Start your journey in Annecy. Annecy, in the north of the French Alps, is called "the Venice of Savoie" — a well-deserved title. The medieval town centre built around a 14th-century chateau is dissected by small canals and streams running out of Lac Annecy, which is clean, fresh and a wonderful azure colour. Annecy is the prefecture of the département of Haute-Savoie.

Starting in Annecy, you can be in Grenoble in just 1 h 25 min with Blablabus. Book today from just £4.30 with easyBus.com.. Grenoble is a city of around 158,000 inhabitants in 2017 (550,000 taking into account the metropolitan area) in the French Alps. The climate is quite cold in winter, with days of snow almost every year. Summers are known to be hot, as mountains surrounding the town stop any wind. Grenoble is crossed by two rivers, the Drac and the Isère ("the lion and the serpent"), and is surrounded by three mountain chains, the Vercors, Chartreuse and Belledonne. The city is renowned for its universities on the campus, for its scientific research centres in the northeast of the city, including Minatec for nanotechnologies, CEA the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, a French National Centre for Scientific Research agency, the European Synchrotron for high-brilliance source of X-rays, the Institut Laue-Langevin for the most powerful source of neutron in the world, the EMBL the Europe's flagship laboratory for the life sciences, and for its industrial centre in the western suburbs: Meylan, Montbonnot and Crolles including high-tech companies such as STmicroelectronics and Motorola. Therefore, it hosts a relatively large population of foreign scientists and students.