Matterhorn

 Dear Gentle Readers

Today we rose early to a sumptuous breakfast in the same restaurant we dined in the night before. Very nice food.  When we arrived in Tasch our hotel said we had been upgraded to a hotel actually in Zermatt. So yesterday we caught the shuttle into Zermatt and spent the night at the Alpen Hotel and Spa. Very nice rooms and a shower to die for. This saved us heaps of time for today as we were already in Zermatt instead of having to catch the shuttle up this morning.

Here is Victoria in front of our hotel.

Suitably nourished we got the porter to drive us back to the train station where we bought tickets to the Gornergrat, the train that takes you up to the summit of the alps. The prices are unbelievable, CHF 132 to go right to the top, each! That's $200 each. However, the lady at our hotel said you can go halfway and still get an excellent view of the Matterhorn, so we shelled our CHF168 for both of us to go up to Riffelberg and got off the train to see this.

Yes dear readers, we shelled out $300 for this view of the Matterhorn.

So we waited...

and waited...

and did some more waiting...

in the hope it might clear up.

Finally our patience was rewarded as the clouds almost cleared away to reveal most of the mighty mountain. We took so many pictures but these were the best (or worst) so we deleted all the rest.

The Matterhorn is the most famous of the Alpine Mountains, soaring 4,478 metres (14,692 feet) above sea level.

The track up the mountains is way too steep for normal trains. The Gornergrat has the Abt railway system, a set of racks in the middle of the track that engages with a pinion gear on the train that lets it pull itself up the steep inclines.

To give you some idea how high we were, this is looking back down the valley to Zermatt. This was actually a telephoto shot so the valley is a lot smaller than in this picture and much further away.

While we were waiting around for the Matterhorn to clear, I took this shot of an Airbus A380 high above with gorgeous chemtrails  contrails streaming behind it.

After spending hours up waiting for the Matterhorn to clear, we decided to get on the road again as we had to drive to Bern, no doubt along some of those very winding roads we experienced yesterday.

When we got to the car and punched in the address of our hotel in Bern, Google Maps said it was a 4 hour drive. Then I noticed it said "avoid tolls". So I unticked it and low and behold the trip dropped to two and a half hours so we were pleasantly surprised as it had already been a long day.

However, about an hour into the journey we pulled up next to a train and Google Maps said "Board the train". Unbeknownst to us, Google Maps had led us to the Lotschberg shuttle train which takes cars and buses and trucks through a 14.5km tunnel to the other side of the Alps. This saves a long detour around the mountains and is much quicker than crossing some of the high alpine passes. This is why our trip dropped two hours. It cost CHF31 but it was well worth it. BTW, CHF=Swiss Franc.

Here we are on said train, you just drive on at the start and drive off at the end. A unique experience in my opinion.