Excelsior Leukerbad

Destination 405

km197'555

Not entirely shure, if I spend my last day in a foreign country, I head towards north. A stopover at Novi Ligure provides me finally the opportunity to send a notification to all family and friends about my remaining itinerary before return back home. The date has been fixed to the 29.
The ride up to Vercelly in the low lands was not that exciting like the sighting of the mountain of Mont Blanc in the far. Since my ...

... the casualties of the Matterhorn.
Zermatt itself is tiny, with only electric taxis. It is much colder than Lauterbrunnen even though it's on the border of Italy.
Switzerland is strange. It has no language of its own. In Bern, Lauterbrunnen and Zermatt they speak German but in Montreux they speak French, even the train announcements change languages. It gets confusing, so I just stick to greeting people in English most of the time. When I had arrived here I was fuming a bit because I ...

... town of Seez. We must have taken some wrong turning around here, because the GPS went a bit mad. So we found a place to turn round (not easy on those roads) and went back until we could agree with the direction the GPS wanted to take.

We'd sent a text to Tom to say we'd arrive about 2 p.m, and could he arrange for some food to be left for us from the barbeque which had been arranged. He confirmed, and said he'd come down for us at that time.

... let alone Europe, we ate Maccas for tea! Even Maccas cost us about $30 for each of us to have a burger and share a water and some wedges.

We then felt we needed something sweet to wash the burger away so we went and had a hot chocolate in a little Swiss chocolate shop and watched the town from their first floor window. Zermatt really is such a pretty little town, it’s the kind of town you would see covered with snow on a Christmas card.

Day 2 – ...

We woke "late" (8am) and were the last to leave our bunk. Skipping breakfast, we began our 5 hour journey back to Zermatt. We chose a route that would give us a different view of the valley, but involved 1800m of decent. We paid for it for the next few days. We arrived at our apartment and ...

... on the snow with a lovely view from Mont Blanc on one side and the Italian plains on the other. In between there were dozens of skiers and snowboarders enjoying some summer runs. After our snow hike, we took a Tram down to do a 10K hike to Hornlihut, starting at 2500m. Tom was suitably freaked out by the ...

... way up to meet Evie and Sue at the playground (after a 5 euro hot chocolate) and we all walked down through some delightful traditional Swiss towns.

                                                 

... and rocking all over the place...! scary event #1 -We stayed in an old flat, Sarahs mom estimates it was about 300 years old...this was also an adventure -we took several different cable cars to get higher in the mountains...these were scary moments 2-20 the cable cars swing like crazy and you can look down 100 meters below you to see the rocky mountain that you will land on if the cable snaps -lots and lots of hiking in the Alps....BEAUTIFUL, it ...

... to get up in the highest mountains in Europe when I was so close! The town itself is nothing special, quite a touristy place (justifiable for its location) and a bit of an adrenaline fuelled, extreme sports mecca. Great if you have a small fortune to spend, but not so good if you're just there to do some hiking. Basing myself in one of the smaller towns further up the valley, like Wengen, probably would have been a better idea, but I wasn't to know. If ...

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Here is a video (sorry for the very bad quality)
http://www.youtube.com/watc h?v=R5_9hODsqgs