Zermatt
Zermatt is one of those really beautiful places in the world.
If I had to sum it up, I would say, it's everything I expected ski resorts to be like when I knew nothing about ski resorts - a picturesque mountain village nestled in a valley with steep sides ascending 2 miles up to craggy peaks way above, dominated by the world famous Matterhorn:
We arrived in Geneva on Thursday afternoon and caught the 3:24pm train to Visp, where we changed to get a different train to Zermatt. The train follows along the shore of Lake Geneva for miles and miles and miles, offering spectacular scenery. These photos, taken from the inside of the train while it was moving at high speed, don't really do the scenery proper justice:
We were blessed with the weather - after about 10cm of snow on Christmas day, it was sunny and calm for most of our stay. Some more snow during the week would have been nice but considering it was later December early January I was pretty happy with the results.
We stayed at the City Hotel Garni run by a guy called Christoph, ("Hotel-Garni" basically means "Bed and Breakfast"):
From left to right: Christoph, Anja, Chantelle, Chanine
These guys were fantastic. Both Christoph and his wife Anja were also qualified ski instructors - Christoph had been skiing since he was 5 years old and was able to give me some good tips for skiing moguls (after a while we started to realise that meeting people who learnt to ski almost before they could walk was not that unusual in Zermatt).
Anja, Chantell and Chanine were also really friendly - they all smiled a lot - nearly all the time it seemed! Each morning I would have a very entertaining chat with one or the other learning the pronunciation of various new German words (unsuccessfully but still it was all good fun). I think that the lovely Chantelle and Chanine were Christoph and Anja's daughters but I never summoned the courage to ask them this.
When I come back to Zermatt (and I will!), I'll definitely stay at this place again.
Alex and Kim
Oh, I keep saying "We" - "We" was Kim (left) and Alex (right):
They were both boarding, I was skiing. That above picture was taken from the Klein Matterhorn area.
There are three main skiing areas in Zermatt - the closest to where we were staying is the "Sunnega-Blauherd-Rothorn" area - but we just called this "Mountain Number 1".
The second area is called "Stockhorn-Gornergrat", which you reach by a cog train:
Yes, the train line runs right next to the ski slope! Amazingly, this train line was built over a hundred years ago! The train station at the top is the highest in Switzerland - it ends at a big building complete with an observatory and telescopes. This building was built even before the train line, as a place for people to go and watch other people attempting to climb the surrounding mountains (including the Matterhorn). That period during the 19th century was called the "Golden Age of Mountaineering" for which Zermatt was a mecca. I learnt all this from a very old man (who still skiied) while sitting on the train on the way up. The views out of the train on the way up are simply stunning.
We called the area reachable from the train "Mountain Number 2".
The "Klein Matterhorn" area is the highest skiing area - "Klein" just means "little" in German - it's a slightly smaller peak that is next to the Matterhorn. We just called this "Mountain Number 3". Aren't we terrible?
At the top of the Klein Matterhorn area there is an "Ice Grotto" where they have ice statues. I've seen ice statues before so I wasn't so impressed with that, but what I didn't realise is that they had carved out a whole cavern out of the glacier. You literally walk down a tunnel into the depths of the glacier ice, complete with all of the crevices etc. Here's an mpeg I filmed as we were walking through the tunnels.
Of course one of the main reasons we chose to go to Zermatt so early was for New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve in Switzerland is a much bigger deal than elsewhere - it's more significant to them than Christmas. Anyway, for New Year's Eve we ended up meeting another guy called Alex Kealy, and Agnes.
Alex is training to be a British Army officer at Sandhurst, while Agnes was a marketing executive for Nestle. Agnes had also been skiing since she was 3 years old (I guess she already knew how to walk then...):
From left to right: Agnes, Kim, Alex Kealy (officer training at Sandhurst), Alex Medina (mate who I already knew).
Both Alex Kealy and Agnes were pretty damn good - Alex got bored with just normal downhill skiing so he skiied with us on cross country skis (so he had to do telemark turns down mogul fields etc.), while Agnes preferred to ski backwards while giving snowboard tips to Alex M. Here's a picture of them in the Klein Matternhorn area (can you guess what that peak is in the background?):
Left to right: Alex M, Agnes, Alex K., Kim.
I'm not kidding. Agnes really did ski backwards while giving snowboarding tips.
Cervinia
You can ski from Zermatt to the Italian resort of Cervinia, so we popped over there for some spaghetti bolonaise for lunch one day:
Actually, "popped over" is a bit misleading. By the time you have traversed the cable cars and lifts, it's about an hour and a half to get there. Still, worth it for the coffee, which was fabulous.
There was also an amazing view from the toilet window of one of the restaurants there:
In general, the food in the Swiss mountain restaurants was fantastic, although predictably expensive. My favourite was the one at the top of the Rothorn cable car (Mountain Number 1).
Apres Ski
At the end of each day we ended up at a bar called the "Papperla Pub", but in keeping with our inability to comprehend anything in a different language, we called it "Frankenstein's" (derived from "Franziskaner"):
Everywhere we skiied there was spectacular scenery. I took lots of photos - here are the best ones:
Skiing movie clips
Here are some skiing movie clips. Each one is roughly 8Mb.
This is a clip of me attempting a mogul field. I sort of had the right idea, but I was making pretty hard work of it.
This is a clip of Kim snowboarding.
This is a clip of Alex snowboarding.
Conclusion
I'll definitely come back to Zermatt again. The only thing I would change, would be to come later in the season - late February - when there would be better snow in the lower runs and therefore more terrain to ski.