Alpine Memories

“The last two days have been so spectacular, they deserve their own blog.” This was Jamie’s reaction to the last two days that we’ve spent in Visp, Switzerland. This will be a fairly short post due to the fact that we only posted a couple of days ago, but we’ve both been so overwhelmed by the last couple of days, that we’ve had to put it into words.


Yesterday started with some pretty ordinary weather that called a halt to our expedition to one of Switzerland’s largest glaciers. Instead, we purchased a two day rail/bus pass which at an expensive $100 each, definitely needed to provide some brilliant services to give some satisfaction. We left that morning to see Sass Fee which is a small ski resort that offers all year round skiing, and beautiful scenery. The bus trip alone to our destination was absolutely stunning. When you see the work that has been put into the roads that service these towns, you can understand why it costs so much to get public transport. They have to pay for these incredible winding and tunnelling roads somehow. The town itself is completely free of conventional cars, which are traded for electric run taxi’s which are no doubt priced to encourage people to walk. This alone, has a calming effect on the entire town giving it an old school feel and essentially turning it into a complete pedestrian zone. We finished the day with a beer in a local cafe, and returning to Cal for a lovely dinner of bangers and mash (sausages purchased in France, 15 minutes away).

With a massive day planned for today, we woke up at a very impressive 6:30am; earliest we’ve been up in months! We made our way up to Zermatt which is a similar sort of town to the one we saw yesterday, but more famous because of the towering monster lurking above the town called Mattahorn. This was to play second fiddle today, as the original plan was for Andrew to do some midsummer skiing on one of the few all year round ski fields in Switzerland. Unfortunately due to some dodgy alpine weather early this morning, skiing was wiped off the cards. To make up for this disappointment we decided we’d take the cable car up as far as it would go (highest cable car in Europe). At about 11:30 the weather cleared up beautifully so we boarded the cable car for the hour long ride. After a couple of bumps which had Jamie clinging to the ceiling, we made our way to the top of Klein Mattahorn, 3882 metres above sea level. The view from here was just incredible. We could see into Switzerland, France and Italy all covered in beautiful snow. It’s just too hard to describe the feeling you get when you’re this far above the rest of the world. Jamie said that it’s one of her most memorable moments of travelling so far. This is what it’s all about.

A&J xoxo
 
PS - Only a few days till we see Mum and Dad Griffo!!!