Zermatt We’d had a week booked off work for months, but it came to Friday night and we still didn’t know where we wanted to go. So we got the Channel Tunnel to Calais on Friday evening and booked into a hotel in Calais with a view to deciding what we might do the following morning.
Calais Friday - We got home from work, chucked our stuff in the car and drove to Folkestone to catch the Eurotunnel to Calais, where we’d booked into the Ibis at the Citie de Europe.Saturday - We still didn’t actually know what we were going to do for the rest of our week off, so we started driving south while we had a think. After a couple of hours we decided that the safest thing to do initially would be to head to our favourite place - Zermatt in Switzerland - and stay there for a couple of days while we decided what to do for the rest of the week.So as we drove south, Judith got on the internet to find us a hotel.
Switzerland We crossed the border from France into Switzerland one some tiny back road where there was nowhere to buy the vignette required for driving on the Swiss motorways. So we pulled into the first motorway service area we saw. While Judith went to find a vignette, I took this photo of the lovely view.
Tasch With a vignette finally stuck to our windscreen, in a couple of hours we completed the drive to Tasch, where we parked the car before getting the train to car-free Zermatt.
Zermatt We arrived too late to get a complimentary transfer from the station to the hotel. However, as it wasn’t that far we decided to just walk.It was just starting to get dark, but there was a nice view of the Matterhorn from the bridge on Kirchstrasse to welcome us to town.
Bellerive This is the reception area of the Bellerive hotel, where we’d booked into for the first three nights.
High Street Having deposited our stuff in our room, we went out to look for some dinner. First night in the Alps - it had to be rosti with sausage and onion sauce. Yummy.
Star Trails Later on, back at the hotel, it was still clear out so I thought I’d have a go at photographing some star trails from our balcony. Usually I’d try this from somewhere really dark. I couldn’t point the camera down any further than this because the buildings and streets were too brightly lit for such long exposures and the lights were causing all sorts of flares and reflections in the lens.This photo is a stack of 80x 15 second exposures at f/2.8 and ISO3200.
Matterhorn Sunday - Our first proper full day on holiday. We were up early(ish) for breakfast and I was out for my first walk of the week. As the weather was so nice, I had decided to head straight for the Hornlihutte, which is probably just about visible in this photo, perched on the side of the Matterhorn.Given that it’s the second toughest walk in Zermatt (in terms of the vertical distance to cover), I would have preferred to save it until later in the week, but the weather that high is very unpredictable, so it was preferable to make hay while the sun was literally shining.
Dam The usual way to get to the Hornlihutte from Zermatt would be to get the cablecar up to Schwarzsee and then walk from there, which cuts the distance/effort by about two thirds. I had decided to make it a bit harder for myself by a) walking all the way from the hotel, and b) not even taking the direct route towards Schwarzsee. I was going to walk up the valley to the west of the Matterhorn (towards the Schonbielhutte) and then hike straight up the side of the Hornli Ridge.After about 45 minutes I crossed the dam. This was the view from the middle of the dam, looking straight down.
Matterhorn Trail As I headed further up the valley, there were magnificent views of the Matterhorn.
Cows There were a few cows on the trail, but they didn’t seem bothered by my passing. Which was handy because they were quite big.
Hornli RIdge After about 90 minutes I reached the point where the trail split and my path headed up the side of the Hornli Ridge. It’s a really tough hike as the trail pretty much heads straight up the slope you can see in the photo. It’s sufficiently steep that you can’t easily put your feet flat on the ground, so you end up effectively walking like you’re standing on tip-toe, which is quite tiring when you have to do it for an hour-and-a-half, which was how long it took me to reach the top of the ridge.
Hornli Ridge On the ridge, whilst I was taking some photos, a passing elderly gentleman said something to me in German and pointed towards the mountain. I thought he was asking if I was on my way up, so I nodded, at which point he walked over and grabbed my camera. Apparently he was asking if I wanted my photo taking. He’s done a pretty good job too. Danke Herr.
Frosty The last time I was up here (last July), it was a clear, sunny day like this. But there was a freezing, howling gale blowing across the ridge and there was still quite a lot of snow on the shaded bits of the trail, the combination of which eventually forced me to turn back long before I made it to the Hornlihutte.This year there was no snow and virtually no wind. However, the shaded bits of the trail were covered in frost, which I think you can just about make out in this photo. No great obstacle, but it did mean that extra, extra care was required. It really wouldn’t do to twist a knee up here.
