The French Riviera,Côte d'Azur

Me and Micha made some day trips discovering the beautiful cities and countryside of the french riviera. France is divided into many regions, a small region close to Italy and Monaco is called Côte d'Azur. The biggest city in this region.... I guess is Nice and also has the famous town cannes, where the famous Cannes Film Festival takes place is in this region.We went to Nice, Antibes and some small countryside around Grasse .Antibes is my favourite place. Nice is nice too...but in the Nice beach,as I was standing in the waves, a big wave gave a small bath to my digital camera in my packet. So no digital photos from Nice. Later hair dryer treated my wet camera and cured it. Micha is a walking encyclopedia, never seen a such an unbeatable combination of intelligence,good looks and extremely pleasant and humble person....had lots of fun travelling with him, he was telling me the history and geography of every stone in this region and took me to the best places and introduced to the best food of the region. Check out more photos of the beautiful Côte d'Azur....

Flight to Paradise..

Reached the Geneva airport..the trains in Switzerland are so annoyingly punctual,Its very difficult for Indians to get used to such punctuality, I reached the airport almost one and half hours did some window shopping and got into the flight and just had a small nap and the flight landed in Nice(a city in south of France), it was a shortest flight trip I ever had just 40 min on air.Micha was waiting with his mom to receive me in the airport and another 30 mins drive, I reached a absolutely beautiful house(Micha's Parent's) over a top of small mountain in a town called Grasse, between Nice and Cannes.The house had a beautiful view of three towns,Grasse,Cannes and Antibes between the valley and view of the alps dropping off in the Mediterranean. I stayed there in that beautiful house with very lovely Micha's family having excellent Micha's food and with nice trips and strolls in the small towns and villages in that region. Some more of Micha's home are here....more pictures after I get my film scanned. Thats the view from his room at dusk..

Nice Drive...

Next day the weather was still nice and sunny, we decided to start driving...Some friends from the hostel, an Australian girl and Canadian boy joined us in the drive, we went through the beautiful small villages, and mountains of the Switzerland to reach Château de Chillon. A castle next the Lake Geneva (Lake Léman)Beautiful castle, very well planned and built on a rock in the lake, most of the balcony open into the lake, amazed to see almost a small kingdom inside, had jails, royal rooms and even a 15th century toilets. we had small picnic next to the lake and then it was time to say bye to Sandra...They started travelling towards Italy and I took a train to Geneva airport to take a flight to France. No..it was not an end of my trip but a beginning of an all new beautiful episode in south of France.

Day 2: Interlaken

It was happy sunny day! so me and Sandra decided to go up the mountains, we went up a small Green hill called harder kulm, which had a something like a Buddhist temple on the top, and had a a nice view of the town, interlaken as the name suggest its beautifully located between two lake and then it was the time for the summer snow. we had two choices one was to go up Schilthorn peak or to Jungfrau peak, it was very difficult to decide between two, later for financial reasons we ended up in Schilthorn, we hiked a bit and reached the cable car and a very scenic journey to the top of snow covered peak. It was just snow and snow and snow all around with just a small cheesy restaurant, Piz Gloria which revoles 360 degree. It was nice to have a long 3 hours lunch with some American travellers, food, nice chat and a 360 degree view of snow covered peaks...very very cheesy....

Thats Sandra having a view of interlaken from the top of Harder kulm... more snowy..summer photos...here..

Day :1 Interlaken…

We didn’t do much on the first, a messy.. cloudy.. day, just went walking around this small touristy town, which is located between two lakes and beautiful mountains on the other sides, we just had look and feel of the town, I was shocked to see many announcement boards in Hindi, and lot and lot of India tourist. I guess Indians have a special crush on Switzerland, may be influenced by thousands of bollywood movies with dream duet song shot in Switzerland and met hell lot of . Among the few nice veggi dishes of Switzerland, I fell in love with a dish called Rösti, made of potatoes and cheese and absolutely delicious.