Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
A slice of Switzerland
|
The Swiss Tourism Department is trying to woo tourist families from India to the country of chocolates and snow-covered peaks
|
The massive alpehorn welcomes people to Switzerland
THE BOOMING notes of a massive alphorn welcomed guests to a slice of Switzerland transplanted to Bangalore last week.
An accordion played Swiss country dances, cowbells tinkled, a guy dressed in skins to look like Wilhelm Tell jumped up and down, and another yodelled in a fine baritone.
One young lady sported a Walther PPK — a la James Bond, a tribute to all those 007 high jinks enacted in Swiss locales over the decades.
And everyone was dressed in regulation red, including Consul General Joseph Renggli from Mumbai, who looked particularly natty in his T-shirt as he kicked off the annual roadshow of the Swiss Tourist office. Sixteen partner agencies — including Swiss International Airlines (the new avatar of Swissair), tourist offices of the Lucerne region, Zurich, Davos, and Geneva; representatives of Zurich Airport, and the various Swiss Rail systems: the Glacier Express, the Mount Pilatus Railways, the Golden Pass Line, and Jungfrau Railways as well as the Schilthorn Cablecar and the recent Mystery Park in the Interlaken — were on hand to provide briefings on what was new in their neck of Switzerland. The message in short was: it's time to put Switzerland on your travel agenda. One in 10 tourist arrivals in Switzerland is from India — and the canny Swiss are making sure the numbers grow. Cities such as Zurich now boast of dozens of Indian restaurants, many of them catering to vegetarians.
Starting April 4, the official Swiss tourist website, www.myswitzerland.com, will sport an India-specific page, Mr Renggli said, adding that visa formalities for
Indian visitors are easy and hassle free.
A single ticket that provides unlimited travel on the entire Swiss Travel
System — including some of the legendary Alpine scenic routes — and free travel for children under 16, travelling with parents , were some recent innovations to woo family groups.
Average costs of a Swiss holiday is around $70 to $80 (Rs. 3,500 to Rs. 4,000 per day, including travel).
Bollywood discovered Switzerland a decade and more ago.
But in recent years, whole chunks of the action seem to be shot in snow-covered Swiss locales — which adds a little masala to made-for-India tour circuits ("Sreedevi and Rishi Kapoor cavorted here; Shah Rukh Khan romanced Juhi Chawla there").
To encourage the process, Swiss Tourism and the Mumbai Consular office has joined hands in creating an audio CD with 10 hit Hindi songs shot in Switzerland — from Chandni (1989) to Mujse Dosti Karoge (2002).
The hills may be alive with the notes of the alphorn; they may increasingly resonate to the sound of Sonu Nigam.
(From Bangalore, the Swiss roadshow travels to Kolkata, Delhi, and Mumbai.)
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
|
