Welcome to Switzerland! Calls Texts and Data…
Just when you think you’ve thought of everything, something comes along to prove that you haven’t…
We decamped, paid, and left the campsite in Dalaas, Austria, this morning, at around 10.30am. Google told us that the journey to our next destination, in Switzerland, would take approximately three and a half hours. The weather was pretty grim, making it a good day to travel. At some point we left Austria and entered Liechtenstein. In fact, the border between the two countries, at least along the road and in the direction we were travelling, was an actual proper border, with official-looking kiosks and border police. We drove straight through, but there was a van stopped there, so it’s possible that they do the occasional spot-checks.
It seemed like no sooner were we in Liechtenstein than we were out of it, and into Switzerland. Blink and you’d miss it – one to tick off, though.
For a while after that, we were driving alongside the River Rhine. The weather stayed grey and wet as we drove, so the landscape around us was mostly hidden in thick cloud. As we drove, both Tracey and I received text messages; ones we had become used to as a matter of course, received as we crossed into any fresh country, from our phone provider (ID Mobile), welcoming us to that country, and reminding us that we could use data, calls and text from our mobile plan without any extra charges.
Or so we thought…
Neither of us took any notice of the texts because it had become a matter of routine. My excuse was that I was driving. I was also using the phone as a satnav (Google Maps). When Tracey received further texts telling here that she had used up her data cap, we suddenly started to take notice. On further inspection, it turned out that within 20 minutes of entering Switzerland, she had hit her data cap of £20. We pulled over at the next available rest stop, which also happened to have a MacDonalds. It was lunchtime, and we were both hungry, and despite the fact that we’d planned to make sandwiches in the van, we decided to head into the Big ‘M’, just so that we could make use of their free wi-fi.
Once we’d placed our extortionately priced order (£30 for two burgers, fries and a drink), we attempted to connect to the wi-fi, so that we could login to the ID Mobile app and see what was going on. To login to the MacDonalds free wi-fi required entering a mobile phone number, in international format, so that it could then send us pass codes to access the service. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get it to work. In desperation, I went to the counter and asked the young lass in charge of orders if there was another way of accessing the wi-fi. She said there wasn’t, but very kindly used her own mobile phone to login on my behalf, and we were away.
I discovered that I, too, had almost hit my data cap. Mine is set higher than Tracey’s, at £50, to her £20. My app told me that in the short time we’d been in Switzerland, my phone – running Google Maps – had gobbled its way through £45 worth of roaming data. Had Tracey not become aware of the data cap issue on her own phone, which hit the cap of £20 before mine, and my phone had been able to use up a further £5 worth, then Maps would have stopped working and we would have been totally scuppered, navigation-wise (I’m still experiencing mild panic attacks at just the thought of how that might have gone down..
ID Mobile informed me that data outside of the plan is charged at £1.50 per mb, leaving me with very little option, under the circumstances, than to purchase a 20GB ‘Add-on’ for Switzerland at £35, for a duration of 10 days. Had we known in advance, of course, we could have purchased the add-on before leaving Austria, giving us plenty of data for £35, thus saving us almost £100 (£45 roaming on my account, £20 on Tracey’s and £30-worth of MacDonalds Burgers that we hadn’t really wanted, or planned for. Whichever way you look at it, this was an expensive oversight; both of us had assumed – incorrectly – that Switzerland would be included in our respective phone plans, as is the rest of Europe. How wrong we were.
We arrived at Jungfrau Camping site, in Lauterbrunnen, in the heart of the Swiss Alps, at around 4pm, without further incident. The weather is pretty dismal, and the forecast isn’t looking great for the forthcoming six days of our visit. There is lots to see and do here, though, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the weather might improve as the week progresses, or at least give us a couple of good days to do the mountain stuff. We are camped in a valley right next to Switzerland’s highest waterfall, Staubbachfall, and are a mere cable car’s ride from views of Europe’s third highest mountain, Jungfrau, and its famous neighbour, The Eiger, both of which we’re hoping to become acquainted with before we leave next Sunday. Fingers crossed for the weather…
By the way; the waterfall is floodlit in the evening – how cool is that?…
