In my travel magazine they ask the people they interview what kind of people are they - mountain, ocean, desert or jungle people. I'm definitely a mountain person and so, I'm discovering, is Israel. I feel happiest when there are mountains around me. Israel likes to climb mountains, the higher the better, on foot or even better if there's a scary narrow road leading up to the top and I'm driving...So we took ourselves to the mountains. Our destination this summer was the Tour du Mont Blanc or TMB for short. Israel had heard from a friend that this is a route worth taking and so we set on trying to walk it. The Tour circuits the Mt. Blanc massif passing through France, Italy and Switzerland in the process. According to the web sites and book describing the Tour the trip takes 12 days. Crazy people running the route do it in two days (it's called the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc sponsored by the North Face) but the more normal people, like us, would probably need 3 weeks to manage it. I say probably because in the end we didn't have enough time to walk the whole tour and so settled for a taste of things to come (because we are definitely returning for another go when we will have more time).
The Tour is formidable. A lot of steep climbing and descending each day. As Israel said, it redefines the issue of heights and hiking... However, I think that with good equipment (which we had, thanks to Israel's careful planning and instructing), previous physical preparations and correctly paced walking the tour is doable. The views are incredibly rewarding and there aren't enough adjectives to describe the beauty and majesty of the mountains, the villages and the surroundings.I'm going to try and describe what we did and where we went. I've got so many lovely pictures to choose from (Israel left me all 500 of them...). It's not going to be easy but here goes...
We set out from Milan by car. They say the best thing about Milan is that it's close to nice places. Now ain't that the truth... We arrived at Courmayeur in the afternoon, had a piadina (see left) and continued on to France planning to go through the Mt. Blanc Tunnel (no other way to go, up the mountain is not an option in this case). We were greeted by a sign announcing that there will be a one hour wait to go through the tunnel. We figured, it must be the holidays causing the traffic jam but then as we crawled forward we discovered that the reason is probably more mundane and reminiscent of the definitions of heaven and hell in Europe:Heaven is Where
The Police are British,
The Chefs are French,
The Mechanics are German,
The Lovers are Italian
and
It’s all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is Where
The Police are German,
The Chefs are British,
The Mechanics are French,
The Lovers are Swiss
and
It’s all organized by the Italians.
We ended up in Les Houches (riddle of the post - how do you pronounce the name of this place correctly?! We struggled for 2 days before finally figuring out how to pronounce it properly...) a small, pretty village a few km from Chamonix. This is the traditional place for starting the TMB (I'm not sure why, maybe because the climbs on the first two days from there are a bit easier). We stayed in a nice hotel there Hotel du Bois. To get into the climbing mode we decided to hike up to the Pyramides of Les Bossons Glacier between Chamonix and Les Houches before starting on the TMB. This was a slightly crazy idea because we ended up climbing more than 800 m. in a few hours on our first day of walking... But how beautiful! Here are some pictures:
The view of the mountain near the glacier kept changing as the clouds drifted in and out.This is what we looked like climbing there:
The smiles probably indicate that we liked the views and were having fun but also that we were a bit nutty doing this climb on the first day...
We took the chair lifts part of the way down (see above) during which Israel told me that it can't be that we climbed "only" 600 m. It ended up that he was correct. We "did" more than 800 m. (and lived to tell about it...).
and this is the sleep of the just a few hours later:
The next day we started walking the TMB in the traditional anti clockwise direction. We set out confidently expecting to turn left onto the route (as indicated in the book) but seeing instead clear signs pointing in the other direction...
It was so confusing we decided to go to the tourist information nearby and ask. The sour faced lady there said "You should go left". We asked "So why does the sign point in the other direction?!". She shrugged in a what-do-you-want-from-me-I-only-work-here kind of way. So we went left in the end...The climb was not easy:
But the mountains were so very very pretty:
We reached Col de Voza in the early afternoon and sat down for a well deserved lunch:
Turns out you can have donkeys or mules carry your stuff while you walk
We spent the night in a refuge called Gite du Champel. This is what one sees from the window when one wakes up in the morning:
and this is where we ate breakfast over there:
During the walks we saw so much water - trickling down from the mountains, rushing through the valleys, everywhere so much water. If we could have just a little bit of all this water in Israel...
and lovely flowers and butterflies:
Our third day ended in the pretty village of Les Contamines. The name of the place doesn't mean what you might think it means, i.e. a contaminted place. Rather, the name of the village originates, according to wikipedia, from ancient local dialect. The word “Contamines” , derived from Latin condominium through condaminium, once meant ploughable land on the squires estate. The village is well cared for. Especially nice are the pots of flowers everywhere:
We stayed at the very pleasant hotel Le Christiania. It's a family business and the good restaurant on the ground floor is run by the daughter who lives nearby.
On the second morning in Les Contamines we woke up to find a market in the main street of the village. We bought ourselves a nice lunch - French cheeses, some berries, tomatoes and the inevitable baguette (one does not see a French person without one tucked under his/her arm) and walked along a river to the Notre-Dame-de-la-Gorge Church. There we had a small picnic:
What do you think about my divine hat? So wonderfully French... I could go with it to the Ascot races or something... We found it in the market in Les Contamines and Israel bought it for me...
The next day we travelled (by car) to Switzerland. We spent the night in a village near Sion - Haute Nendaz in the Valais. Why there, you wonder? For old times sake. Many years ago when I was about 7 my parents took us there after the time we spent in Holland. It was our first trip abroad in which we didn't go to be with relatives. I remember being incredibly happy to see mountains again when we got there after Holland which is completely flat (except for some tiny dunes near the coast). The place is rather empty in the summer but seems to be an active ski resort in the winter. The views were wonderful there, too (as you can see in the picture).We took the road up to the top of the mountain there trying to find a nice place for a picnic. The problem was that I was STARVING (and those who know me well know what this means..). So at some point we just stopped on the side of the road (maybe one car passed by the whole time we were eating) and ate our food. I was a bit... don't know what exactly, and this is the result:
In the morning we travelled north towards Zurich. We went through the Grimsel pass:
The pass is a heaven for bikers (both bicycles and motorbikes). One of them, (see below on the left) who climbed all the way up from Meiringen on his bike (1,500 m. height gain!), took our picture:
(was it cold? yes, it was! It's Israel who doesn't suffer from the cold... but then you think, I'm outnumbered, the other guy is also wearing shorts, but he has mitigating circumstances, he just climbed a mountain).We continued from the pass down to the valley and then up a scenic road near Meiringen leading to the Reichenbach Falls. The falls, which drop down 250 m., impressed Sir Arthur Conen Doyle so much that he staged the mighty battle between Sherlock Holmes and and his archenemy, Prof. Moriarty, over there. Initially, they both died when they fell but later on, due to pressure from fans, Sherlock Holmes appeared to have survived by hanging on to a ledge and went on to solve more mysteries. Here are two pictures of the falls:
and these are of us over there (beautiful place to have coffee nearby):
The narrow road continues on up to Schwarzwaldalp, which like many other mountains in Switzerland, it and its surroundings are wonderful, beautiful, choose your adjective... See for yourself:
(the picture opening the post is also from there)
In Zurich we met my parents. While there we paid a visit to the Sprungli chocolate store along the Bahnhofstrasse. As far as I'm concerned they (with Lindt) make some of the best chocolate that one can ever hope to eat... Do yourself a favor and if you're in Zurich go there. The chocolates are worth every penny you pay for them, have some coffee, and try their vanilla ice-cream. It's the real thing...
To end this (very long...) post some ducks, this time the healthy inhabitants of the Zurichsee:
Shana Tova to all... and happy travelling