- Visa information for residents
of the US and for those
living in the UK.
- Swiss
National Tourism Office not terribly useful.
- The Valais
Tourist Office is more useful; there are several brochures,
including a hotel list, that you can either order or download.
Tourist offices for individual villages or regions are given in the lodging page, as I assume that is what they
will be most often used for.
- Swiss Federal Railway
site is a combined online timetable, fare finder and booking site
(booking obviously requires registration). Many large and medium
railway stations have a computer in the Information area with a
browser pointing to that page. I find it very useful.
The Swiss Travel System site is a gateway to much travel information; most useful is the list of offers by Swiss Travel System (various discounted tickets for visitors). An excellent discussion of the best pass for visitors is Tourist travel passes, the conclusion is that for most (not all!!) visitors the one month half fare card is the best option (it can be bought in Switzerland).
There are a variety of tools for producing timetables:- Produce a customized personal timetable which can be downloaded as a PDF file.
- Download a PDF file of a route from the official timetable (this link
may take you to a page in German; if so select English).
- Federal
Office of Topography, sells both paper and digital maps.You will
find much more about Swiss maps (from the Office of Topography and
other sources) on my maps page.
- Swiss
weather forecast from MeteoSwiss. Not all pages are available in
English! MeteoSwiss also provides forecasts by SMS, from what I
understand from their web page they are available in French
and German.
An interesting site (French only) is M�t�o Valais, weather conditions and forecasts for the francophone Valais. Another site for the Valais is Le Nouvelliste. There is a discussion of various Swiss weather forecasts in this thread. - The Swiss Alpine
Club, only available in French and German. Their shop sells books
(a few of which are for hikers, most of course are for climbers), and
they have a hut
finder. Both these links are to the French version, and can be
reached directly from their home page.
- F�d�ration Suisse de Tourisme
P�destre is the body that coordinates the activities of the
cantonal hiking associations. Their site is only available in French
and German. They have links to each of the cantonal associations, and
also have an online Wander
Shop (the shop is available in English). They have a large
collection of commercially produced maps, which are not really needed
but may interest map lovers. Almost all the books on the Valais are
in German.
- VALRANDO,
only available in French and German, is the Valaisan hiking club. It
has a contacts page and sells relevant books and maps.
- Philippe Noth's
excellent cyber-hiking site, also has a partial English version. I found it an
extremely valuable resource for hiking in Switzerland, with a strong
emphasis on the Valais.
- Rob Veenhof has an
interesting site, lots of miscellaneous useful information and a
multilingual dictionary
- A collection of pages (in French) on various refuges in
the mountains, and a collection of hut GPS
coordinates, downloadable in a large variety of formats.
- Steve &
Judy Pardoe's TMB FAQ Page deals with the Tour du Mont Blanc, but
much of the information is applicable to the Haute Route. There is
one exception: it seems that bailing out is difficult on the TMB; on
the Haute Route you are almost always at most a few hours from a
village.