Vermala Aparthotel Crans-Montana

... control recently has broken down, this was the perfect sign to follow, where I planed to cross the border to Switzerland.

Just arrived in late afternoon to Aosta, I was not only already entered to the italian part of the alps but also to the point of good bye. Here I decided not to spend another night in Italy and crossed the border to my homecountry Switzerland a hour later at Calle del Gran San Bernardo.

BIENVENUE EN SUISSE - WELCOME TO SWITZERLAND

... 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 ...

... room, toilets and showers to myself. I rarely saw anyone and reception was really nice. I then headed to Cully to try the famous Lavaux walk but caught a train that didn't make all the stops so I ended up at Lausanne again. I decided to take a bit of a walk, making my way through Pully and then to Letvy where I caught the train to Cully. The view was great but the vineyards that I stumbled across in Letvey were better because there was noone around and you could really smell the wine.

... back to the campsite after that. In the sun it started to get pretty warm.. well not freezing anymore so had loads of my layers off. Just walking down the road by myself and the only noise was the faint running of water in the stream and the cow bells... I could not have been happier.
I met Kathleen back at the van after and enjoyed the last 20mins of sun.. then it got COLD. She went to the internet and I had a snooze.. wrapped up in a ...

... that I have much to compare it to, but I wouldn’t argue with that. Pictures will tell that story.

Shortly after I got to the hostel I met Bill, a retired engineer from Baltimore. He’s a pretty experienced hiker and I decided to go with him on a "six hour" hike the next day. That six hour hike turned into nearly 10, but it was entirely worth it. I can’t count the number of ...

... truck stop, about 2 hours from Lautenbruner. Camping up there is going to be expensive, so we might as well save a couple of bucks while we can.

We had a very fine dinner of Wienerschnitzel, veggies and Italian vino rosso here.

It still seems kind of hard to believe. Back in St. Paul, it would have seemed awfully exotic to be camped at a Swiss truck stop, somewhere between Lucerne and Lautebrunner. Yet here we are, beside the Swiss Autobahn.

... side of the Valley to where we walked yesterday and is the first stop of the cog railway that takes you up to the top of the Jungfraujoch. One of Matt's mates from home, Rusty, also used to live there for a while, so we were keen to visit. We decided today that we should walk up and catch the cog railway back down. The opposite of what we did yesterday. The walk is 1hr 30 mins up very steep trails and after the first few hundred metres my calves were ...

... and Nikki were late coming in due to her lost luggage so we spend all afternoon marveling at our luck in the weather and cycling around up and down the valley. We also had time to go to Trindlebasch which is the waterfall inside the mountain. You take a lift up inside the mountain and wander around inside and outside to view the waterfall from about 10 different places. It was pretty cool, definitely something you couldn't do in NZ. Andrew and Nikki ...

... accesible to a height of about 3454m by train. (the summit is 4158m). It was pretty misty on the way up and we were pretty bummed because it cost us about 115 bucks for the return trip. We reached the top and it was really cool to see but there was very little visibility. We decided to go inside the big complex to look at the ice caves and ice sculpture exhibition which was really good. The floor and walls were ...

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