Fiesch Monday

After Chamonix it was a big ask for the Matterhorn and surroundings to be anywhere near as spectacular. Well, the ask was big and we got it. The view from our hotel balcony was great and things were looking hopeful for the day.

 

We had a very comfortable bed, good breakfast and were able to leave the car in the hotel car park for the day. It’s not allowed to drive into Zermatt, so we caught the shuttle train from the station directly opposite the hotel. There were some steep sections and the train seemed to stop and possibly lowered a cog onto a rack for the steep parts. It sounded, to use a very technical term, clunky as other cog railways sound. We visited tourist info at Zermatt, where we were given information about what we wanted to do. We bought a peak2peak ticket which allowed us to take a very long cable car, the Matterhorn Express, with 3 changes of direction from Zermatt (1620 metres) to Trockener Steg, then another from Trockener Steg to Matterhorn Glacier Paradise at 3883 metres. There could have been fantastic views of the Matterhorn from here, Europe’s highest cable car station, but there was so much cloud. We did have a great view on the way up though, with no clouds. Wifi was available in unexpected places, such as the top of both mountains we went to, the cog railway stations and even outside the lift at the panoramic view point, probably so people could send photos of the clouds. Most of the cable cars we used were small, holding about 10 people max, but we were obviously scary, so we mostly had a cabin to ourselves. There were 3 Japanese tourists in our gondola at one stage, who thought it very funny when Rick squeezed the camera through a vent in the gondola to take a clear photo.

After the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise, we took the same route back to ¾ of the way down, then changed to another cable car, the Riffleberg Express, to meet the rack and pinion train, the Gornergrat railway, the highest cog wheel railway in Europe and travelled up to Gornergrat at 3089 metres. Stunning views again. From there, we took the cog railway back down to Zermatt and the shuttle train back to Tasch.

Back in the car again and drove here to Fiesch. Nice little hotel with a terrace overlooking a very wooded valley with a fast flowing river. Coffee and cake on the terrace. 

We can hear the river flowing from our room, the river is not actually flowing from our room. Just finished our bottle of Lambrusco after dinner and sitting looking out over our little terrace at the snow-capped mountains in the distance.