Awww man what a story. It was awesome, the plan, go to Switzerland to see the Matterhorn. Sounds simple right? How hard could it be? I think the fact that a 6 hour drive that turned into a 11 hour drive kind of explains that question.
I guess I should start at the begging. A mate has spent the last 3 weeks "working" in Germany, he MSNs me saying:
Nick: come to Switzerland
Nick: iv found a mountain pass I'm going to take a journey through the alps
Steve: when
Steve: iv got most Fridays and Mondays off from now until Christmas
Nick: this weekend I'm flying home, I'm thinking the weekend after
Steve: tell me where to be and when and ill be there
Nick: lol right your on, I live 10 minutes from Frankfurt airport. if you can make a flight out ill pick you up
Steve: you want me to do any driving ?
Nick: erm I should be fine, it won't be very driving intense
Nick: I have a plan, were going to Tasch. its less than 2 hours from Bern and its 6km away from Zermatt (we can walk it)
Nick: which is where the Matterhorn is....
Fast Forward to Friday 7am, I'm at Stansted airport waiting in the departure lounge for my 1 hour flight to Frankfurt Hanh. As I was sitting there reading my magazine, surrounded by loads of people, none of whom where speaking English. I started to think about what was going to happen;
- Fly to Frarankfurt Hanh airport,
- Get picked up from airport,
- Hang around Frankfurt till about 5pm,
- Drive south into Switzerland, then round some mountains, to get to Tasch at about 2-3am,
- Walk/Train/Taxi the 6km from Tasch to Zermatt,
- Find some where to sleep
Sun, Sea & Sand Snow, Glaciers & Mountains,- Matterhorn,
- Drive back to Frankfurt,
- Fly Home to the UK.
A nice simple plan yeah ?? Ok so having a plan is nice. Having a plan that can be changed easily is
WAY more use. If you have a plan that goes perfectly your either a blatant liar, pretty dam awesome, or just making it up as you go along. Having a plan is good - your going to know when things aren’t going so right & also your going to know what you want to go do.
The flight to Germany was nothing special, so I didn't end up going crazy from the boredom, I didn't even have to sit next to some annoying kid. My bag was unloaded and waiting for me in the airport, before I'd even got through passport control; good old German efficiency. Once I was out of the airport, I turned my phone on and called Nick.
Nicks job consists of been on call in Frankfurt; he has to be in or around Frankfurt on the off chance that that something goes wrong - when it does he springs into action and sorts it. When he’s not fixing stuff he hangs around his hotel. Picking me up wasn't going to be a problem - except - nick was on the fist call he had out there, and he had been out there 3 weeks.
Frankfurt Hanh is about one and a half hours from Frankfurt, as always at airports there are taxi / minibuses / coaches that will take you from the airport to the cities / touristy type stuff. BOHR do a coach from Hanh to Frankfurt for €18. Once in the centre of Frankfurt I got Nick to txt me the address of his hotel, showed this to a taxi driver who spoke minimal English. He said that he knows the street, but not the hotel. Me, I say "ok, take me there".
Shortly after, I'm standing outside the hotel back on the phone to Nick, he tells me that he has stashed his room key-card out side his door. I knew this bit was going to be tricky - getting past hotel reception. A few phone calls later & a bit of blagging I had a new key to nicks room. I dump my stuff and finish my magazine from the airport off.
Still no nick, so I grabbed a few hours sleep, as I had been up since 3am. When I woke up and it was dark out side and still no nick. We were planning on leaving the hotel for Switzerland at 5pm on the dot no matter what. The time was now 4:30, or seen as I'm in Europe 16:30. Nick was still at work on his call; I went back to sleep, read some more book, watched some German TV. 20:30(8:30pm for us Brits) Nick arrives. Once he's packed we grab some food, and are in the car ready to roll at 10:30pm.