Hornlihutte After another hour-or-so I made it to the Hornlihutte, which, annoyingly, was closed for renovation/extension. I would very much like to have seen how they got that digger up here.
Hornlihutte This is the new bit of the Hutte. The Matterhorn was looking very close now, what with me actually being perched about a third of the way up the side of it at this point.
Hornlihutte View I had only been to the Hornlihutte once before, when it was snowing and the visibility was about fifty yards. So it was nice to be able to see the view properly this time.
Matterhorn The trail went on past the Hutte for a couple of hundred more yards. It would have been nice to go to the end, but by this point my legs were completely stuffed. I simply had no energy left to take another step uphill and it was seven or eight miles back to the hotel. So I took this photo and turned around to start the journey down.
Helicopter A sightseeing helicopter on its way to the Matterhorn.
Rock Bridge This was the rock bridge on the trail down. It’s about thirty feet long and about twelve feet wide and there are near vertical drops of hundreds and hundreds of feet on either side. Also, from this angle it looks like it just ends in mid-air. But I can assure you that the trail does continue on the other side.
Temporary This curious set of structures is apparently where people are staying while the Hornlihutte is being renovated. I can’t help but feel that those “tents” should have been arranged in some sort of organized, geometric pattern. Maybe that’s just me?
Matterhorn As the trail descended from the Hornli Ridge there were some magnificent views of both the ridge and the Matterhorn itself.
Schwarzsee After an hour or so I could see the cablecar station at Schwarzsee in the distance, where I had arranged to meet Judith for lunch.
Gornergrat Off in the distance there were some nice views of the hotel at Gornergrat, where we would be relocating to in a couple of days. This photo was taken with my camera zoomed in as far as it would go.
Gornergrat And when I said “off in the distance”, I really meant off in the distance. This photo was taken zoomed out from the same spot as the previous photo. Gornergrat is on top of the peak in the middle (the one just to the right of the dark peak, which I think is Ober Rothorn).I could probably have walked from here to there in, oh, six or seven hours.
Zermatt Having met up with Judith for lunch, she decided that she didn’t fancy walking all the way back to town with me and would instead get the cablecar half way down, meet me at Furi and walk from there. I think Furi might just about be visible somewhere in the bottom right of this photo.
Suite So I met up with Judith at Furi and we walked back to the hotel together. When we arrived back at the hotel I discovered that in my absence we had been moved from our standard and perfectly nice hotel room to this awesome suite. Apparently when we had arrived the previous evening, we’d booked the last room available. The hotel manager/maybe owner thought it was a bit rubbish that we didn’t have a choice of rooms, so once a load of other guests had checked out on Sunday morning, he had our stuff moved to this really nice suite. Now that’s what you call customer service. It’s no wonder this hotel is so highly rated.And, yes, that is a massive bathtub next to the bed.Out for dinner (rosti again - couldn’t help it) and then off to bed for some very well earned rest.Distance walked today - 16.8 miles (27.0km)Ascent today - 5,873 feet (1,790m)Descent today - 5,873 feet (1,790m)
View Monday - We had decided to walk to the hutte at Fluhalp. As usual, I would walk up from the hotel and Judith would get a train and cablecar and meet up with me about half way there.The weather was still nice, although high, hazy cloud meant that the sky was not as clear and blue as it had been the previous day. This was a view of the Matterhorn when i was approaching Findeln.
Sheeps These sheep were looking particularly clean and fluffy. Perhaps they’d been participating in the previous day’s competition?
Helicopter Whilst walking up to Findeln I had been watching a pair of helicopters ferrying materials to a building site. As it turned out, my trail went right past the site. As it also turned out, this was not a good place to watch a hovering helicopter from. They create a rather impressive amount of downdraft. I managed to get one photo off before getting blasted with dust and debris and having to go chasing off after my cap.
Helicopter So I moved to a safer distance to watch and take a few more photos.
Helicopter Once they’d dropped their load they didn’t hang around. You can just about make out the cable still trailing underneath. You definitely wouldn’t have wanted to get that caught on anything when you’re giving it beans like that.
