Ticino

Went on the long 4 hour journey to Ticino. The jouney was beautiful, and appreciated it as much as my sleepy eyes could allow. Changed trains in Domodossla, which is actually in Italy and was off to our first stop at Locarno. It's a pretty town, mountains and a huge lake. Very similar to Nainital in some respects. There was a wine festival going on. You can buy a glass for CHF 5, and taste the wine from different local vineyards that had put up stalls. Got a good deal of information about the speciality wine making process in broken English. Here people hardly speak any French or German, only Italian. And people are very belle to. :-)

Went on to Belinzona next, to visit some nice castles. And as usual, there was another fair going on there with food, music, gymnastics, and fun. From there went again by train to Lugano. Each of these places are 20 minutes apart by train and very similar. We had a hostel booked in Figino near Lugano. Dint get anything there itself, as there was the Lugano Jazz Festival going on. And to our surprise, the last bus to/from figino to lugano was a 6 pm. We caught the last bus to Figino and checked into out hostel. And thankfully, there had a couple of bikes we could rent. I got a cool racing bike for myself. We took the Swiss national bike route - Nord-Sud Bike route 3 - along the lake lugano. It was a beautiful route. But halfway along the route, we had to take the highway to Lugano. That part was a bit scary with little space on the side of the road, and cars just whizzing by. Anyway reached Lugano after 2 hours of toil, but fun. Had some of the awesome italian pizza in a restaurant, mostly stopping there for the belle waitress i must admit. And then we parked our bikes nearby and went into the various - 5 or 6 - stages were live performances were going on. All the piazzas - yeah, Roma style - were packed with people swaying to some terrific music going on. And not just jazz, but all sorts of music. Around midnight, after 2hours, Gaurav was feeling immensely tired from the whole day - starting 6 am - of activities. We decided to go a back. And this time took another mountainous road back. Getting lost or almost lost a couple of times at 1 am in the night was quite some fun. Finally, managed to locate our hostel and promptly slept off.