Vancouver Zermatt Although this page has “Vancouver” in its title, there are no photographs of Vancouver in here courtesy of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull. Three days before we were scheduled to fly to Vancouver, the volcano started erupting and most of the flights to and from much of northern Europe were cancelled for the best part of a week.The day before we were scheduled to fly, we hedged our bets and booked a return Eurotunnel crossing to Calais. Later that day our flight was finally formally cancelled. So on Friday evening, we cancelled as much of the Vancouver holiday as we could before planning a new holiday pretty much from scratch.After a couple of hours of heated debate, we decided to book a) an overnight stop in Reims, and b) three nights in Zermatt, which would take us up to Wednesday. We would then review our options and see what we wanted to do next.
Eurotunnel Saturday - We drove to Folkestone to get a late-afternoon Eurotunnel to Calais. Given the problems with the planes for the last couple of days, we'd expected the Tunnel to be rammed. However, it was nigh-on deserted when we turned up. There must have been no more than thirty cars on our train.
Sunset It was a lovely, clear evening as we drove from Calais to our overnight stop in Reims. As we drove south, I could see the Sun going down and was waiting for an explosion of colour due to all of the dust in the atmosphere, as had been described on the news. But it never appeared. I pulled into a service area to take this photo just before the Sun disappeared from view. As you can see, it was a nice sunset, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.
Aire du Jura Sunday - Another lovely day. We left Reims and headed south. After a couple of hours we passed a sign for the Aire du Jura rest area, which said it had a viewing point, so we thought we'd pull in and have a look. And blimey, I'd never seen a motorway service station like it. This is a picture of the Bourneville Gate, which you pass through on the way in. The tower sports a viewing platform, but unfortunately it was closed when we were there.
Aire du Jura In their shop there was an impressive selection of local wines on sale.
Circles Pavilion Outside again, this is the Circles Pavilion, where they have exhibitions.
Mountains We continued south and crossed the Swiss border at Geneva. We got our first sight of some proper mountains as we passed along the northern shore of Lake Geneva. Excellent.
Mirabeau Hotel After a fantastically scenic drive into the mountains, we finally parked the car at the train station in Tasch and got the mountain railway the last few miles to car-free Zermatt.This is a picture of our hotel, the Mirabeau. We were so impressed with the hotel when we arrived that we immediately extended our stay for an extra day.The hotel was very well presented, the staff were excellent and our room (a junior suite with a Matterhorn view) was fabulous. I can very highly recommend this hotel to anyone visiting Zermatt.
Weisbier This was to become a staple food source over the course of the week. Mmmm, beer.
View Monday - This was the view we woke up to the following morning. Suddenly, not making it to Vancouver didn't seem to be quite such a disaster after all.
Train After a very nice breakfast in the hotel, we picked up our lift passes from reception (all sorted out for us by the hotel - nice) and walked the couple-of-hundred metres to the station to get the train to Gornegrat. This is a picture of Zermatt from the train.
Gornergrat This is Gornegrat station, where we all got off.
Skiers Most of the people on the train were skiers...
Skier ...including Judith, who had decided that being in a top ski resort in the ski season was just too good an opportunity to pass up. She mentioned that she'd brought her skiing kit, but I didn't for a minute think she'd actually use it.
Piste Because the train only brings around 50 skiers every 20 minutes, if you waited 5 minutes until the rest of them had cleared off, you could pretty much have the whole piste to yourself, as Judith is demonstrating here as she skis off into an absolutely breathtaking view.
Piste This is a photo Judith took a few hundred metres down the piste, looking back towards the Gornegrat Hotel (on the right). As you can see, she definitely had the whole place to herself. The cable car station at Hohtalli is visible on the left.
Rotenboden In the meantime, I'd taken the train back down to Rotenboden to pick up the "winterwanderweg" to Riffelberg. The trail was only a couple of miles long, descending a modest 750 feet, which seems like a pleasant way to ease myself in to a few days of walking.