Judith After a couple of hours walking, I finally met up with Judith, who had caught a train and a cablecar up to Blauherd.
Fluhalp I think the views of the Matterhorn on the trail to Fluhalp are some of the best in the area. The Blauherd to Fluhalp trail is also open in the winter and is an awesome walk if you have the opportunity to do it.Anyway, we made it to Fluhalp, where I deposited Judith before continuing up the trail to what I think of as “secret lake”. If it’s got a real name, I can’t find it. If it’s a still day it has some of the most impressive Matterhorn reflections around.This was the view looking back towards Fluhalp (towards the bottom right) from near “secret lake”.
"Secret Lake" Unfortunately this wasn’t one of those still days. I hung around for ten minutes or so, just in case there was a calm moment, but this was the best reflection I saw. Not to worry though. Elsewhere on my website there is a photo of the perfect reflection that I captured when I was here last year.
Stellisee I met up with Judith back at Fluhalp, where we had lunch before heading back to Blauherd.On the way we passed the lake at Stellisee, where there were also no reflections to be seen. Still, it was a good opportunity to stop for a couple of minutes to admire the view.
Blauherd Judith approaching Blauherd, where our paths would part again.
Trail Having left Judith at Blauherd, I continued on back to town. This trail is very picturesque and also relatively quiet because it’s a bit out of the way. Anyone taking this trail is immediately committing themselves to walking all the way back to town, whilst the other way down skirts past the cablecar station at Sunnegga, offering a get-out for tired legs.
Cliff View The main reason I wanted to walk down that particular trail, apart from it being a jolly nice walk, was because it would allow me the opportunity to go past one of my favourite view points in the area. This bit of trail carved into a sheer rock face offers magnificent views across Zermatt to the Matterhorn in the distance (which here has just disappeared off the top left of the photo). Just brilliant.
Matterhorn Re-framed, now we can see both Zermatt and the Matterhorn. This is a picture best taken in the morning, when the sun is not quite so much directly in front. But it’s still a nice view at any time of the day.
Matterhorn Here I was trying out a black and white shot to bring out some of the details in the dramatic looking clouds.Back to the hotel for a quick shower before heading out for dinner. Pizza on this evening.Distance walked today - 14.0 miles (22.5km)Ascent today - 3,806 feet (1,160m)Descent today - 3,806 feet (1,160m)
Early Tuesday - I woke up quite early, i.e. too early to try to wake Judith up to go for breakfast, so I decided to have a quick blast up to Edelweiss. As it was still early, the Matterhorn was illuminated, but the valley was still in deep shade. I think this is generally one of the most dramatic ways to photograph the mountain.
Edelweiss Twenty eight minutes later and I was a) very much out of breath, and b) 1,119 feet (341m) above Zermatt. The sun had not quite risen over the mountains on the oher side of the valley.
Edelweiss Same photo, but in black and white, which is managing to look rather like a pencil drawing.It took 23 minutes to get back down again, giving me a round trip time of 51 minutes, some five minutes slower than I did the same walk last July. I must be starting to get old :o(
Gornergrat Back at the Bellerive we had breakfast, packed up our stuff and headed for the station to get the train to Gornergrat, which you can see in the photo. Despite the fact that it’s not cheap to stay in the hotel, you still have to pay CHF84 (about £55) to get the train there!
4206 Despite the fact the the hotel looks pretty big from the outside, it apparently only has twenty rooms. Each room has the name of a Swiss mountain and the room number is the height of the mountain (in meters).
Gornergrat View We’d booked a Matterhorn view room and that was most definitely what we got (apart from the clouds slightly obscuring the view, but that wasn’t really their fault).
Station Also from our window I could see the station, where we had arrived a few minutes earlier.
View Point From a window on the back of the hotel I had a nice view of the view point behind the hotel.
Looking North This is the view looking more or less north. Our room is in the bit of the hotel that you can see on the left. The peak on the right is Ober-Rothorn, which is the highest peak in Europe that you can walk to without the assistance of a mountain guide.
Patio View As it was about lunchtime there were a lot of people about. I was very much looking forward to seeing what I was like up here when everyone else had left.
