Zermatt

This is Matterhorn country. The big cheese, the real Swiss experience. But unfortunately one that we had to limit to a day’s side trip from Saas Grund. Staying there would have crippled our finances, that’s for sure! But it was definitely worth the investment.

Zermatt is car free, which means you have to make the 8km trip from the next village by train, a narrow gauge alpine cog driven train to be precise (narrow gauge eh? why can’t we get some of these in NZ?!). Now the price of this alone was worth a day’s skiing at a French resort straight off, and after being relieved of another 152 Swiss Frankensteins (that’s £60/$NZ175) we were ready to take on the “Matterhorn Ski Safari”, that being a 10,000m vertical descent across all the three ski sectors plus a cruise down into the Italian resort of Cervinia – without having to use the same cable car/lift or piste more than once! And just to make it even more special, included a cruise along Europe’s highest piste (approx 3800m)! Now that’s what I call a safari.

Essential Matterhorn shot

Zermatt itself is amazingly beautiful – the views of the Matterhorn and the many other 4000m+ peaks that surround it would be a beautiful sight…but only if we could see them! Luckily we snapped a quick Kodak moment at the top of our first summit, as it would be the only chance of seeing this famous sight for the rest of the day. Low (relatively speaking) cloud hung about all day, but alas didn’t bring the snow that the resort so badly needs.

Amazing glacier scenery all around Zermat

There was an amazing diversity of means of transport on and off the piste, grand gondolas, more alpine railways, a connecting piste via a tunnel (will the Swiss ever stop digging holes?) and another which was slapped on the side of a cliff with a 200m drop at its side. Very inventive but does really also show how spread out the resort is and a lot of the runs were narrow pathways rather than what we’d call a piste.

Europe's highest mountain lift, where to next?!

The absolute exhilaration that comes with completing a 10,000m descent in one day took it out of us. Fantastic! That aside though, we’d rate Zermatt on its beauty, on having the Matterhorn, on having access down to Italy (adds a new dimension to boarder crossing!), but we wouldn’t rate it for snowboarding. But that’s probably a good thing as otherwise we’d have had to chuck in the adventure and go get jobs!

10,000m!!!

No new snow on the horizon so from the Saas valley we’re heading off towards Switzerland's Italian region for some sight seeing, more on that soon...