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Switzerland’s mountains are the cornerstone of its beauty, and a great way to take in scenery is by train. The GoldenPass panoramic line allows passengers to gaze through its huge glass windows at the sprawling Alps. The route heads through Montreux, Zweisimmen, Interlaken, and Lucerne, and early reservations can be made for VIP seats alongside the driver. Farther up in the Alps is situated one of the highest train lines in the country. The Bernina Express tour spirals its way through the mountains, nose-dives through tunnels, and shoots along bridges, passing glaciers and quaint villages with the highlight being a UNESCO World Heritage site between Thusis and Tirano.

When work is complete on the Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT), travelers will be able to travel through burrowed sheer mountain rock for 35 miles in a 50-minute trip from Zurich to Milan. Until then (scheduled completion is June 2016), sections of the world’s longest and deepest traffic tunnel is open for group tours organized by local visitor centers. You can see the digging machine that did the literally groundbreaking work, a 300-ton, 450-meter-long wonder. While the digging is done, the 57-kilometer tunnel won’t open till workers lay down all the train tracks and support structures. We took a short train ride to Bellinzona, where we boarded the train to Lucerne where we were joined by Tabea Mandour, who is a project manager with the Swiss Travel System. Tabea told us that this amazing project has been over 20 years in process, and will cut the time between Zurich and Ticino by 50 minutes (with another 10 minutes in savings once the Cenari Base Tunnel in Ticino is complete). This will bring the travel time for a train journey from Locarno to Zurich down to an hour and 40 minutes! Ready to embark on your own Swiss adventure? Check out the itineraries that have been created by the members of AFAR’s Travel Advisory Council and other specialists at AFAR Journeys.

Lucerne is no stranger to mass tourism: The otherwise lovely medieval city swells each summer with list-checking visitors en route to central Switzerland’s famed Pilatus and Titlis mountains. Surprisingly, few of them make the 15-minute trek from the train station to this gorgeous 19th-century badi (open-air swimming area) on the Lucerne National Quay, overlooking the clear blue waters of what the locals call the Vierwaldstätter See (aka Lake Lucerne). The entire facility was meticulously restored in 2010 and remains a favorite of residents for its excellent views of brooding, multi-horned Mount Pilatus, Jean Nouvel’s lakeside KKL performance hall, and Santiago Calatrava’s Lucerne Station Hall—and all without the hassle of tourists.

Forty miles from Zurich in the heart of central Switzerland, the Axenstrasse is a historic motorway that’s so achingly scenic it might even cure your vertigo. It winds for seven miles around the base of the Uri Alps hugging the verdant ridge of turquoise Lake Uri (a branch of the four-fingered Vierwaldstätter See—Four Forested Cantons Lake—more familiar to most tourists as Lake Lucerne). It occasionally careens through century-old mountain tunnels and past painted bell towers and Roman-era viaducts scattered around the region’s Alpine villages, where the legendary folk hero William Tell is supposed to have come from. There are numerous picnic areas along the older sections of the Axenstrasse, and the entire stretch of lake is swimmable in the summer. Hikers can find a variety of trails along the road that can take them to higher altitudes, where they can spot ibex, chamois, alpine orchids, purple gentian, and acrobatic alpine choughs, riding the thermals of the warm foehn winds, said by locals to cause madness.

This week on Travel Tales by Afar, author Bonnie Tsui, swims like a local through the currents of Swiss life and culture.