On the 13th episode of Travel Tales by Afar, Bonnie Tsui, author of Why We Swim, floats down three Swiss rivers. While swimming in Zurich, Bern and Basel she chats with locals about Switzerland’s river-swimming culture and learns how each city’s channel is integral to Swiss life— from the mundanity of a morning commute to the historic character of a place.
Transcript
Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Travel Tales by Afar. Every week, we hear stories of life-changing travel from poets, scientists, authors, entrepreneurs, and more. This week, on our last episode of Travel Tales season five, we’re going to journey down one of Switzerland’s most important rivers.
Our guide is Bonnie Tsui, author of Why We Swim, a cultural and scientific exploration of our human relationship with water and swimming. And for Bonnie, swimming is pretty much in her DNA. Her parents met in a pool in Hong Kong and so she and her brother were raised in the water. Growing up in New York, they swam at Jones Beach. They joined the swim team and became lifeguards, just like Bonnie’s dad. She says that started a lifelong relationship with the water that continues to this day.
Bonnie has written several stories for Afar, and the one you’re about to hear is one of her latest. It’s a little bit about a dog, a little bit about the beauty of open water swimming, and quite a lot about what Swiss rivers—and the swimmers who claim them—say about the cities they call home.
Bonnie Tsui: It’s lunchtime on the Limmat River in downtown Zurich, on the first truly hot day of Swiss summer. In the midday June heat, sunbathers are sprawled on wooden decks, clad in the barely-there swimwear of the young and confident. When the scorch becomes unbearable, they get up, jump off the diving board, and zip by on the conveyor belt of the river, exiting on loop to do it all over again.
I came to the Limmat straight off a flight from San Francisco; Swiss trains being every bit as convenient as you’d expect, the river was just a 12-minute ride from the Zurich airport. I’m just passing through on my way to Basel, but I couldn’t help but make a quick pilgrimage to jump in. So I’ve tucked my luggage into a locker at the train station and brought a tote bag with a towel, swimsuit, and goggles to Oberer Letten, a riverside pool complex in the heart of Zurich.
And as I stand on the entry stairs and take in the scene, I can feel the current tugging firmly at my calves. Let’s go! it says. The Limmat is chilly and brisk, its waters juiced by three weeks of rain. Plunging into the cold water cures me of jet lag straightaway, and I begin swimming upstream to hold myself in place. My brain and body are instantly awake and alive. The sun winks at me every time I turn my head to breathe.
The moment I stop to tread water, the current flushes me downstream to the exit staircase by the main lifeguard office. I’ve always been a swimmer—I’ve been swimming everywhere from the Atlantic and the Aegean to the Caribbean and the Coral Sea—and it’s always thrilling to see what that looks like in new places.
The guards on duty at Oberer Letten are friendly, asking me where I’m from and telling me about their favorite water sports. As we chat, a fellow swimmer offers to take my picture.
In the hierarchy of Swiss rivers, the Limmat is relatively short—it flows just 22 miles from Lake Zurich before meeting up with the Aare River—but it’s a lovely first taste of Swiss river life. I climb out, wave goodbye to the lifeguards, and get back on the train to Basel.
Behind every great city in Switzerland is a river to swim in—often on a lunch hour, sometimes even to commute to work. Nicknamed “the water tower of Europe,” the country holds more than 6 percent of the continent’s freshwater reserves. Several major European rivers run through Switzerland, with their headwaters in the Alps.
Switzerland’s status as the hydrographic center of Europe has informed the history of pretty much every city from Bern and Basel to Zurich and Geneva, situating them on key trade routes and strategic crossings.
The ingrained reverence for rivers was something I first glimpsed 20 years ago, when my husband, Matt, and I went swimming down the Aare River in Bern, the Swiss capital, with a dog named Arcas.
I don’t love dogs as a category, and this has always felt like a moral failing. But Arcas was special.
Arcas was just a puppy then, a rust-red farm dog with one ear up and one ear down, and a little afraid of the water. He belonged to one of our closest friends, August, who is Swiss German and grew up in Bern. The Aare is famous for being cold and glacier-milk blue. It flows right from the Bernese Alps.
