Backpacking With Benefits

摘要

When the train conductor switched from German to Italian, I knew that we must have crossed over into Ticino, Switzerland's most southerly canton. I spent that night in a grand old hotel in Lugano, which fancies itself as "Mediterranean Switzerland" and has the palm trees and azaleas to prove it. Even so, the city still runs on Swiss time: My guide, Mark Graf, promised to meet me at 9:10 the next morning and arrived not a minute early nor a minute late. I would struggle to keep up with his lanky legs for the next three days of trekking in the surrounding mountains.