Lausanne makes a brief appearance in the book. After discovering in Geneva that Harris has only brought US dollars to Switzerland and that therefore they lack the cash to get a ticket to Interlaken, Jessica shepherds everyone to Lausanne on a cheap ticket. There she manages to convert the US currency to Swiss francs and get the tickets to Interlaken in the nick of time. The action is basically contained in the railway station.

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It's an important point to note that you really should pay your fare for public transport in Switzerland. Not that I endorse trying to get by without paying your fare anywhere else, of course. It’s just that in Switzerland you stand a fair chance of getting caught if you don’t, thanks to all the ticket inspectors. It’s also fairly likely that it’ll be a fair bit higher than the original fare would have been but since you’ve been caught, fair and square – OK, that’s enough crap fair/fare jokes. Let’s just get to Lausanne.

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Beyond the semi-picturesque, semi-functional station, Lausanne is a fairly – sorry, reasonably – pretty town towards the eastern end of Lake Geneva. It doesn’t sit in the Alps so much as next to them but you can get into some good hiking terrain very fast thanks to several rail and bus lines heading straight out of the station and into the surrounding mountainsides. Lausanne lies at the foot of the mountains, overlooking the lake in front of them. If you’re coming from Geneva, you could consider it like a sort of gateway into the more serious hiking terrain.

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The town itself is a large town but not as big as its larger neighbour down the lake, namely Geneva, which is a small city. Lausanne has a lot of nice places to visit, to go shopping in and also to eat. Like Geneva, it also has a Church of Scotland which is a bit odd, given that there are no other Churches of Scotland if you head eastwards into mainland Europe until you hit Bochum in Germany or Budapest, Hungary, depending which way you go. Maybe religious, Scottish people have a particular thing for French-speaking Alps. Or perhaps they’re the best connected by EasyJet to Glasgow or Edinburgh. The latter seems unlikely as a religious explanation though, given the historical linkages round here to the great, Scottish reformation character, John Knox, who passed away in 1572. That’s an awful long time to have to wait for a flight.

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 A curious point to note with regard to Lausanne is that it provides some serious scoring potential for men who otherwise have all the sex appeal of a discarded washing machine with a bad case of what may be either rust or underpants fungus clogging it up. For some reason, good-looking women in Switzerland seem remarkably attracted to quite unattractive men and nowhere is this more apparent than in Lausanne. Go to the station or the lakeside in summer in particular and see how many couples look as though Miss Universe just started dating a hairy zombie who failed his audition for “Night of the Living Dead” because he wasn’t sexy enough. This is apparently because Lausanne has a very high proportion of students in its population and these guys are typical of the hipster look – inability to shave anything so that the head hair merges into the facial hair, merges into the body hair, merges into the pubes and so on. The clothes look like they were last washed when people were using modems for their internet connection. The facial expression expresses less intellectual capacity than that of a drunk hamster. And so on. Yet these guys seem to score, and really well at that, with no problem in Switzerland in general, and Lausanne in particular.

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So there you have it. If beautiful countryside, gorgeous girlfriends or spiritual nourishment are your thing, and if you’re a hiker, a hipster or Scottish, then Lausanne may well be for you.

Lausanne Station. Not the worst in the world by a long way but not as attractive as the town.