After South Africa, Oxford and London, intrepid Farrol Khan has made the Saanenland region of Gstaad his home. He has produced a unique guide to this Bernese Oberland gateway between the German- and French-language Alpine region.

Journalist, late-life novelist, an inveterately entrepreneurial activist and guidebook author, Farrol Kahn has not allowed labels to define or restrict him. And his 2019 volume on life in the Bernese Oberland resort of Gstaad is probably unlike any other guidebook you’ve read, unless it’s one of the seven other travel books he has published over the years.

Gstaad Insider’s Guide notes that the village became the haunt of A-listers after German playboy Gunter Sachs and his new bride, French star Brigitte Bardot, walked their dog down the Promenade in 1967, as well as reporting that the area reputedly has 7,000 cows and an equal number of residents.

OK. But who else but Farrol would open a guidebook with 60 pages portraying the people who make Gstaad, including a man with 3,000 contacts, a farmer and fashionista, a hotel-owner working to Repair the World, and a professor trying to heal the world with art?

Those are just the opening articles. The second chapter is devoted exclusively to Gstaad’s bakers, and chapter 3 to shopping – the big brands and local discoveries.

Farrol Kahn's unique insider guide to Gstaad

These include the first high-fashion boutique to establish itself on the elegant promenade, Maison Lorenz Bach, and the mini-market housed in a chalet dating back to 1627 in the satellite/administrative village of Saanen, where Farrol based himself. The shop, open 365 days a year, is run by the third and fourth generation of the Schmid family since 1927 with an emphasis on fresh food, imported from Biel, Murten, Neuchatel and the Valais (for fruit).

The Alpina, Gstaad’s James Bond hotel

Other sections cover accommodation (from luxury (such as the Alpina Gstaad known to locals as the James Bond hotel) to the child-friendly Maison Hornberg, to eating (10 pages), banks and business (15 pages including a small library focused on German books for women readers and children with an English selection of thrillers, literature and non-fiction), real estate, farming, entertainment, schools, and local guides. Entertainment includes the Gstaad Yacht Club, over 50km distant from the nearest body of water at Lake Thun.

Innovative as ever, Farrol closes the 240-page book with 20 beautiful pages from the results of a photography competition about the Gstaad region, judged by locals (which meant an international fine art photographer, a world class gallerist and a local publisher).

Farrol describes himself as “born and educated in the semi-desert of South Africa”. His professional life was based mainly in London and Oxford as a journalist and aviation health activist.

If you have learned to wear compression socks on long airline flights, it is in part because of him. In addition to four books on aerospace medicine since 1990, he invented air socks to prevent deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and raised £2 million for DVT research by the World Health Organization as well as instigating the UK and EU governments to provide £2.5 million into DVT research.

“The risk of developing venous thromboembolism (VTE) [DVT or pulmonary embolism] approximately doubles after travel lasting four hours or more [...] if seated and immobile,“, WHO concluded.

Farrol was director of the non-profit Aviation-Health Institute (AHI) in Oxford from 1996 to 2009. During this time he organized Healthy Flying events at Heathrow, Copenhagen, Dublin and Malta.

Farrol in front of the Geneva home of Baladine Klossowska, the mother of the painter Balthus, the woman who was the poet Rilke’s last lover and a major figure in Farrol’s bio-novel about the Bohemian writer who spent his last years in Switzerland.

Inspired to write a biographical novel on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who lived the last six years of his life in the Valais, Farrol moved to Switzerland in 2009. “The 800-page book took ten years to write,” he reports. (See Peter Hulm's inspiring Global Geneva piece on Rilke in the Valais)

The resulting publication in 2021 was well-received in Switzerland and earned one of its most well-informed reviews by Elena Danielson of Stanford University. “This counter-intuitive historical novel by Farrol Kahn clears away some of the mist [surrounding the poet], bringing Rilke’s life and times into better focus, without losing any of the magic,” she writes.

She describes it as “beautifully detailed and heavily researched” – “a serious exercise of the imagination” in bringing to life his conversation. It focuses particularly on his relationship with Elisabeth “Baladine” “Merline” “Mouky” Klossowska, the mother of the painter Balthus, who spoke with “a lyrical Polish accent”.

“Kahn excels at making this improbable relationship seem real, although trying to describe it here, I’m totally baffled at how the novelist pulled it off,” the Stanford scholar observes. “One of the great joys of the novel comes from dozens of cameo appearances by colorful figures, from Joseph Roth, Bruno Cassirer, Rudolf Kassner, and Rudolf Steiner, to Leonid Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, Maria Tsvetaeva.”

She notes that towards the close of his life, Farrol has Rilke say: “There‘s one thing they will never find in my letters. My lighter side. My sense of humor will be a secret between us.”

Prof. Danielson comments: “Kahn has unveiled some of this secret.” Even Ralph Freedman. author of definitive biography of Rilke, described it as “absolutely brilliant!"

Rilke himself was quite aware of all the contradictions in his life, even incorporating “Widerspruch”’ in the epitaph he wrote in advance for his tombstone in the Upper Valais village of Raron.

Once again an innovator, after the novel’s publication in 2021 Farrol launched the project of a Road Trip with Rilke round Switzerland in 2023, 100 years on from the publication of Rilke’s masterwork The Duino Elegies.

Farrol’s map of the Rilke tour.

One response to Farrol’s challenge: a cyclist above the Valais capital of Sion.

Farrol’s travel guides

Farrol’s travel guides are still available from Amazon, though his Valais guide from 2011 (5 stars on goodreads) has only one used copy left and costs CHF123.88.

Gstaad guide GBP36.69 at Amazon.de

You’d do best to try Switzerland’s Payot first, where the books are still advertised at reasonable prices (CHF30 for the 200-page Valais book).

His 2018 240-page book on Geneva had seven left at Amazon when we last checked, and is priced at only 27.39 euros plus €3 postage. Though many professional travel-writers find Geneva boring, Farrol describes it as “the smallest big city where the airport is only seven minutes away by train, where you can shop for watches in the cradle of watchmaking, walk in the medieval old town that is steeped in history of the Reformation, eat perch in the lakeside restaurant, cruise in vintage lake steamers and visit International Geneva which is a separate city within a city and learn how it impacts on all aspects our our daily life.

Lastly, you can participate in the rich cultural heritage of music, art, architecture and science like CERN where the internet was born and see the largest Hadron Collider where particles collide at temperatures 100,000 times more than the centre of the sun.”

Peter Hulm is a contributing editor to Global Geneva. He lives part of the year in the Valaisan village of Erschmatt overlooking the Rhone Valley and – almost – within distant sight of Muzot and Raron.