A day in Switzerland

Experience 10. What's the Matterhorn? Gornergrat, Switzerland. 8th June.

A cloudy day with a chance of rain and a chance of sunshine. Our destination being Gornergrat from which sensational views of the Matterhorn are guaranteed...or are they?

Our bus ride was about three hours, across the boarder and along winding roads through alpine country. The alps...what can you say about them...well, they're a bit hilly! We traversed the Simplon Pass which was originally built to allow Napoleon to pass his cannon into the Italian territories of the time, presumably to terrorise and blow up the locals....well, in truth it was probably the Austrian occupiers he was aiming for.

We passed snow covered peaks and very Swiss looking chalets, some of which seemed to be perched in precarious positions...don't drop your ball cause it is a long way down! From Tasch we took a 10 minute train ride to Zermatt then a cog railway to our destination. On the cog railway we passed a curious looking rodent sitting stock still on the snow, one of our gang suggested it was a Marmot, which after consultation with Professor Google, seemed to be about right.

Very cloudy & extremely cold in the thin air of Gornergrat, the lack of air took me back to the Kinabalu climb, short of breath and an instant headache. Not much view though. They call this mountain the mighty Matterhorn, but it seemed to be a bit shy today. The skies did clear in part from time to time, but not where the mountain was supposed to be, in fact the patch of cloud remained stubbornly in place despite the freezing winds that swirled all around. After a few icy snowballs were tossed about we gave up and headed back to the cog railway and our decent....why wouldn't you come out, what was the Matter horn?

Experience 11. Chocolate by the gram. Zermatt, Switzerland. 8th June.

More popular than snow capped alps and the Matterhorn in Switzerland is of course Swiss chocolate. A visit to the local chocolatier in Zermatt, before our return train ride to Tasch was definitely an experience not to be missed. It almost felt like we had stepped into a scene from Willy Wonka, mouth watering beautiful looking chocolate from wall to wall. They had a myriad of wrapped chocolates, individual gourmet chocolate to chose from and even the familiar Toblerone. Well it looked the same as the Toblerones we have in oz, only difference was that this one was 4.5kg. As tempting as it was, I didn't think I could afford the weight in my luggage (sorry Nick and Tom) and with all the other local Italian delicacies to consume on our trip I didn't think even I could consume 4.5kg of Toblerone in 3 weeks. So I went for a few grams from the slabs of chocolate which they just snapped off how ever many grams you wanted. All sort of combinations to chose from in either white, milk or dark chocolate. My choices this time were milk chocolate with praline almond and straight milk chocolate. Devine to say the least.