Basel

Day three of our European road trip saw us leaving France and entering Switzerland. We crossed the border near Basel, which ended up being our first stop in the country. We hadn’t originally intended to stop there, but it was about lunchtime and we were getting hungry.

We parked up somewhere in the city that seemed appropriate, and went for a wander.

It immediately became apparent we hadn’t really researched Switzerland much. We knew that the currency was Swiss Francs, not the Euro like the rest of our trip, but hadn’t looked into what language we’d be facing in the parts of the country we were visiting. A quick bit of Googling later (paying for mobile roaming data was a necessity whilst travelling – we used it to book hotels, find out info, translate things) told us that Basel is predominantly German speaking. Fortunately, as the only word I confidently know in German is ‘achtung’ which wouldn’t get us very far, we found a cafe where enough English was spoken to order some food.

Suitably sated, we headed out into the city to see what was about. Much like virtually every where else we’d visited on our tour, the city had trams.

This part of the town seemed to be a central hub of the tram system; there were several lines criss-crossing a crossroad, and pedestrian crossings in all directions as well leading to the stations in the middle. I’m glad we had no plans on using the trams or else we would have gotten very lost, I’m sure.

Closer to the river Rhine there was a church, the Basel Minster. It was open to the public so we took a look.

The carvings on the exterior walls were impressive.

There wasn’t a huge amount of room to get a clear shot of the front (there were also building works cluttering up the space), but thanks to a wide angle lens I managed to grab something.

The inside was not as bright, but still impressive.

There was plenty of stained glass windows. In order to get some of the surrounds too I shot HDR.

Out of the back of the church, there was a small foot ferry crossing the Rhine. Due to the strength of the current (I guess) the ferryboat was tethered to a cable crossing the river.

We were relatively high above the river. Below us people were queueing for the ferry.

We had some nice views along the Rhine from our vintage point.

We obviously weren’t the only ones looking at the view. There was this guy too.

The roof of the Basel Minister was really colourful.

We left the church. Nearby we saw what looked like a pretty traditional Swiss street.

As we headed back towards our car, I caught what looked like a more modern Swiss street.

We then left the city and headed for our next overnight halt deeper into Switzerland.

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