Approach to Zernez
11 July 2011
We checked out of the hostel and headed over to the post office to mail (to ourselves at the hotel in Zürich) all the hiking gear we no longer needed. Then, newly unencumbered, we started down towards Zernez.
The bike path started out following the river and the main road, but soon it drifted far from the road, and even had an unpaved mountain-road segment.
At Zernez, we ate a supermarket lunch. Piaw bought a wallet from the store next to the supermarket. "What's the difference between these two wallets?" he asked the storekeeper, trying to account for the difference between two wallets that cost 10 CHF and 20 CHF. It turned out that the more expensive one just had a small Swiss flag decoration on it.
After lunch we climbed Ofenpass, the road to which runs through a Swiss national park. Here the forest was a bit denser than usual, and the road had dramatic views of the nearby mountains. There were a couple of retrogrades in the park.
We were making good time and decided not to stop for the day within the park. At Ofenpass, there is a hotel, but not much else to see, and we didn't stay long.
The descent was beautiful.
We reached St. Maria, then crossed the border into Italy, stopping at Glorenza. It's a nice town, though apparently not a terribly popular tourist destination. The girl at the tourist info center directed us to a hotel where at first no one answered the door. (In fact, the tourist info center was itself somewhat hard to find!)
Dinner at the Hotel Post was enormous and arrived promptly (though we had to wait for a long time before they would bring us the check).