Hohtalli I decided to walk the short trail from the hotel along a ridge to the cablecar station at Hohtalli. The cablecar station isn’t used during the summer months, so it was likely to be a quiet walk.
Sign Post
Denied! I got about two thirds of the way there before I came across this patch of ice and snow in the shade of a rocky outcrop. It was only about fifty yards long and doesn’t look much in the photo. However, even with walking poles, trying to cross it was very treacherous. After a few minutes of not really getting anywhere, I decided that this would not be a good spot to break a leg and turned around to head back to the hotel.
View There were some nice views on the way back to the hotel, which is on the hill on the left that you can see the trail going up. The hotel itself is just out of sight.
Glacier View Back at the hotel I met up with Judith. Due to the brevity of my aborted walk, it was still fairly early, so we decided to walk down to Rotenboden from where Judith could catch the train back to the hotel.
Train The trail runs close to the railway line for much of the way down to Rotenboden, so there were many opportunities to take photos of the trains, which were passing every ten to fifteen minutes.
Matterhorn As usual, there were also many opportunities for Matterhorn photos, although the mountain itself was disappearing in the clouds.
View Judith on the trail from Gornergrat down to Rotenboden. She had snuck ahead a bit while I dawdled about taking photos.
Approaching Riffelsee If you see photos of the Matterhorn reflected in a lake on the internet or in holiday brochures (if such things still exist), it will almost certainly be the lake we’re now approaching - Riffelsee. Usually we don’t come down this way as it’s about the busiest place in the whole area. Japanese tourists in particular like to get the train to Rotenboden and then walk down to Riffelberg. But by this point it was fairly late in the afternoon and there were not too many people about.
Riffelsee Reflection When we got to the lake there was sufficient wind that there were no reflections to be seen. But we hung around for a while and after a few minutes this beautiful reflection appeared. It only lasted for a few seconds and then it was gone. (I still don’t think it’s as good as the reflection at “secret lake” though.)
Shaggy A couple turned up with two of these shaggy dogs, which immediately jumped in the water. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to dry those off.
Sheep A few minutes later a load of sheep turned up for a drink. They didn’t seem that bothered by the fluffy dogs. Maybe they thought they were also some sort of sheep?
Train Judith went to the station to catch the train and I started walking back up to the hotel. After a few minutes she passed by, looking very pleased that she wasn’t walking up the hill.
Hotel So obviously Judith beat me back to the hotel by a fair bit. Here she is looking out of the window of our room as I arrived back at the hotel - top floor, third from the left.
Deserted As there was still about an hour to go before they started serving dinner, I thought I’d go out and take a few photos now that all of the other tourists had left for the day. The peace and quite were remarkable. All I could hear was the distant sound of waterfalls on, and under, the glaciers. Magnificent.
Rothorn A miscellaneous view across to Unter- and Ober-Rothorn.
Stones The many, many visitors to Gornergrat had piled almost all of the small stones into these little stacks.
Sunlight Sunlight streaming through the clouds. I’ve just about managed to catch that moment in this photo.
Station There would be no-one at the station for a few hours.
Observatory I don’t know how she managed to get up there. I don’t suppose the view was that different from where I was standing though.
Cafeteria Back in the hotel, the cafeteria was shut up and deserted.We had our dinner in the main restaurant, which I don’t have a photo of. But it was very relaxing and the food was excellent. Which was just as well given that there was nowhere else to eat.
Dark After dinner we walked up to the viewing area behind the hotel. It was getting dark quickly, but it was also getting cloudy, which was a bit of a blow as I was hoping to get some nice photos of the stars.
Lounge As it was starting to get proper dark out by this point, Judith found a comfy spot in the deserted lounge while I took my camera outside to see if there were any stars out.
Star Trails Up at the view point, there was an excellent view of the sky and it was very, very dark. In fact I could only see to walk about by the light of my torch.These star trails look a bit fragmented because of all of the cloud that was blowing past. It’s not a terribly good photo, but as I stood in the pitch dark in the freezing cold on a deserted mountain top for thirty minutes to take it, I thought it deserved inclusion if only for the effort it took to get it.
