Sils-Maria - 15 April 2009

Already Wednesday! The kids where gone up the mountain to test all the skills they know by now, to do some real skiing.
When my job was done, René and I hiked to Sils-Maria. We heard that the Fextal has great hiking trails and as our holiday is almost over we need to get our last hikes in. The weather reports for the next few days are not so good.
Sils-Maria is another typical Swiss village with houses built in the style of most houses of the Engadin. What is worth mentioning is the way they like to paint their houses in soft pastel colours and then draw special frames round the windows or they love to paint scenes depicting certain aspects of every day life. Like a bakkery will have scenes of the process of how a bread come to be. The ibex is a figure they love to paint somewhere on their houses and birds, all different birds I’ve see

I still have to see my first ibex.
Sils-maria has one famous house, Friedrich Nietzsche lived here for a while or rahter spent his summers

The house of Friedrich Nietzsche

Wooden sculptures of Beatrice Guyer

Where the horse carts leave, there is a nice walking route up the mountain. It’s quite a steep route up the mountain!

A road into nowhere

Finally we were up a plateau where a few houses stand, they seem to be lived in. Many houses I have seen in these villages look like holiday homes with shutters closed and with snow heaped up around it, but here the snow was cleared and you can reach the houses. The valley is extremely scenic, not only in winter with the snow on it, but it must be just the same in summer.

Hotel Sonne

The little church next to Hotel Sonne

We walked up a hill to a hotel, Hotel Sonne! On top of a hill like that it must be getting sun all day long. We both had to be back on time so we decided to turn round at the hotel. Walking down the snowclad trails we slipped and slided all the way down. It was funny.