GstaadLife

Is the airspace above the Pays d’Enhaut and Saanenland big enough for three ballooning companies? Just 15km from Gstaad, Château-d’Oex is a renowned center for alpine ballooning. This January, the popular Festival des Ballons will be celebrating its 30th anniversary. Following several years of financial difficulties for the local ballooning company, Sky Event, news that a French company, France Montgolfières, is setting up shop in Château-d’Oex is causing something of a stir. Sky Event is in a tight spot. The potential for expanding the ballooning clientele is limited, especially given that the number of flights in the valley has remained stable year after year. With their first flights planned for mid-December, France Montgolfières claims that they wish to entice more of Gstaad’s clientele. Do they really think that Sky Event, as well as Château-d’Oex’s other balloonist Florent Jobin, didn’t think of that?

Well, they didn't get enough last year. This week Stanislas de Sadeleer of the Gstaad Automobile Club, and his co-pilot Vincent Janssens, will be embarking on another epic voyage from Paris to Dakar in the second annual Transafricaine Classic Rally which begins on November 1 in France. The year's event promises to be even tougher than last year, with more than 120 competitors compared to last year's 70-odd. Of the new drivers, some are professionals who have raced the modern Paris-Dakar, so placing as well as last year's 11th is going to be tough. GstaadLife.com readers will remember last year's drama when de Sadeleer and Ledi Garage's Hansueli Brand were detained by the Mauritanian army along the disputed border with Morocco-annexed Western Sahara (see Team Gstaad detained by Mauritanian army). We hope for no such drama for this year's Gstaad team, who will be racing in the same 1994 Land Rover Discovery Series 1 as last year.

Here at GstaadLife.com we'll have regular coverage from the desert, with Team Gstaad carrying the very latest in mobile blogging technology from Nokia to deliver to us live photos and video from the sands of western Africa. To get a taste of what we're in for, click on the links below or watch the video. The official race website is here. And check back with us regularly over the next 18 days to follow their progress. GstaadLife.com wishes de Sadeleer and Janssens the best of luck and a safe run down to Senegal.

Above: Stanislas de Sadeleer (left) with co-pilot Vincent Janssens (right) making final checks on their 1994 Land Rover Discovery which was prepared for this year's rally by Hansueli Brand (center) and the team at Ledi Garage in Feutersoey.

Team Gstaad Automobile Club is sponsored in part by ING Private Banking.

Full coverage from Transafricaine Classic Rally 2006 [DE = auch auf Deutsch] :

• Discipline leads to superb finish in Senegal for Gstaad Transafricans [DE]
• Transafricans close in on Dakar [DE]
• Village parties in Mali as Transafricans navigate desert brushlands [DE]
• Team Gstaad rises to Nega Pass challenge [DE]
• Relief for Team Gstaad as rallying resumes [DE]
• Green light for Transafrican Rally! [DE]
• Transafricans out of Mauritania but rally now in doubt [DE]
• Team Gstaad detained by Mauritanian army [DE]
• Military tensions force cancellation of Transafricaine Rally stage [DE]
• Transafricans damage Land Rover in rough terrain [DE]
• Dust, dust and more dust for Gstaad Transafricans [DE]
• A wild day in the Saharan dunes for Team Gstaad [DE]
• Tranafricans come in 5th in first African stage [DE]
• Team GAC makes landfall in Africa [DE]
• Smooth sailing into Spain [DE]
• Transafricans arrive safely in Narbonne [DE]
• Trouble for Transafricans after 100 meters [DE]
• Ominous words from Team GAC [DE]
• Transafricans begin voyage to Dakar [DE]
• Transafricans stop by Geneva [DE]
• Bon voyage aux Transafricains! [DE]
• Transafricaine rally apéro draws a crowd [DE]
• The real way to see the Sahara

GstaadLife.com sister-website AnzeigervonSaanen.ch is now online! It's been a while coming but for those of you who understand German (Swiss-German if you want to watch the videos) and who want to keep up with the real ins-and-outs of our local community, the new website is a good complement to this one. Written in the same style as GstaadLife.com, the Anzeiger online will dig a little deeper on local issues as they affect locals. You can also search the Info Aktuell and the print archive, and in the Marktplatz Saanenland (Saanenland Marketplace) you can find all the ads that appear in the Anzeiger every Tuesday and Friday. The site was built in collaboration with local media software firm, Consenda AG, and is run by Andrea von Siebenthal, who many of you will know from past GstaadLife coverage. She caught up with Editor-in-Chief Frank Mueller to ask him about the all-new Anzeiger. Click below to watch the interview, or for those among you who are Saaneduetsch-challenged, click here for an English language transcript.

This weekend is Gstaadermesse weekend, a bi-annual love-fest for all our local businesses. Basically everyone congregates in the Tennishalle over four days for what seems like a cross between village fair and Ideal Home Exhibition. We jest, but actually it's quite interesting to see all the latest and greatest from our local barons, and it's a great venue to take the pulse of the local residents. And that's exactly what the newly-digitized AnzeigervonSaanen.ch was doing last night, with Andrea von Siebenthal wandering around getting people's thoughts on Gstaad and life in general. Watch the video below from Thursday evening (Swiss German only) to see...