Nicks SatNav was set to take us to Tasch, about 550km or about 6 hours. Once we were out of Frankfurt on the main "E Roads", it was pretty dam sweet rolling along at 120mph. SatNav got up to some weird stuff, sending us on nice little trips threw some random towns, we even got to see a McDonalds twice from different directions. Germany was most uneventful, which is good when you’re on a 6 hour driving mission.
The border of Germany-Switzerland is a bit more than your average EU border, but seen as Switzerland isn’t in the EU. We got the normal "how long are you staying", "where are you from" etc. Paid the 40 Frank "Road Toll" and got a nice little green sticker for our troubles.
This is the point where things started "to go bad". I say bad, but it wasn't really bad, its just where they started to "Deviate" from the plan, and just some totally unexpected stuff. Stuff that you could never plan for, never in 1,000,000 years, it was "The Perfect Storm" of random, unfortunate, funny as hell stuff.
Switzerland is less than friendly to car drivers. They have crazy slow speed limits and speed cameras hidden all over the place. We were in the country for all of 15 min and then *FLASH* 10 min later *FLASH*. After this we just trundled along hoping that we were under the speed limits. As soon as another car went by we kept pace with them so we at least made some progress.
Address:On the "WTF Meter" this is about a 1 maybe a 2. Getting caught on a speed camera is crap; getting caught twice is lame, a bit careless. But still it’s not unheard of. Then things go to a 2-3. Road works, "Road works?" I hear you say, but these were no ordinary road works, these were Swiss road works. They had closed the road that we needed, they had diversions up though. The diversion signs were tiny, the arrows were pointing in opposite directions. "Berne Left" "Berne Right". In need of a little direction I got my SatNav out, Dual SatNav is the way to go, it is the future, it is the ultimate in road trip navigation. We kept driving, using the new two SatNav systems, and then as we have just past an exit, a diversion sign saying take that exit! It took us 2 more attempts to get round all the diversions in the end.
The next few hours were pretty uneventful, except maybe the both the SatNavs arguing with each other:
SatNav one "in 100 yards turn left"
SatNav two "in 200 yards turn right"
This wasn't really a problem - they both knew where we were heading. They must have been plotting what was about to happen for ages, together, in secret.
Ok, so it’s about 2:30 am, we have been driving for a good few hours, its still pitch black. I could start to make out the scenery now. Slowly seeing mountains appearing at the sides of the roads, then seeing outlines of mountains covered in snow, and then we started driving threw these mountains. It was awesome, totally dark - no lights. You could just make out that you were surrounded by snow covered mountains. The temperature gauge was slowly dropping; it said the temperature was now -2 degrees C. We were defiantly getting in to the mountains.
The roads were becoming more adventurous now; they didn't just go up and down a few little hills. These were proper roads that wound their way up one side of a mountain then down the other side. We are talking 180 degree bends, and 6-7 of them in a row. Basically awesome driving roads, so long as you ignore the 500 meter drop down the mountain if you screw up.
All this scenery and the fun roads started to distract us, if we had been paying more attention, we would have seen what happened next coming much sooner; We would have seen what the SatNavs had planned for us. Nick's SatNav gave up the game 1st, a weird looking icon turned up right in the place you would expect to see the next direction; for example, for a right hand turn you would see a arrow pointing right. The icon kind of, almost, looked like a train ... it was 3am ... and the SatNav, was expecting us to board a train. Thinking this was just another game of Nick's SatNav we just ignored it and used mine. That was until it asked us to board a ferry, half way up a mountain, at 3:30 in the morning. When you have two angry SatNav ladies telling you to keep driving & in 150 yards jump on a train, you have to just go and see if its a big joke.
As funny as it was, it wasn't a joke. We looked at each other, and we both said, ok!
We were in Switzerland, it was 3:30am, and the road thought the mountains turned out to be a car train, which unfortunately doesn't run at 3 in the morning. Faced with this we decided the best bet was to reroute. The best the 2 SatNavs came up with was a 90 mile detour back the way we came and round the mountains to the north-east. The Black Parade started playing for the 4th or 5th time, and we were off again. We were not about to be beaten by Tom-Tom, we were in Switzerland.
