15/5 business day - run + 10BX for the olds (youngs not interested after the 1st session), maths, washing clothes and dishes, net/email/blog, skate and scoot with the kids next door,grocery shop ( ~$240!?!) and away south westward to Tasch , the end of the road before Zemmat. It lies further south & higher still than the famous Grindewald & Jungfrou region with more than 10 peaks over 4000m, the highest at 4634m but the most recognizable Matterhorn at 4478m.
Spectacular inviting drive through alpine villages & valleys, all cropped mainly with apples & some vines, many with massive jet-like waterfalls just bursting out of the rock nearby.
We get our first look at the less than pristine & hygienic Switzerland with small motorway-side caravan communities (? gypsies?). Closer to Zemmat is characterized by red tourist trains and kms of tunnels through ( not over or around) the imposing clear mountains. The longest presently is 37km but the Swiss are building another ,due for completion in 2017, at 57km!! Tasch is an unremarkable, small brown,wooden service village to the ski fields higher up. Apart from madly busy tourist railways tracks everywhere & ugly budget hotels/motel (the fancy one’s are higher up the ‘Horn’ ), it’s most visible structures are enormous aqueducts,channels, & bridges that funnel megalitres of melting glacial ice & white water underneath the village thus keeping it from being washed away. All seems a bit precarious. We park up for a snacky dinner & bed.
16/5
It’s snowing! Soft, powdery beautiful stuff! Kel’s exhilarated as glittery flakes land on her eyelashes and vanish with a few blinks. We ride a very quiet red tourist train to ritzy Zermatt, full of outrageously expensive watch, chocolate, Swiss knife, North Face type clothing & shoe shops, restaurants, cafes, stodgy brown buildings with red shutters and Japanese & American tourists, and us.
Every street reaches up to a jagged, snow-capped peak. Wil’s enthusiasm for the whole scene intensifies convincing him of a future living & working in a ski field. Man, he’s planning alot. Jeff & I reckon he’ll need 5 lives to fit it all in. We wandered through a weird cemetery behind an austere church cluttered with edelweiss & the graves of young men in their 20-30s, victims of the surrounding ~ 10 ‘horns‘, especially the angular very sheer Matterhorn.
With the snow coming down a little more heavily, we pause luxuriously in the coziest cafe with sumptuous large leather seats for coffee/hot chocolate. Wil finds Tony on line (!) and they have a ping pong e-chat - what a thrill. We get the low down on where to get the best cheese fondue,a Swiss delicacy,from the cafe chicks. Cafe Du Pont is the scene of an incredible over consumption crime.
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| Scene of the Culinary Crime |
We order 2 and get 2 large pots of steaming melted, garlicky and herbed cheese, 2 huge baskets of crusty bread pieces and 2 large bowls of small steamed jacket potatoes….and we finish it! Barely able to stand up, we roll out into the cold, belching and groaning toward the Matterhorn Mountaineers Museum. A brick like German woman gruffly directs us around the foyer, strips us of jackets, bags & of course, a rather large sum of money before unceremonially ushering us down the stairs into a dull display of Old Zermatt in the days of farming and hardship...and THE snapped piece of climbing rope (bizarrely set in a glass case upon a red velvet cushion) that broke in 1865 sending 4 climbers in the first ever summiting party, to their death down the north face of the Matterhorn. Oh well. There was a terrific short film about the highly skilled (& well practiced ) helicopter rescue team that service the abundance of crazy sorts that hanker to conquer the Icy Giants. It'll cost you about 1500 franks to have a crack at the Matterhorn - mostly we presumed to cover the incredible rescue service.
Home via a knife shop and a chocolate shop with pricey purchases only from the latter. How we could stomach chocolate after the fondue incident is a mystery!
We decide to drive down the valley toward Interlaken rather than stay the night and before we know it, we’re back in another set of snowy peaks & mountain passes closer to the Italian border, many of which seems closed to traffic given the conditions.
Time for bed so we nervously pull up in the parking lot at the bottom of a cable car lift, warm up with a tea and hit the books. Soporific sounds of bell-jangling cow bells augment the trumpeting human low notes - pity any policeman who comes to the door to move us on in the night.
17/5
The Swiss must bore the best holes in the world. We woke early after a COLD night roadside to a window full of mountain peaks and naively made for the multitude of passes in the SW of the country after a night of soft snow.
I started casually taking passenger side driving photos but as the thickness of the snow and the pointness of the peaks grew, my snapping frenzy reached it’s highest point …. and then the tunnels.
More of these than open road. Despite thick carpets of plush white snow, the roads are precisely prepared AND dry already.
Then we realize all the high passes,Grimel & Furka, on our way to Interlaken are closed. Buggar. Surely the punctual practical technological Swiss have an answer. We pull up at a pub where pickled bar flies draw me pictures of cars on a train through a tunnel 5 mins up the road. Really?? Yes indeed - the autoverlad through the Furka tunnel! A man in a bright neat orange tie speaking rolly polly Swedish chef Swiss German gives me a bored “Ja, Ja” and hurries me along with a ticket for SFr30. We drive to the stop sign and wait for the next train in 10 mins.
Snowfight !!
The train arrives and we drive on holding our breath,ducking & tucking in the side mirrors. What ridiculous fun!
Out we pop steering Eddie down the most picturesque set of tunnels taking a further gazillion photos.
All the tunnelling explains frequent unsightly earth moving equipment and enormous piles of gravel. No doubt, being the obsessive best recyclers in the world (they pay for rubbish collection but not recyclables collection - good idea!), they recycle it all into the overdone web of motorways criss-crossing the land.
Millions of Swiss are going the OTHER way, banked up in traffic for about a hundred km in motorhomes and cars whose roofs are cluttered with boats, bikes, windsurfers etc. Then I learn that conformity has it that one holidays in the Swiss Italian SE departing through the Gotthard Tunnel. With the sun out and thus surrounded by truly majestic coloured lakes and alpine scenery, we decide to drive back a bit toward Interlaken rather than Lucern. Jeff, the genius decides to drive up to Grindelwald.
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