We woke this morning to the sight of snow gently floating down outside our room. Unfortunately it is not all that easy to photograph so you will have to take my word for it.
Our main baggage having gone on ahead on our bus, around 9:30am we walked down through the town of St Moritz to the railway station.
We made a small detour to have a closer look at the frozen lake
Then we boarded the train, “The Glacier Express”. This is a famous train which has been running since 1930. It travels between St Moritz and Zermatt which is a town at the foot of the Matterhorn. Now I don’t think that this train actually crosses any glaciers. I certainly didn’t see any. I suspect the word “Glacier” in its title must refer to the train’s speed. It took us around 8 hours to travel the 270 kilometres of track
But it is a truly amazing ride which, according to the guide book, crosses over 291 bridges and through 91 tunnels. Now we were sitting with a Canadian couple and the husband was a teacher as well as an author of several Maths text books and we decided we would count the tunnels, which we did and we only got to 72. But we were fairly strict on our definition of what constituted a tunnel and did not count avalanche sheds.
The scenery along the route was incredibly beautiful but there were a couple of highlights for me. The first was travelling through the Rhine Gorge. This is called Switzerland’s Grand Canyon and was very striking.
The second highlight was going over the Oberalppass which was the highest point on the line at 2033 meters. We came up out of a long tunnel which we had entered into in a forest but we exited in a sea of pure white snow and nothing else. The sun was shining and the reflected light was dazzling. It was truly breathtaking and totally overwhelmed my camera. This photo does not even start to do it justice.
Shortly after 6pm we pulled into Zermatt. It has a population of 6,000 permanent residents but can accommodate a further 40,000 visitors, mostly skiers and climbers, in the winter season. There are no motors cars. Access to the town is by train. The only vehicles you see are small electric vans owned by the hotels.
We are staying at the Hotel Sonne. It has been built in the traditional Swiss Chalet style and we have a very comfortable room on the 5th floor.
We have a couple of owls, a couple of reindeer and a snowman decorating our balcony.
Hardys’ Travels 