• Newly-elected local federal parliament member Erich von Siebenthal on his victory
• Gstaadermesse president Christoph Romang on the first smoke-free Gstaadermesse.
• The GstaadBusiness-Angels of Martin Göppert
• Richard Müller in the dark
• Gottfried von Siebenthal telling us about his favorite photo from his new book
• Lorenz Mösching on the stup for the Gstaadermesse
• Police chief Urs Bach on the controversial security concept for Saanenland
• Oh, and don't forget tourism director Roger Seifritz on whether it will snow this winter...

...and the second video from Saturday evening has a few thoughts from other local merchants past and present as well as visitors to the Gstaader Messe:

Prepare for hybernation: the clocks in Switzerland (and indeed throughout Europe) go back by one hour at 02h00 on Sunday morning October 28. So, an extra hour of sleep this weekend, then dark evenings all the way through till March 30 2008.

The Fernwärme Saanen-Gstaad project has requested its construction permit. The what, you may be asking. Fernwärme is Saanenland’s answer to the global renewables revolution. Unlike the wind farm proposal on Horetube (see A wind farm on the Hornberg?), this project is immediate and aesthetically less controversial. SFr 25 million are being invested to get an innovative, cheap and environmentally-friendly power plant burning timber for heat up and running by the end of 2008. This concept was pioneered by the Lech ski resort in Austria. Half of the plant’s 28 MWH capacity has already been sold, and the largest customer so far is the Gstaad Palace. Depending on the location of your chalet, homeowners can also be linked into the system. If you are interested visit the Gstaadermesse exposition this weekend, click here (German only), or contact Claude Minder of EBL Elektra Baselland on 061 926 14 06 or claude.minder-at-ebl.bl.ch.

Skyscrapers are already a subject to controversy in Swiss cities (see Swissinfo: Roche headquarters to redefine Basel skyline), but ironically now the arguments are spreading up the alps. The Klein Matterhorn (above) could soon become Switzerland's 77th 4,000 meter peak if Heinz Julen, the renowned architect from Zermatt, successfully tops the mountain with his man-made steel and glass pyramid (see Swissinfo: Artist dreams of building Alps' highest hotel). Whilst Laxeralp recently tabled a similar project, the Swiss star architects of the Allianz Arena in Munich and the Beijing Olympic Stadium, Herzog and de Meuron, are still pursuing their vision of a 105-meter hotel above Davos. So it is that the vision of alpine metropoli may become reality. Before passing judgment, however, we should cast our eye down the valley to our own Glacier 3000, which with its Botta restaurant should remind us that Gstaad is no bystander in this extravaganza of high-alpine development.

By Tim Kilchenmann

The Swiss political landscape has recently been marked by unusually aggressive campaigning from the main political parties ahead of the federal election on October 21. In particular the populist Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has moved centre stage. While known in Gstaad-Saanenland as a benign voice of farmers' rights, the SVP's allegedly racist posters, protests, and Il Duce-like focus on its leader Christoph Blocher have become what passes for substantive election debate in 2007. But if there is one institution that is truly gleeful about this year's controversial campaigning then it must be the international press. In September the (UK) Independent’s Paul Vallely proclaimed Switzerland as "Europe’s heart of darkness." More recently the Guardian described the SVP's manifesto as Neo-Nazi literature, and the New York Times published a cartoon of a Swiss cross being perverted into a Swastika. And it's not just the global major broadsheets, mind you. The United Nations has voiced its concern about racism in Switzerland, not to mention the murmurs of grass roots organisations such as Amnesty International. The themes of this year's Swiss elections are frankly embarrassing.

Below, whatever the climate in Switzerland, Gstaad has always been a multicultural environment!

Bilanz has once again set forth its rankings for the best hotels of 2007. And as ever Saanenland is well-represented in the resort hotels category, with four of our venerable five-stars making the top 50: the Gstaad Palace is 4th, the Grand Hotel Bellevue 8th, the Ermitage-Golf Schönried 20th, and Grand Hotel Park 28th. Not too shabby, but if we take a look back to last year’s results, we see that three of them have actually slipped in the ratings, the Palace from 3rd to 4th, the Bellevue from 5th to 8th, and the Park sliding from 21st to 28th. Only the Ermitage-Golf ranking remains unchanged. Overall the changes in the first eight places are minor: same hotels, different order. So why have Gstaad hotels slipped? Certainly the problem does not lie with an inferior quality of the service here in Gstaad. Only the loss of seven places for Grand Hotel Park raises suggests changes for the worse. The main issue, in fact, is the strength of the competition.

Click here to download the complete list of Bilanz hotel rankings for 2007

Another week, another gourmet guide. Restaurant ratings have become something of a tiresome affair in Saanenland. Not only is there a drive to decorate restaurant windows with as many Gault Millau and Guide-Bleu signs as possible, but the tourist office relentlessly bangs on about Saanenland having the highest Gault Millau point density in all of Switzerland. But making real sense out of this jungle of recommendation is difficult (continued...)

Left: Robert Speth with wife Susanne. Chesery has once again scored tops among local restaurants in the 2008 Gault Millau guide.

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