Cafes near the Chocolat Tea Room in Geneva

All this talk of chocolate and coffee has me thinking about Geneva; because no matter where you go in this city, you are never far from either.

In keeping with the theme of GO HOW,  that is how you get where you go matters –  I want to stress that sweets notwithstanding, Geneva is a city for people who like to be on the move.

Swiss at the gate at Geneva International

They’ve got trains, they’ve got buses, they’ve got boats and (my personal favorite) they’ve got airplanes!

Boy oh boy do they have airplanes. EasyJet has a hub here and fifty-nine other airlines serve little Geneva Airport. And not only that, the airport is so centrally located, from some hotels, you can actually walk there, which I can assure you I did. Several times.   Okay, the terminal building blocks your view of the planes on the ramp, still you sure can hear them roar and the smell of jet fuel just reeks “I’m goin’ somewhere!”

So grab your hat – may  I suggest this one I saw in the window of a downtown Geneva hat shop…

Fab hat in a downtown Geneva shop window

And put on your shoes – if any of these paper versions from a stationery store strike your fancy…

Paper shoes on display at a stationery store in Geneva

And come with me on a walking tour of Geneva’s trains, boats and planes. Before we’re done we’ll stop for some cocoa, I promise.

To get into downtown Geneva from the airport, or anywhere else for that matter, one only need hop on any of the buses that run from 6:00 a.m. to midnight or one of the overnight buses that go from midnight to 4:00 a.m. (If you want to travel between 4:00 and 6:00 you’ll be traveling by cab and be warned;  it will cost you.)  Hotels and hostels give guests complimentary Geneva Transport cards. How hospitable is that? Visitors travel on the city buses for free.

In what I would call downtown but what Genevans call  “center-ville”, one simply must try the trams, which run as precisely and as quietly as Swiss watches.  So reliable are they, that my friend Joya and I calculated we had exactly 13 minutes after our lunch to dash into a shop and buy some chocolate.  Emerging from the shop (there was an astonishingly large and anxiety-inducing variety of chocolate there) we had one minute to spare. Our tram arrived just as we stepped onto the platform. I said, “whew”, but Joya was calm. She knew the tram wouldn’t depart a second ahead of its scheduled time.

Surprises at every turn and staircase

Don’t think I spent my entire visit viewing the city from the window of public transport. Geneva is a wonderful place to explore on foot. In the old town, there are twisty streets leading to open gardens and darkened stairways that end in cobblestone courtyards. Many of these mysterious passageways lead you up to the highest point in Geneva and  St. Peter’s Cathedral which was Catholic for 500 years before becoming Protestant in 1536.

No visit is complete without a walk along the shore of beautiful Lake Geneva where the masts of thousands of sailboats create a spiny forescape to the rolling hills and  snowcapped peaks on the other shore.

Certainly the sailboats outnumber the mouettes, the ferry boats that take commuters and tourists from one side to another. But anybody can ride the mouettes  and I think to get on those sailboats, you kinda–hafta know somebody, which I did not.

Swans and gulls and who knows what else

I walked and walked and walked, stopping every now and then to watch the fights break out between swans and gulls who were being fed by the children along the lakeshore.

And while I don’t regret one minute of the way I spent my day in Geneva,  when I returned to the US, I learned that through a program called Genèveroule,  free bikes are available to rent at bike shops throughout the city. Yeah, that would have been fun too.

As dusk settled in and it started to feel colder, (no surprise, it was February) I turned inland from the lake and was drawn as if by a powerful force to a cozy cabin nestled under the trees just off Mont Blanc Square. Was it the smell of you-know-what coaxing  me ever closer just like Hansel and Gretel were lured into the witches oven?  They could have been boiling tar in there. How could I resist this?

The Cottage Cafe in Geneva

And so here is where my day came to a close – inside the adorable, straight-out-of-a-storybook Cottage Cafe . Here is where I sipped a steaming cup of hot chocolate and revisited my multi-modal journey – enjoying it all right down to the last stop.

Christine Negroni

Author of The New York Times bestseller, The Crash Detectives, I am also a journalist, public speaker and broadcaster specializing in aviation and travel.