The Vagrants of Vaduz

It was a cold November morning, and we two vagrants were, almost insanely, hiking through a freezing drizzle in search of a castle. There was hardly a soul on the wet and shiny asphalt roads, with even the cows in the paddocks giving us that these-guys-must-be-crazy looks. For the second least visited country in the world’s most visited continent, we could have jolly well been the only tourists that day. Or maybe even month (come winter, Europe happily shuts shop).

I walked uphill with a trudge, smoke billowing out of my rasping nose, yet I couldn’t help notice the swathes of emerald green alpine forests that seemed to stretch ahead, and even up, higher on the hills. It was then that I froze, as my addled brain failed to process what I saw. Brain freeze, literally. Through my rain-specked glasses, I seemed to note a kind of bleaching on the green forests high up on the hills. And it was spreading fast, coming downhill. Wet, bedraggled, bereft of piping hot tea, it took a few seconds before I almost screamed Eureka! It was no bushfire or fungal plague as I was scared at first sight, but was instead one of the most pleasant experiences I had had in my few months in Europe - the first sighting of snow. I shouted out to Mapboy, then fumbled to take out my Kodak and made a feeble attempt to freeze in pixels, what was an ethereal experience - Snow softly carpeting the forests in alpine country, turning green to white, as if decking the hillside hollows in apt preparation for Christmas. The rains no longer felt cold, the walk no longer arduous - the thrills of wanderlusting made us beam in joy, as we reminded ourselves, it’s always less crowded along the extra mile, but that brings with it, experiences that cannot often be described.

It was a perfect group photo backdrop, but in a rare show of separation, our famous five (or super six, if you include toggle-traveller Mahajan who could never decide if to travel or not) had decided to split that weekend. After three months of relentless wandering, Beaucoup wanted a break from travel-fatigue, Daddu was scarred after spending a winter night at Milan’s open arctic station, while Mahajan had to revise her corporate valuation for alas, only the ninetieth time in that many weeks. That left just me and Mapboy to travel to Mozart’s Salzburg, the Habsburg’s twin capitals of Vienna and Budapest, and finally to some country I didn’t even know exist a few months earlier - Liechtenstein. Keen to tick yet one more nation, we decided to dedicate, magnanimously, one morning to the sixth smallest country in the world. I am pretty sure, people would have guffawed at plans to visit Liechtenstein - its name had more letters than the country had municipalities! Luckily, we never had to face the scrutiny of Monsieur Pacome that trip - I had talked of him before - and I guess he would have literally ROFL-ed, screaming that his clan had more members on the other side of the Seine than Lichtenstein had people. Or better still, his uncle’s barn was bigger than, well, the country. I later read that the country, a tax haven, actually had more registered companies than it had people. Oh and yes, AirBnB once had a plan to rent out the entire nation for a night, a beer session with the king included! Maybe, we should have talked to Pacome after all.

But that said, the country, like most European alpine suburbs stretching between Switzerland and Germany, was spotless, clean, pretty and beautiful. The roads in the capital, Vaduz, were lined with autumnal trees shying in orange and red, and were smooth to drive your Bugatti to work (it has the second highest GDP per capita, so why not?). The houses with their colourful gabled roofs looked delectable, and its king lived in a castle on the hill, as if overlooking his country like a medieval feudal lord. With nothing more to do, it was to this castle that we were treading to, when the snows and sleet caught us unawares. Yes, it was freezing cold, but the postcards that the mind was collecting, was a rich lot. Alas, the castle was closed, or we would have loved to have kanda-bhaji with the king (he has beer once a year with all his citizens so this was no wishful thinking). We came down to the town centre, collected a few souvenirs, visited the post-office museum (that must have been thrilled to tick its quota of international visitors for the year). My Liechtensteinian facts and wonders were not yet over though for the day. I found a brochure in the post office that talked about the country, and which sadly recollected how the Czechs had, after the second world war, confiscated ten times the country’s size of land deep inside the then-Czechoslovakia, dwarfing the country overnight. I also learnt that it was one of the only two double landlocked countries in the world (landlocked countries inside landlocked countries). 

I happily shared these facts with mapboy, who gave me a stare of absolute disdain, then decided we had enough of the country-ticking mania. We hopped on the first bus we got, literally melted in its warmth and then arrived at a lonely station to catch a train back home to Paris. The station was again freezing cold, so instead of collecting icicles there, we caught a warm and cosy train in the opposite direction to Austria, before getting off a few stations later to catch yet another train, once again in the opposite direction back to Germany. By then, Daddu could have written a book on the joys of international border crossings in a Political Union. 

As the train trundled past the small country though, I couldn’t help feel glad that we had stopped, even if for a few hours that morning. There was something about stopping there in that lone station, where few people got down, and even fewer got up, that had a sense of pensive aloneless to itself. It was not a sense of loneliness, nor melancholy, rather a feeling of quiet acquaintanceship that made you feel that the pit-stop was not meant for everyone, just as not everyone was meant for that stop. And just like that, in the blink of a dreamy eye, the small country of snow, sleet and schloss passed by... 

17th July, 2021