Something about the look of the place announces itself immediately, whether it is a carved wooden balcony dripping with detail, a train ticket set in clean unfussy type, a red flag with a white cross, or a watch dial engraved with patterns so fine you need a loupe to see them. You know it is Swiss before you could possibly say why. We got curious about the why, and the answer turns out to be more interesting, and more useful, than we expected.

You hear the Alps before you understand them. Somewhere on your first morning, up a green slope you can't quite see, there is a sound: an irregular, tuneless, oddly companionable clanking that rises and falls with no particular rhythm. It takes a moment to place it, and then you do. Cowbells. Dozens of them, drifting down through the clear air from a pasture you cannot see, and once you have heard it you will hear it everywhere, and you will come, we promise, to love it.

The first time you drive into the Lauterbrunnen valley, you will probably slow down, then stop, then say something out loud that isn't quite a word. It's that kind of place. The valley runs dead straight and impossibly narrow, walls of sheer grey rock rising the better part of a thousand feet on either side, and pouring off those walls, in ribbons and threads and one great free-falling plume, is water, everywhere, all at once.

So why Switzerland, and specifically why this corner of it, the Bernese Oberland, the cluster of valleys and impossible peaks around Interlaken? The honest answer is that nowhere else on earth gives you this much mountain, this much “spectacular”, for this little effort.