The Filthy Lucre Tour
 Lichtenstein Unless anyone tells me otherwise, I'm recommending not bothering with Lichtenstein. The main town, Vaduz, looks much like Switzerland but a bit more industrial and with a bit less impressive scenery. In my personal opinion. Highlight of this day-trip was driving into Austria by mistake. Like Switzerland, driving on motorways in Austria reqires a permit, or vignette, a little sticker that goes in the windscreen which you can buy at motorway border crossings. As we crossed the border in a town but ended up on a motorway we realised we were in fact fugitives from Austrian law. After we managed to get off the Austrian motorway and cross the Swiss border in another town, to avoid unpleasant questions about our lack of a Vignette, we realised that my passport was in safe keeping at the campsite back in Zürich. We gave the border control chap my driving licence instead, smiled a lot and looked foreign - he pointed at the "naughty people" spaces they had reserved and told us to park oofer zair for a minute. After about five minutes he turned up, gave us our documents back and waved us in. I imagine that the five minutes involved him phoning Interpol; running our digitally scanned number plate through a worldwide database of stolen vehicles; electronically cross-referencing our ID details with the UK's own systems and then comparing the retinal scans they'd secretly taken against a worldwide gene database to see if we had natural tendencies to crime. Or perhaps he went back into the booth and consulted with his colleague. "Ist this ein passport?" / "Nein" / "Hmm... ist student cart?" / "Nein" / "Zis picture look like zat guy out zere in de beemer?" / "Yah sure, I say so. He has a wery distinctive noze" / "OK, danke". At some point we saw a truck on fire on the motorway - I've a feeling it might be in Austria, but as I'm going to claim not to have been on an Austrian motorway, let's say it was in Switzerland. Traffic was stilll running with one lane cut off, and the heat from the blaze as we went past was quite extraordinary. It didn't look like an overly flammable cargo, so I'd imagine driver was safe and well. I'm afraid the photo doesn't really cut the mustard, but Kiki wouldn't let me take any more as we got closer.
|
Diary Photos
| 9th May 2006 |
| Truck fire on motorway |
 |
||
| 465 Words | This page has been read 75 times | View Printable Version |