Montreux and Yvoire - two overrated tourist destinations

I've done a fair bit of sight seeing this past week, thanks to the fact that my mother has been here to visit. We've eaten crepes in the old town, visited the cathedral, gone to parc des Bastions on the 1st of May, been to look at the bunnies and the wild boars in the little animal park in Jonction, plus two longer excursions, one to Montreux and the other one a boat trip to Yvoire.
I suppose Montreux and Yvoire are two places you ought to go visit if you live in Geneva. I've heard a lot of good things about both of them, although I have been warned that Yvoire can be a bit on the touristy side. Well, that is the least one can say!

We went there on a beautiful, sunny day, and had a nice 1,5h boat ride there. Once we got there we saw little else to do but to follow the stream of tourists, because they all went in the same direction. This is because there was only one direction in which to go. In other words, Yvoire proved to be a lot smaller than I'd thought. It didn't take us long to have gone through the whole little medieval village, and since there seemed to be little else to do than to eat there, we scanned the menus of all the restaurants we passed. Yvoire probably has more restaurants than inhabitants, so it wasn't hard to find a place to eat. The only problem was that they all seemed to serve exactly the same thing, with a few exceptions. This same thing was of course "filé de perche" from lake Geneva. Most restaurants had different variations of this popular but to me completely pointless dish. What they all have in common is that they consist of breaded little fish bits, fried in a lot of butter and served with chips. And that's it. Sometimes you get tartar sauce with it, sometimes just lemon and sometimes some other sauce. But usually it's just the fried fish and the chips. I do not understand why people pay to eat this, and why it is so popular around Lake Geneva!

We managed to find a restaurant which served not only filé de perche but also some kind of bouillabaise, and had a lovely (although overpriced like all the restaurants in Yvoire) three course lunch on a sunny terrace, overlooking the lake. When the lunch approached its end and we realised that there was actually 1h and 45 min left until our planned departure, we started to panic. Because we had already gone through every street of this medieval open air museum at least two or three times, and apart from restaurant menus, there is little else to look at or do there. To our relief we discovered that there was actually another departure one hour earlier than the one we'd planned to take, so when dessert was finished and the bill paid we went straight to the boat in order to spend the rest of our late afternoon in Geneva. I'm glad we went to Yvoire, because I've been wanting to go there for quite some time since I keep hearing how pretty it is etc. Now I know that I have no reason to return to this medieval theme park of a village. I would rather go to a real town which is not designed to steal money from tourists. There is not much to see in Yvoire which can not fit on a postcard.



Montreux also left me slightly disappointed. It did rain when we got there, which of course has something to do with it, and we arrived just after all the restaurants had stopped serving lunch, so we had to have some rather disappointing crepes in a café. But the town itself was smaller than I'd thought, and not as pretty as I'd expected either. To our great content, the sun came out just when we'd finished our lunch, and we decided to walk along the waterfront to the castle of Chillon, which we'd planned to visit. This walk was amazingly beautiful, and was worth the whole effort of going there.
The path was lined with different kinds of flowers, from poppies to rhododendron, as well as a variety of more or less exotic treas. And seeing the mountains on the other side of the water at the same time was just breathtaking. The castle of Chillon itself turned out to be a bit too big and a bit too empty to be fully enjoyable. I generally like castles and had wanted to go there for a while, so again, I'm glad we went. But they could have made the visit a bit more interesting by adding some more authentic furniture etc.
Now that I've been to Montreux I see little reason to go back. Next on my list of places to visit is Gruyere. I have been wanting to go there since before I moved to Geneva, so I certainly hope it won't disappoint me!