We arrived in Fribourg in time for dinner and ordered a soup. “Sorry,” said the waitress from Romania. “The cooker says ‘No soup’” Then she added, “This is a Spanish-owned hotel!”

We didn't get the connection between a faulting cooking range and Spanish ownership. “Ah!” we said, vaguely, “Then we’ll have gazpacho”: we’d first tasted this sustaining soup in Seville.

The waitress vanished, returned “Sorry, no. The cooker says it is a cold soup, not served on cool days.”

Wonder of wonders: a talking cooker? Then realisation dawned: ‘The Cooker’ was the reluctant chef. He took his time producing fried fish. It was edible: just about! We wondered if our visit to Fribourg would be a slimming tour!
Then after breakfast the next morning, the very experienced and warm Solange Noth appeared and quickly restored our faith in Switzerland. She introduced us to Laura Krahenbuhl, our morning guide. Laura seemed a little timorous, probably wondering if we spoke a Peter Sellers sort of English. She relaxed after a while and led us out into a beautiful day full of sunshine and a crisp nip in the air. She told us that the 850-year-old city had been built on three levels descending to the valley of the Sarine river.

We walked through a park with a mechanistic fountain… wheels and cogs and levers… made by Jean Tinguely to commemorate his friend, Formula One driver Jo Siffert who had died in a crash. Then we descended to a lower level of the town,  riding a unique funicular powered by the town’s waste water. It filled a tank below the upper car, which then did a controlled descent and pulled up the lower car. The tank below this then filled up, descended and pulled back its twin. It had been installed in 1899 and was the only one of its kind still surviving.

We walked down a street lined with beautiful medieval houses in what once, the tanners’ quarter. Obviously the city fathers of that age didn’t want the odiferous business of this sector to reach their delicate nostrils!

The 13th century Cathedral of Saint Nicholas was a soaring, inspiring, example of the best of European religious architecture, particularly its intricately carved Gothic entrance. Sadly we couldn’t take any pictures inside because it was a Sunday in this French-speaking, predominantly Catholic, canton of Switzerland.

We returned to the hotel and Solange took charge of us, sat us in her blue Volksvagen, and drove us to the lakeside village of Murten. In La Schiff restaurant, with a sailing ship as its inn sign,  we had an excellent soup (at last), delicately filleted and fried pale perch fresh from the lake, and a dessert of wild berries and cream, washed down with a white Chasselas wine. The chasselas grapes were, according to legend, introduced into Switzerland by the Romans who had, apparently, first grown it in Egypt. Not a very likely story. But the good thing about this meal was that this ‘cooker’ was far more skilled that the one in our hotel! Or it could have been the French cultural influence: much of their cuisine is delicately understated.

We walked down to the lakeside, where visitors fed ducks, grey swans and black swans. We boarded a ferry and chugged across Lake Murten, bobbing with luxury yachts, to Praz. Serried rows of vines stretched over the sunlit slopes of the lake-facing hills. Sunlight reflected off lakes is, according to viticulturists, excellent for ripening grapes gently. Families picnicked between the golden rows and a farmer carrying a hoe walked his shaggy sheepdog up a winding, unpaved, road.

We turned into the village, with its geranium-bright window boxes, and entered a barn-like building with a sign that proclaimed Rouge & Blanc. Our host, Etienne Perrin had trained himself to anticipate international demands for wines from this region, buy direct from the vintners, and sell to consumers under the Rouge & Blanc label. We had a brief session of wine tasting in his cellar and felt sure that Indian connoisseurs would find his Swiss wines very interesting.

The evening sun lay low on the lake when we chugged over it again, headed back to  Fribourg and  Le Café du Midi for a fondue dinner. We were served by two slim, tall, Ethiopian girls as attenuated and graceful as Brancusi sculptures. Solange explained that she had ordered a half-and-half: half of a cheese that has a flavour and the other half of a cheese that melts easily.

The fondue pan is first rubbed with garlic, the cheese is then put into a pan to melt over a spirit stove, and the pan with the bubbling cheese is laid on the table. Diners tear off chunks of bread, impale them on fondue forks, stir them in the melting cheese till the chunks are well coated with cheese, and eat.  Alternatively, small, new, boiled potatoes in their jackets are cut in half and used as the chunks of bread are. We tried both, had the pan replenished with bubbling cheese, and washed it all down with red wine. Without wine… or black tea, for teetotalers .. the fondue will lie heavy on the stomach.

We slept very soundly ready for another lip-smacking encounter the next day. Solange drove us through rolling, green, farmland with the cheese fort of Gruyere rising atop its hill in the distance.

This was clearly dairy country and even a children’s park had fiber-glass cattle daubed in psychedelic colours. The live ones in the black-and-white uniforms of Swiss, lowland, cows, chomped in the fields or regarded us with heavy, bovine, disinterest. It was these, high-yielding, animals that had made such entrepreneurs as Daniel Peter, Francois-Louis Cailler and Henri Nestle establish the Swiss Chocolate Capital in Broc.

The Cailler Chocolate Factory is a long, immaculately, white building set in a garden against a backdrop of green hills. Inside, guides dressed in cream and chocolate coloured uniforms escort visitors around on the one-hour tour.

The whole, immaculately, hygienic place has a faintly rich aroma of creamy milk and chocolate. There were four aroma pillars on which we whiffed the different fragrances of  white chocolate made from cocoa butter, milk chocolate first made by Daniel Peter, dark chocolate that has an intriguingly bitter undertone, and chocolate with hazelnut.  We saw the whole process from sampling the raw materials in sacks… the hazelnuts were very popular… to the grinding, mixing, blending, moulding. We viewed it all from behind protective glass and learnt that Cailler chocolate uses condensed milk, whereas Nestles uses milk powder.

Then, when we had been thoroughly immersed in chocolate lore, we were led through the sample room where visitors can gorge on as many chocolates, of as many flavours and varieties, as they can eat. Even so, we doubt that outsiders can gobble the 11.5 kgs of chocolates that every Swiss consumes every year.

When Solange dropped us to the station we noticed that the boot of her car was filled with rugged hiking gear. She and her husband were going to climb a mountain over the weekends. With all that fortifying fare, and all those chocolates, mountains should be an effortless morning's stroll!      

FACT FILE

Getting There: Fribourg is a station on Swiss Rail.
Day excursions:  Murten is less than an hour's road journey from Fribourg. From Murten by  cruise ship to Praz and the vineyards of Mont Vully. Little over a half-hour's drive from Fribourg to Broc and the Cailler Chocolate Factory for the free guided tour and chocolate bargains from their Factory Sales Outlet.
Accommodation: A selection - NH Fribourg- 4 Star. - E-mail: nhfribourg@nh-hotels.com
Best Western Hotel De La Rose - 3 Star E-mail: info@hoteldelarose.ch
Hotel Elite- 2 Star - E-mail: elitefribourg@bluewin.ch