Winterwanderweg However, there was nothing modest about the view. There were a couple of ski tracks, which I assume had been made by the snow patrol checking the trail out early in the morning ("normal" skiers aren't permitted on the walking trails). Mine were the only footprints.
Gornergrat After a mile-or-so, looking back up the slope, I could see the Gornegrat Hotel on the skyline (right in the middle of the picture).
Riffelberg After another mile-or-so, I came to Riffelberg, where I met up with Judith for a drink and a rest.
Church After a while Judith headed off skiing again and I decided to walk back up the trail I'd just walked down. This is a picture of the small church just outside of Riffelberg. This was also the point at which I learned to stay on the marked trails. I wandered 10 feet off the trail to take this photo, broke through the snow crust and sunk in to well above my knees. It was sufficiently arduous dragging myself out that I decided I didn't want to do that again.
Rotenboden (again) Back at Rotenboden and the view was still magnificent. I got the train down to Riffelalp, where another "winterwanderweg" started. Judith got on at Riffelberg and went back to town to do some shopping.
Riffelalp Riffelalp is below the tree line, which made for some slightly different views of the ever-present Matterhorn on the trail back to Zermatt. The first half of the trail was largely covered with snow and ice, but it had also been spread liberally with wood chippings, which made for a surprisingly grippy surface.
Crossing The trail crossed the pistes a couple of times, which was a bit hairy as some of the skiers were giving it beans. Still, I managed to make it back to town safely.
Evening View This is a miscellaneous view taken in the evening on the way back to the hotel.
Balcony View The night-time view from our balcony.
Rothorn Tuesday - We took the funnicular and two cablecars to Rothorn, where Judith set off on another intrepid skiing expedition on a another largely deserted piste.
Slide When you're walking about, you often forget that the actual ground is not under a couple of inches of snow, as it occasionally is in the UK during the winter. Here's the top of a slide in a children's playground just managing to poke through the snow.
Blauherd I took the cable car back down to the winterwanderweg at Blauherd and set off for the restaurant at Fluhalp, which you can see in the distance in this photo (in the right foreground). Fluhalp is only about a hundred feet above Blauherd, although the trail falls a few hundred feet before climbing back up, so it was still a moderately challenging walk.
Fluhalp This was the view from Fluhalp, looking back towards the Matterhorn.
Art On the way back to Blauherd, I passed this interesting piece of art that someone has thought to deposit in the middle of nowhere. A sign said that I could climb on it at my own risk. However, given that walking about in all this snow with virtually no people around felt risky enough as it was, I decide not to push my luck.
Helicopter I arrived back at Blauherd just in time to see a helicopter dropping off some building supplies.
Trockener Steg I met Judith for a drink at Sunnega, after which she decided to get the funnicular back to the hotel, while I opted to walk the 2,000 feet-or-so down to Zermatt. The first bit of the trail was tricky as it actually runs along one of the pistes for a couple of hundred metres. The rest was pretty easy going and largely free from snow and ice.When I got back to the hotel, we decided to try to get the new Matterhorn Express cable car up to the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise. We got as far as Trockener Steg before giving up. It was getting fairly late in the afternoon and we didn't want to risk missing the last cable cars back down (because that's a bit of a pain, isn't it Mike?).This is a photo looking towards Zermatt from Trockener Steg. We got the Matterhorn Express back down to Schwarzsee Paradise, before switching to the newly built cable car to Riffelberg. From there we got the train back into town.
Sunrise Wednesday - I woke up fairly early and looked out of the window to see the sunrise just catching the top of the Matterhorn. Nice.As we were having such a fabulous time and the weather was staying consistently excellent, we decided to extend our stay by another day (to Friday).
Walking Judith had gone skiing to Gornegrat again, so I'd gone for a walk on the trails to the east of town.
Good trail As I climbed higher, the trail remained nice and free of snow and ice.
Bad Trail However, 50 metres after I took the last picture, I turned a corner onto a north-facing slope that was thick with snow and ice and hadn't been covered with nice, grippy wood chippings. It was very slow and chilly going for about a mile.
