walk right past it. Again it’s not huge or particularly castley, just a fuck off big rich person’s house really, but it’s worth pointing your camera at.

We swung by the National Museum which is fine, it’s interesting and you get an audio guide with your entrance fee, but it’s not brilliantly laid out to be honest. We did learn a bit about the history of the country and how it came about. Basically the Liechtensteins were advisors to the Holy Roman Emperors, the Habsburgs, and over the years were gifted huge swathes of land. They didn’t really rule them though. Then in 1699 they bought the Lordship of Schellenberg, and in 1712 they bought the County of Vaduz. The two were united and declared a Principality, and became a member state of the Holy Roman Empire. When that went to shit in 1806, the Principality of Liechtenstein became sovereign. So basically some blokes with more money than sense wanted a country of their very own to rule over and just, well, bought one.

The nature rooms in the museum are quite good though. Lots of stuffed animals, but like with taxidermy. They’ve not arranged some kid’s plushies in glass cases. Some of them have skeletons next to them which I really liked. I do like dead shit. You can also visit a dark room (separate building, separate ticket) which houses a replica of the crown and a disproportionate amount of Easter eggs. Nothing tasty, mind. Art eggs. One of them is a Fabergé Egg. I have no idea why they’re so fond of eggs. We weren’t allowed to take photos here so I can’t share the egg glut with you but trust me. It’s excessive. The Fabergé Egg is, apparently, the Apple Blossom egg and isn’t an imperial egg because it wasn’t gifted by a tsar. You can tell Google has been doing some heavy lifting for this paragraph.

Once we’d had our fill of history we caught a bus into Balzers to look at Gutenberg Castle, the other not-ruined castle. You can’t visit this one either. Well, okay yeah you can but only at certain times on certain days and with a guided tour. You can visit the outer bailey though, and apparently there’s some manner of rose garden you can look at but only on Sundays. It wasn’t Sunday so we wandered to the Rhine and strolled the six and a bit miles back towards Vaduz as Tarrant pointed out things like how I fail to consider previous walks done that day when I say, “It’s only six and a bit miles. Let’s walk.” It’s flat though, and tarmacked the entire way with some lovely views of, well, Switzerland.

There are several bridges which cross between Liechtenstein and Switzerland and one of these is the Alte Rheinbrücke, the Old Rhine Bridge, which is a wooden bridge. The last remaining wooden bridge over the Rhine I’ll have you know. The others were destroyed by storms and floods over the years. It’s been there since like 1900 or something so it’s doing pretty well. The restoration projects probably helped with that. It’s only for pedestrians and cyclists which is fair enough. I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Beetlejuice where the Maitlands career off the road on a much smaller covered wooden bridge. That film has ruined covered wooden bridges for me. It’s been 38 years. I need to get over it.

Aaaanyway, it was utterly stinking hot so we made our way away from the river in search of tasty cold motor impairment beverages. It’s very important to stay hydrated in this kind of heat. I don’t think I was expecting it to be this hot, I just kind of assumed alpine equals a perfectly sane temperature. Dear reader, it does not. Prepare to have your entire being wrung out by the simple act of breathing. Your not-a-pint of probably Swiss beer will be bath water temperature by the time it’s mostly backwash.

You’ll mostly be drinking Swiss beer on account of the fact that Liechtenstein only has one brewery; the Liechtensteiner Brauhaus. After our hard day of touristing we were too late to visit the brewery itself but we know how beer is made so we rocked up to the the attached restaurant, the Liechtensteiner Braustube, to see if they were any good at it. This is very much worth spunking large sums of money on to be fair. We got a flight of six beers (a flight each because we’re lushes) and I had the pork knuckle. I feel like whenever the opportunity to consume a pork knuckle presents itself it should be taken. Tarrant had some other manner of dead pig. It really was great food, and the beer was pretty good too. I’m a fan of their pilsner.

We would have liked to have stayed for longer but given that sleep was something that happened to other people last night, as we had a batshit early start planned the next day, we shuffled back to the oven that passed as our hotel room. Utterly shattered.

---

Vaduz & Balzers, Liechtenstein

Stayed at: Kloster by b_smart, Schaan

Useful shit to know…

• Schalun Castle is around 47.150926, 9.533583. It’s also known as Wildschloss and that’s what you’ll see written on signposts as you walk up.

• The National Museum was CHF10 each at the time of visiting, and the treasury was CHF3 each. You buy the tickets for the latter at the National Museum.
• They’re both 20% off with the Welcome Pass.
• The Postal Museum is free. You can buy postcards and stamps there, and post them there too.

• The old wooden bridge is at 41.132454, 9.511667.

• Bussing around the country is a piece of piss. All the routes are on Google Maps and seem accurate.
• You don’t need to show your Welcome Pass when you get on, you just board and they trust you have a ticket.
• I did see people buying tickets on the bus too so that’s an option if you don’t have a Welcome Pass, or you can use the SBB app.
• The bus network is LIEmobil.