What I remember most about the experience was that otherworldly blue, and the thrill of flying down an icy river with a puppy who looked at everything with new eyes. And so did we. It was the first time we’d ever seen a river so integrated into the life of a city, in ways that were both practical (getting from point A to point B) and playful (taking the dog on an adventure).
On this visit, I want to examine that relationship more closely, specifically in Basel, on the Rhine, the longest and one of the most storied rivers in Switzerland. What might it tell me about the character of the city itself?
When I arrive at the Hotel Krafft on the Kleinbasel side of the river, my hair is still damp from my dip in the Limmat. In my little single room overlooking the Rhine, I find a dry bag hanging on a hook, waiting for me to use during my stay.
It’s shaping up to be a two-river day.
The Rhine, whose Swiss portion runs more than 230 miles from the Alps to the border with Germany, is a river of a totally different scale than the Limmat in Zurich. Hundreds of people swim in the same busy commercial waterway as ferries, cruise vessels, and the cargo ships that transport much of the oil and gasoline for Switzerland. That might seem like a bad idea. But on a hot summer day, everyone gets in, and there are some who swim in the river all year round.
The Rhine wasn’t always so welcoming to swimmers. Despite the remnants of historic public baths, by the 1970s, the water was deeply polluted by industry. More than a century earlier, textile dye entrepreneurs established their first factories along a canal that dumped toxic waste into the Rhine.
A years-long effort to clean up the water gave Basel a swimmable river, beloved today by locals and visitors alike. There’s also an annual open water event held in August, the Basler Rheinschwimmen, in which thousands of people float down the river and city organizers promote swimming safety.
By the time I jump in on this hot June day, it’s 5:30 p.m.—happy hour. The daylight is still long, and swimmers shriek their way downriver.
Floating 10 feet away from me in the brisk current is my Swiss swim guide, Thomas Flatt, who wears a fisherman’s cap to keep the sun out of his eyes.
Thomas is a trim, tanned 55-year-old with the teeth-forward grin of a movie star. He’s on the board of IG Rheinschwimmen, a volunteer association that advocates for safe public swimming in the Rhine. The do’s include swimming with a buddy, staying in swimming areas marked by buoys, and watching for watercraft and moorings. The don’ts? Jumping off bridges, swimming while intoxicated, and using buoyancy aids. Thomas tells me that swimming in the river is deeply rooted in a culture of individual responsibility, rather than state control and supervision.
Thomas Flatt: That’s why we made this association to guard the rights of the swimmers. Because in Basel, swimming is allowed everywhere.
Bonnie: And because the Rhine runs through the center of Basel, it serves as a major recreation area for the population of nearly 200,000 people, more than 30 percent of whom are international residents. It’s a communal place for different parts of society to come together.
Thomas is taking me on a swim that will pass beneath three of Basel’s bridges. We’re joined by several of his friends, including one Dutchman, two sisters who grew up just outside Basel, and a woman from Ohio who has been living in the city for more than two decades. They all have an active relationship with the Rhine.
Niels is the Dutchman.
Niels van der Valk: I’m Niels. I’m Dutch. I’ve been living here for eight years now. I’ve been swimming from a young age, of course. But my connection with the Rhine started when I came here. And we found out that it’s actually a lovely place in summer, and it’s 30 degrees [celsius] easily. And I wasn’t expecting that whatsoever. So I started taking my family into the Rhine, and there’s thousands of people floating by here on a great day.
Bonnie: Sahar, the American, introduced Thomas to wintertime swimming in the Rhine.
Bonnie [in interview]: Will you tell me your first and last name?
Sahar Salah Mansour: Sahar Salah Mansour. I moved here in ’95. I’ve been here forever, but um, I started about four years ago. I thought it was amazing and I went with a Finnish friend of mine who, 30 seconds after the water, ‘come out, come out,’ and I’m like, but I’m not even cold. I discovered I could really stay very long, up to 30 minutes in very cold water.
Bonnie: And then you acclimate very quickly, too.
