My wife and I are going to summer vacation to Swiss towns that are on the river Aare for this exact reason. To me, floating in blue, transparent, super clean water on a hot day is heaven. Swiss are also individualist folk, so there is always many almost individual options to enter and leave the water or stay by it. It is depressing to come back to Berlin’s Spree and Havel that are both filled with cyanoalgae and Spree is also used for waste water when there is too much rain. It is lovely to see this initiative, perhaps there is hope for a clean swim in Berlin too.
Although for now, even switching the touring boats to electric engines, which should be easy enough (why do the private companies benefit from public space selling 25€/seat tours in the city center while spewing huge clouds of exhaust into the air and dumping oil and dirt into the river? – they should at least switch to clean engines and for a limited km range tours this would be sensible) is not done in Berlin. Even the ferries that the transport company operates are not all electric (cause they actually rent some of them from the private boat touring companies), although there they could even be tethered and not require a battery at all. Anyway, all of this is just optimistic hippie talk, I will rather just move to Switzerland than wait for Germany to clean up.
I’ve come across a video where Swiss people were commuting from work by diving into the river yesterday and it blew my mind! It looks so delightful. I’ve never thought about going to Switzerland for holiday but now it’s all I’m thinking about.