Ledge Eventually the trail turned back to face the sun. Which was just as well as I wouldn't have fancied trying this bit if it had been covered with snow and ice. At least they'd had the decency to provide a hand rail.
Plane! The first plane I'd seen in the sky for a week. And I was getting used to seeing beautiful blue sky not criss-crossed with unsightly vapour trails. Doh!
Deer I made it most of the way up to Sunnega (where I walked down from yesterday) before heading back down to town. On the way back I disturbed a deer that was sitting in the undergrowth near the trail.
Matterhorn Glacier Paradise I met up with Judith back at the hotel and, as it was still pretty early, we decided to head for the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise again. This was the cable car on the final leg from Trockener Steg to Matterhorn Glacier Paradise.
Matterhorn Glacier Paradise And this was the view from the top looking towards Zermatt. This was the third time we'd been up here and it was the clearest we'd seen it.
Mountains The Matterhorn is on the right and Mont Blanc is on the left (very hazy in the far distance). We'd not been able to see Mont Blanc from here on either of our previous visits.
Toyota Back in town and the local police had apparently decided that a regular Toyota Landcruiser wasn't quite go-anywhere enough for their needs. That looked like it might literally go anywhere.
Patrouille des Glaciers In the evening we went out to see the start of the Patrouille des Glaciers. This is a 53km ski/mountaineering race from Zermatt to Verbier. Evidently they didn't think that running/skiing/climbing 53km in the daylight was hard enough, so they've started at 10pm. The fastest competitors will finish in around 7.5 hours!Apparently the race started during WWII, when the Swiss army wanted to test the abilities of its soldiers, was cancelled for 35 years when some of the competitors were killed falling down a crevasse on a glacier (not a massive surprise to be honest), then reinstated in 1984.
Patrouille des Glaciers And they're off!
Edelweiss As we'd stayed longer than we expected, our lift passes had expired. Rather than renew them for anther day, we decided to walk up to Zmutt instead.The trail started out quite gentle as we passed Edelweiss (the yellow hut on the skyline).
Yikes! However, it soon became a bit hairy. No handrail to hang on to here.
Marmot There were quite a few marmots about.
Double Yikes! I was really glad there was no snow on this trail. At least there was a rope to cling to on this section.
Zmutt We made it to Zmutt, but everything was closed. Doh! We pressed on to Furi, where we stopped for a beer before returning to town.As it was our last full day in Zermatt, we spent the afternoon relaxing in the sunshine with a beer (or two) on the hotel's terrace before trying out their large (but underground) swimming pool.
Cloudy Friday - For the first time this week, we were not greeted by glorious blue sky and sunshine. We had our last breakfast in the hotel, packed up our stuff and head to the station to get the train back to the car at Tasch.
Rothorn As we arrived at the station, the sun was struggling to shine through the hazy clouds above Rothorn.We picked up the car and headed out of the mountains. However, before we'd made it back to the motorway, the sat-nav had directed us onto a steeply climbing road that zig-zaged back up the mountainside.After around 15 minutes we came to a toll booth, which seemed odd as we weren't aware that there were any toll roads in Switzerland. However, all became clear as we rounded the next corner...
Lotschberg Tunnel ...and drove onto a train to be carried through the Lotschberg Tunnel to Kandersteg, which is only a few miles from Adelboden, where we drove to a couple of years ago. The train was quite exciting, since the carriages are open (as you can see) and it was completely pitch black in the tunnel. I though it would have been really exciting had we been in the Honda, until I wound the windows down and almost instantly choked to death due to the diesel fumes from the locomotive. So maybe not so exciting after all.The remaining 700 miles of the journey were pleasant and uneventful. Judith’s dinky 1-series had proven to be an excellent and comfortable long-distance tourer and we arrived home at 9pm having driven a total of 1,442 miles at a reasonable 46mpg.Considering that this was a very spur-of-the-moment holiday arranged after the extremely short-notice cancellation of our planned trip to Vancouver, it had turned out really rather well.