Zermatt There was an impressive orange glow coming from the direction of Zermatt, out of sight down in the valley.Anyway, that looked like all the photos I was going to be able to take on this day.Distance walked today - 7.8 miles (12.6km)Total ascent today - 2,848 feet (868m)Total descent today - 2,848 feet (868m)Today felt almost like a non-walking day compared to the last two days, but 2,848 feet of ascent and descent was still almost a Snowdon!
2am Wednesday - Despite all of the cloud, given that I was only going to be up at Gornergrat for one night, I was not going to be easily thwarted in my photography ambitions. I went to bed and set my alarm for 2am, hoping that the clouds might have broken by then. And boy, had they.This was taken from our hotel room window. Although it looks a lot like sunrise with stars, at 2am there was just enough cloud in the sky to pick up the glow of the lights from the towns in the surrounding valleys. It was one of those magical photographic moments where, through no skill or effort on my part, everything just came together perfectly.I think this is a strong contender for the best photograph I’ve ever taken. Definitely it’s in the top five.
Star Trails As I was up and having trouble sleeping due to the lack of air at this altitude (something they don’t mention before you book/check in - apparently it gets better if you stay for more than one night), I thought I’d be as well to plug in my programmable shutter release and capture some star trails.This is a stack of 40x 30 second exposures at f/2.8 and ISO3200. Unfortunately the view from the hotel is looking to the south-west, so there’s none of that lovely stars-spinning-around-the-pole-star effect in this shot. Still, it’s turned out quite nicely anyway.
Hallucination? After satisfying myself that my star trails photo had come out okay, I managed to doze off for a couple of hours before waking up just as it was starting to get light. I poked my head round the curtains, just in case anything interesting was going on outside, to discover that there was a line of red lights all the way up the side of the Matterhorn!Given that I’d not slept very well, my initial thought was that I must be hallucinating. So I took this photo, which clearly shows the line of red lights. I also woke Judith up (which is a brave thing to do at 6am) to get some independent verification. As expected, she was really not happy at having been woken up and even less happy at the prospect of having to actually get out of bed to look out of the window. But she did confirm that she could definitely see the same thing as I could.
Lights We speculated as to what the lights might be but subsequently discovered that they have been put there for the 2015 celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the first ascent of the Matterhorn. It appears that they were just trying them out. Given that the anniversary wasn’t for another ten months, they were definitely getting ahead of the game.
Mountains This was the view looking out of the back of the hotel, broadly in the direction that the sun was shortly due to rise.
Sunrise There were some lovely views of the Matterhorn as the sun came up, although there were perhaps just a few too many clouds for photographic purposes.After a nice breakfast, we packed up our stuff again and checked out of the Gornergrat hotel. Even with the poor night of sleep, if the hotel hadn’t been fully booked for Wednesday night we would have almost certainly stayed for another day. It’s a most excellent place and I will definitely endeavor to come here again.Anyway, as it turned out, we’d had a massive stroke of luck with our next hotel.
Firefly This was my seventh visit to Zermatt and our sixth visit together and in that time we’d never stayed in the same hotel twice (due mainly to the impressive number of excellent hotels in Zermatt). But when we were here last year we had a magnificent time staying in the Firefly, which, at the time of writing, was the Trip Advisor number one rated hotel in Zermatt. So we thought it might be really nice to stay there again.We had checked on t’internet, but there was no availability. So, just on the off chance, we phoned them up. They said they had no one bedroom suites (the hotel only has sixteen rooms and they’re all suites), but as we only wanted to stay for two midweek nights, they’d let us have a three bedroom suite for the price of the one bedroom suite! Result!!This is a photo of part of the living room of our three bedroom suite.
Firefly This is a photo of the living room from a different angle.
Balcony Judith in the living room, taken from the living room balcony.
Master Bedroom The master bedroom, with another bath in the middle of the room.
Balcony The view from the balcony in the master bedroom. Lovely. We had been really, really lucky to get this suite. Thank you, thank you Hotel Firefly.
