Langnau is the unofficial capital of the upper Emmental, and it behaves like one. There is a proper town centre, a railway station with trains to Bern and Lucerne, a hockey arena where the SCL Tigers play to a loyal, noisy crowd, and a Friday morning when the cattle market and the shops bring the surrounding farms in to town. With nearly nine thousand residents, it is the largest place on this road, which makes it the obvious spot for fuel, groceries and a sit-down meal before the valley gets more remote.
The town has an old pottery tradition, and the glazed Langnau ceramics, often decorated with slip-trailed flowers and proverbs, turn up in museums and in farm kitchens all over the canton. There is a local museum that gathers a lot of this, along with the story of the Emmental farmers' lives, and it is good for a rainy hour. The covered wooden houses along the main street, some of them very old, hint at how prosperous the cheese and cattle trade once made this place.
The riding around Langnau suits a relaxed pace. The Emme and its small side valleys, the Ilfis and the Trueb, cut through the hills, and the roads follow them in easy, rolling bends between dairy farms and patches of spruce. Gradients are mild, but the surface can be patchy where water has run over it, and agricultural traffic is normal. If a tractor with a manure spreader pulls out, the only winning move is patience and an open window, because the smell is part of the local landscape.
Not far to the east in Trubschachen is the factory of the biscuit maker Kambly, whose shop is a pleasant place for a coffee and a bag of cookies for the tank bag. A bit further, the hills rise towards the Napf, a rounded summit from which streams fan out in every direction, and the country becomes steeper, with isolated farms along ridges and gold-panning in the rivers, a hobby the Emmental is oddly known for.
Come in summer for long light, in September for the smell of cut grass, and avoid the first frosty mornings, when shaded hairpins on the side roads can stay slick until well after nine.