Vaduz; Saturday, 29 April, 2023

I arrived down to breakfast shortly after a large coach party had departed, which appeared to have gone through the breakfast like a tornado with virtually every table requiring cleaning and virtually no food on the buffet, thankfully the team at the hotel were pretty quick in getting things sorted and in the time it took to get a coffee out of the machine I had a table and shortly afterwards the key parts of the buffet had been refreshed.

I had a leisurely morning in the hotel as I was booked onto a specific train rather than having an open ticket so I didn’t need to leave the hotel until about 11:30 to make in into Zurich city centre in time to make my connection.

In the end I could have probably left it even later as I had nearly 30 minutes to wait around in Zurich before my train arrived and turned out to be very lightly loaded with only about four people in my carriage for the one stop ride to the border town of Sargans.

In Sargans I hopped off the train and crossed over to the bus station to pick up the LieMobil bus that was taking me across the border and onto Vaduz. The bus from Sargans runs right up through the whole of Liechtenstein stopping off in the capital Vaduz, as well as the largest town Schaan before popping out the other side of the country into Austria and ending up in the Austrian city of Feldkirch.

Given I was probably going to be making reasonable use of the public transport in the country over the following couple of days I opted to buy an country wide 7 day pass that would let me on every bus in the country – including over the borders into both Switzerland and Austria, and even on the ÖBB train from Feldkirch in Austria through to Buchs in Switzerland via the four railway stations in Liechtenstein (all closed at the weekend when the trains run fast through the country, but the bus ticket is still valid).

Getting off the bus in Vaduz I walked the short distance over to my hotel and checked in, a slightly odd experience as the hotel is almost completely automated with just a kiosk to check in on. During my entire stay the only member of staff I’d see would be the lady replenishing the breakfast bar.

Checked in I had a wander round the centre of Vaduz before heading back over to the main bus stop to pick up the bus up into the hills and the highest settlement in the country – Malbun. From Vaduz the bus climbs steadily nearly 4,000ft up to the town located at 5,200ft above sea level. The town is the only ski resort of the country, and with the warming weather the season had finished a couple of weeks before I arrived so the whole area was closed up for a couple of weeks worth of maintenance before re-opening in mid-June for the summer biking and hiking season. It consequently had an almost ghost-town feel to it. I spent 25 minutes wandering around before hopping back on the same bus I’d come up on as it started it’s decent back down the mountain.

I hopped off the bus in the town of Triesenberg where I changed onto a different bus that climbed up another hill to the village of Gaflei which is the closest you can get via public transport to the middle point of the country – located a 1.8 Km very steep uphill walk away. I decided just to have a look around the area by the bus stop and catch the same bus back down into Triesenberg where I changed back onto the bus back down into Vaduz.

By the time I got back to Vaduz it turned out that all of the supermarkets had closed for the evening and given the price of even cheap meals in restaurants would blow my budget for the weekend I decided that there was nothing for it other than to hop on the bus and cross the border to go grocery shopping in Austria. It was a very pleasant ride up through the north of Liechtenstein and then over the border into Austria, and a quick turnaround in the supermarket in Feldkirch station meant I was able to hop back on exactly the same bus to take me back down to Vaduz for my hotel picnic dinner before turning in for the night.