Star Trails As I’d done so much walking on the previous days, I thought it would be nice to have a rest day. So we had a leisurely lunch, had a bit of a walk around town and spent an hour in the hotel’s fabulous swimming pool.This photo was taken from our bedroom balcony.Distance walked today - 0.0 miles (0.0km)Total ascent today - 0 feet (0m)Total descent today - 0 feet (0m)
Avalanche Thursday - For my last day of walking in Zermatt, I had decided to walk on the west side of the valley. This is my favourite side, mainly because there are no trains or cablecars, so there are also very few people.The other noticeable feature of this side of the valley are the avalanche defenses that cover the high mountainside, some of which can be seen in the photo. I’d had to walk for about ninety minutes to get high enough to reach the first of them.
Glacier The trail I was following was the one to Wisshorn, although I didn’t think I’ve have the time to go all the way to the summit. In the distance there were magnificent views of the Gabelhorngletscher (I think).I’d only been up here once before (last year) and it was very cloudy, so I didn’t get to see much of anything at all, apart from a helicopter that I almost inadvertently flagged down for assistance by adopting the “I need help” stance, which is coincidentally almost exactly the same as the “I’m trying to take a photo of your helicopter” stance. You live and learn.
Avalanche Defenses Above me the mountainside is literally covered with avalanche defenses.
Scale Just to give you an idea of the concerted effort that must have been required to install all of those avalanche defenses, here’s a photo of me sitting on one. I took this myself with the self timer and my camera balanced on a rock.At this point I had been walking for about two and a half hours and I had seen only one other person. And he hadn’t even said hello the miserable git.
Trail As I said earlier, due to the lack of transport, few people come up here. One of the (few) downsides of this is that the trails aren’t very well defined. You can just about make out the one I was trying to follow in this photo.
Lunch After walking for a little over three hours, I decided to stop for a spot of lunch. This large flat rock afforded a comfy place to sit and admire the view of the glacier across the valley. Another large flat rock a short distance away provided another handy spot to stand my camera and take this photo.I’ve got my hood up because it was drizzling a little bit and there was a chilly breeze occasionally blowing across the mountainside. But that didn’t make this any less of a brilliant place to be.I’d still only seen one other person all morning.
Marmots Finally, a photo of marmots. I’d heard a few during the course of the week. I’d even seen a couple from a great distance, but I’d thus far had no opportunity to actually photograph one. I was beginning to think I might have to go home without a photo of one, so it was a great relief when these two popped up and hung around for long enough for me to get my camera out.A few seconds earlier there had actually been three of them, but one exited to the left just before I took the photo.
Trift About three-and-a-half hours in and I was approaching the mountain hutte at Trift.
Trift I’d never actually eaten in there and I wasn’t going to do so today either, since I’d stopped for my own packed lunch only about half-an-hour earlier. So I pressed on up the other side of the valley.
Zermatt From the trail I could occasionally see views of the edges of Zermatt. Then I was faced with the option of continuing to follow the trail along the valley, which I didn’t really have the time to do on this day, or to descend back towards town, which I did do.
Edelweiss An hour later I arrived at Edelweiss, where I’d walked to on Tuesday morning. From there is was a relatively short and easy walk back to the hotel. Edelweiss is somewhere else I’d very much like to stay at some point. Although I’m concerned that with all of the fabulous hotels I’ve been staying in lately, I might find its amenities a little rudimentary. I don’t think you even get your own bathroom!
Firefly In total I had walked for over six hours today and I’d passed only four people on the trail. With the exception of the area around Gornergrat and Rotenboden, nowhere around Zermatt is particularly busy, but if you’re looking for proper peace and quiet, then the west side of the valley is the place to find it.Back at the hotel, there was time for half-an-hour in the pool before heading out for our final dinner of the week in Zermatt - one final rosti for me and a bowl of molten cheese and some bread for Judith.This is a picture of the illuminated logo outside of our hotel.Distance walked today - 11.1 miles (17.9km)Total ascent today - 4,813 feet (1,467m)Total descent today - 4,813 feet (1,467m)
Train Friday - We checked out of the wonderful Firefly, got the train to Tasch to retrieve our car and headed for Goppenstein to catch the train to Kandersteg.Here we are on the train. Still not been on here with my Honda. Which is probably just as well as you can’t even open the windows in the tunnel, never mind actually go through with the roof down. The trains are diesel powered and you would definitely choke on the fumes (as I nearly did when I opened the car window).