Basel’s urban highlight reel exhilarates all of us: the high, fast water, the sunny cathedral spires and the sidewalk cafés flying by, the riverbanks humming with conversation and clinking glasses. We keep an eye on possible exit routes and eventually climb out at a ladder before Dreirosenbrücke, the last bridge before the Port of Switzerland. From here, we have a clear view to France and Germany, whose water towers and churches are just beyond the bridge.
Before I even dry off, my new friends conjure up après-swim Aperol spritzes and a spread of bread, cheese, olives, and hummus from one of the riverside buvettes, the seasonal pop-up sheds that serve food and drinks. We pull up some café chairs and discuss river swimming in other Swiss cities—the Limmat in Zurich and the Aare in Bern, of course, but also the Rhône in Geneva and the Reuss in Lucerne. Everyone agrees that while those waterways have their merits, swimming has a distinct character here in Basel, sewn into the fabric of the place.
The everydayness of swimming is such that getting in is how you understand the soul of each place. Thomas points out some swimmers floating by.
Thomas: Because going through the city is a special experience. Like, like those, you see?
We just want to be better than Zurich… because there’s a competition between Basel and Zurich.
Bonnie: The next evening, I meet up with another one of Thomas’s friends, a woman named Barbara Zimmerle. She’s invited me to go for a dip at Rheinbad Breite, a recently renovated 125-year-old bathhouse. In a sunny break between clouds, we walk upriver and float back down to the swim club and its conveniently located staircase. Barbara volunteers on the board of Rheinbad Breite and helped raise money for the recent expansion that restored the bathhouse to its original footprint. It spans two levels, with changing rooms, showers, lockers, a wintertime sauna, and spacious decks for sunbathing and hanging out after a river swim. Anyone can drop in and use the facilities for six Swiss francs, the same price as citywide, public pool entry.
Barbara lives just uphill from the club—I could throw a rock and hit her window. She tells me how the rhythm of her days is dictated by the ships moving through the port, the horns warning swimmers downriver, the vicissitudes of wind and temperature and passing weather.
She shows me a photo from a more recent morning when, instead of going by bicycle, her 15-year-old daughter put her things in a dry bag and swam down the river to school with her friend.
“It’s not something that she does all the time,” Barbara says. “But it’s such a nice way to get to school.”
Immersing myself in Swiss river life, of course, also means feeling the undercurrent: the knowledge that our outdoor pastimes are increasingly vulnerable to colossal shifts wrought by a warming climate—Alpine river swimming, perhaps more so than most.
I talked with Stefanie Gubler, the head of the Swiss National Park Research Commission. Stefanie’s focus is on biodiversity, climate change, and impact on ecosystems. In the mountains of southwestern Switzerland, it was once possible to hike 30 minutes from the parking lot to the moraine. When she goes up now, the glacier is gone. “Snow is an issue,” she says, “and the whole river system is suffering from that.”
The changes she’s observed swing wildly from one year to the next, from extreme heat, drought, and sediment buildup in the rivers to heavy rain, flooding, and rockfall from a destabilized landscape. What this means for the swimmer is more dangerous and unpredictable conditions. The month of my visit was plagued by extreme rain and flooding across Switzerland, which pushed most rivers to treacherous highs and filled them with debris. Climate affects culture, of course, in ways that we can’t yet predict.
I think about how rivers are so core to the lived experience of this place. So many daily goings-on have a delightful, just-add-water version to them. But buoyancy isn’t effortless. The work of staying afloat, both literal and metaphoric, requires attention, care, and collective as well as individual responsibility—as do all things worth having.
Aislyn Greene: And that was Bonnie Tsui. Don’t you just want to go for a swim now? If you want some inspiration, we’ll link to her book, Why We Swim, as well as to her website in the show notes. Her new book, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, will be published April 22, 2025. In the show notes, I’ll also share that pre-order link. And that wraps our last episode of the season. We’ll be back in 2025 with more inspiring stories of life-changing travel. We’ll see you then.
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This has been Travel Tales, a production of AFAR Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene and Nikki Galteland. Music composed and produced by Strike Audio.
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