Walking across a country – Liechtenstein

For a 4-day weekend in May, 2012, some friends and I met in the tiny nation of Liechtenstein with a plan to walk across a country.

We did it!

I was coming from SE Germany, and they from W Germany, so agreed to meet at the only hostel that exists in Vaduz, the capital. For a hostel, the prices weren’t very hostel-y.

They got stuck in traffic, but my trains were all on time, so I walked from Buchs, Switzerland over the bridge and into Liechtenstein, then down to the hostel and checked us in.

The setting was straight out of The Sound of Music. Gorgeous!

I walked around, found some falafel for dinner, the staple of traveling vegans with no other options, and then met up with my friends late at night when they finally got in.

The next morning, we got up ‘not early’, ate some breakfast at the hotel, and then planned a path. First things first: get to the Switzerland border and then follow the road to the border of Austria. Sounds easy, but we had a pre-schooler with us, so we knew he’d have to be carried at various points.

We passed the university, along the river, and then started from the Swiss border.

Up the road, following the bike paths and sidewalks, we ended at the Austrian border on the other side of the country. It’s not that bad of a walk, especially when you stay on the shaded side of the road. At the Austrian border, we tried to ask for passport stamps.

“Where is your vehicle? I have to inspect it”
“We walked.”

The guy just couldn’t believe it. Anyway, we were told ‘no stamps’ and to try at the tourist center in the middle of Vaduz. We caught a bus going back, since this wasn’t ‘walk twice across a country’, and we got falafel for lunch.

I did get the tourist stamp later, but you had to pay for it!

We did some more exploring around Vaduz in the evening before planning to get out into the mountains the next day, and that was truly epic.

Snowball fights at the end of May? Great times.

Back in the city, we made friends with some farm animals near the hostel, and they loved our apples.

Liechtenstein is beautiful. If you want to walk across a small country, it’s a great opportunity to do it somewhere scenic.