Cablecar Having arrived in Kandersteg, we drove the short distance to the cablecar, which would take us up into the mountains near to lake Oeschinen, which is reputed to be the most scenic lake in the Alps.Ideally I would have liked to walk up to the lake, but we were hoping to get at least a couple of hundred miles closer to Calais before bedtime, so I didn’t really have the time.
View From the cablecar station it was a gentle twenty minute downhill walk to the lake (which, much to Judith’s dismay, meant that it would be a gentle thirty minute walk uphill on the way back). But the views along the way were excellent.
View The lake is somewhere just over that grassy hill ahead.
Lake Finally we arrived at the lake and it was indeed very scenic. It was also much bigger than I was expecting - maybe a mile across at its widest point.
Lake Whilst it looks lovely, what these photos aren’t conveying is the noise being generated by the few hundred school children that were generally causing mayhem all over the place. For the most part they were all either screaming at each other or trying to throw anything that wasn’t physically attached to the ground into the lake. Or both at the same time. Many had taken to the rowing boats that you can just see in the bottom right of the photo, which afforded them the opportunity to scream at each other on the water and for those still on the land to throw things at the people in the boats.On the whole, despite the beauty of the scene, being there was a generally thoroughly awful experience.Still, it was lunchtime, so we popped into one of the restaurants for a bite to eat. Apparently children either don’t have their own money or are not permitted in the restaurants with the civilized grown-ups. Which was nice. What was also nice was that by the time we’d finished our lunch, almost all of the screaming hoards had cleared off to spoil somewhere else.
Boats It’s difficult to gauge the scale of things around the lake. Here are a couple of rowing boats on the lake. They’re probably still a couple of hundred yards from the cliff and my photo would need to be maybe three or four times taller for you to be able to see the top of it. It really is scenery on an epic scale.
View Now that the screaming masses had departed to curse someone else’s day, we were able to appreciate the scenery more effectively.There were quite a few trails around the lake, winding off into the distance to unseen mountain huttes. It may be necessary to come back for a couple of days at some point and have a go at a few of those.
Waterfall A waterfall on the lake.
View This was a view on the way back to the cablecar station. There seemed to be a trail disappearing into that valley in the distance. Hopefully I’ll get to have a go at that at some point.
Black and White View Same photo, just in black and white.
Chateau de L'ile Back at the car we headed north to try and cover some distance before bedtime.Considering that it was Friday afternoon, we had been making fairly good progress, right up to the point that we reached Basel. The motorway was completely jammed, so the sat-nav directed us off and we made quite good progress for about a mile before we came to a complete standstill. We crawled a short distance in a long time before getting fed up and pulling a U-turn. We picked a road perpendicular to the traffic misery and just headed in that direction down whatever roads were available for about 30 minutes, until we were well clear of the jams.Then we turned north and drove until we had pretty much run out of diesel (managing 549 miles on one 50 litre tank - a personal best in the 1-series).When we finally stopped for some much needed fuel, we checked for local hotels and discovered that a highly rated place called the Chateau de L’ile was only a couple of miles away, so we headed for that. It turned out to be rather nice and we had a lovely dinner in their brasserie.
Grounds Saturday - It turned out that the hotel was right next to a large river and had extensive grounds. It also appeared to have a large swimming pool. It would have been nice to have stayed there a little longer and had a better look around, but we still had 290 miles to drive to Calais.
1-Series I thought I’d best include a photo of the car, what with it having performed such sterling work conveying us all the way to Zermatt and (so far) half way back again.
Home The rest of the journey home was pretty uneventful. We arrived at the Eurotunnel almost two hours early for our train, but it was so busy that we weren’t offered an early departure. In fact, it was so busy that we, and about a dozen other cars, didn’t even manage to make it onto the train we were booked on and had to wait for another half an hour for the next one.And so ended my seventh, and our sixth, visit to Zermatt. I intended to try not to take too many photos, as I was sure there was little to see that I hadn’t already photographed before, and ended up taking more photos than on any previous visit. All things considered, and partly due to the tremendous luck we’d had with the hotels, this was probably our most enjoyable visit to Zermatt yet and will be very hard to top. But I’m looking forward to trying.Total distance walked this week - 49.7 miles (80.0km)Total ascent this week - 17,339 feet (5,285m)Total descent this week - 17,339 feet (5,285m)