We’re used to long journeys. But most of them take place in our Toyota, whose speedometer now reads 470,000. We know from experience what it’s like to spend nine hours behind the wheel and cover six hundred kilometers in that time. Or even just one hundred, if the tracks are muddy and you get stuck a few times!

On April 30, 2025, a different journey awaited us. It began at eleven o’clock in the morning in Swakopmund, from where friends took us to Walvis Bay International Airport. There we boarded an Airlink Embraer 180, which took us to Joburg in two and a half hours. After a three-hour layover, we boarded a Qatar Airways Boeing 780, which landed in Doha, Qatar, just under seven hours later. Here we had three hours to stretch our legs before boarding an Airbus A350 and landing in Zurich six hours later.

After a coffee with friends who surprised us at the airport, I boarded the express train to Bern, which sped nonstop from Zurich Central Station to Bern. There I boarded a BLS regional train that rattled via Thun and Spiez to Kandersteg, where I arrived on May 1, 2025, at 6:40 pm. A long journey had come to a happy end…