If the point where things started to go "bad" was back by the border, this is the bit where things went double "bad". We had planned to be in a hotel by now; lucky we didn't bother with booking anything. Instead we driving back to go round the mountain. Leaving the smaller, camera-free, 1 lane roads to get back to the 3 lane motorways.
The problem with driving in Switzerland at god knows what time in the morning, in a country that hates cars and anyone who drives them, are the speed limits. Or more importantly knowing what the speed limits are - which we didn't. The previous plan of tailing someone else and using them as a pacemaker was some what screwed. It seems that Swiss people tend to sleep at 4am and not do so much driving. So we plodded along at a "safe" speed until we left the big roads and headed back to the little towns.
Right here is where things kicked up a gear, and the gods started to REALLY try to stop us from completing our mission. So far we had had border police with guns asking us loads of questions. lucky they didn't want to see in the boot, as explaining thousands of pounds of IT equipment left in Nicks car from the job might have been a bit interesting. Then we had the speed cameras. Then Swiss road works, then the SatNav trying to get us on a train. What more could possibly go wrong? Surly something had to start going right? Ha-ha yeah right! ... we were still hours from Tasch, plenty of time for stuff to go wrong.
it was decision time, as far as wee could see we had two options.
- Pull over get a few hours sleep in the car in the mountains in sub zero temps.
- Pull over, dial up Google on a mobile phone, use Google maps on a mobile phone, work out if there was any other possible way round. Drive on and arrive who knows when with no sleep.
Obviously we were hardly likely to pull over and sleep, so we drove on. Using two SatNavs, a XDA connected with GPRS to the internet we came up with something that resembled a plan. a 4-5 hour drive back the way we came round the other end of the mountain, it wasn't good, but we were going end up there 1 way or another.
the next few hours were amazingly uneventful, I even managed to grab 30 min of sleep. Probably one of the best moments, EVER, waking up just as the sun was beginning to rise, and with the first light of the day seeing all around me snow covered mountains. we were at this moment in a valley somewhere very near to Tasch. The closer we got, the lighter it became, and the more we could see. After the night we had just had - it was about time we started getting some thing back, and we did. It was amazing, SNOW, mountains and snow.
I snapped a few pictures on the camera, it was to dark, and we were in the car. The quality was not that great. Most were blurry or under exposed, but some were fine. Looking back I just wish I had taken more. If I had taken 50 pictures and only 10 were usable id have been happy. Oh well at least I have a couple of shots.
According to the sign we were now in Tasch. Against all the odds we had just made it to our destination. We had arrived at the perfect time; it was 8:23am. Just in time for everything to start opening up.
In the last 24 hours I had about 3 hours sleep, and had just been in a car for 11 of them. It was -5°C, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by big fuck off mountains. The odd little wooden house dotted around, and a big 6 story car park. This giant concrete building was the best sight you could imagine.
We managed to find a parking space next to some posh cars. Seen as we wouldn't be coming back to the car till we were ready to leave, I got changed and added a few more layers (3 more to be exact). we got to the platform/ticket office just a little bit to late, the next train was leaving in 3 min. by the time the tickets had been bought the train had left. The station was empty except some snowboarders; a return ticket was about 15 Euros. The next train would be in 15 min, not bad eh?
The town of Zermatt is at elevation of 1,608 M (5,276 FT), to put that into perspective.
The peak of Ben Nevis is 1,344 M (4,409 FT), the peak of Snowdon is 1,085 M (3,560 FT).
We had to take the train as there are no cars aloud up to or in Zermatt. The only vehicles that are aloud in Zermatt are little electric buggies.
The cold fresh air had woken me up, the fact that we had spent all night driving round most of Switzerland didn't seem to matter any more, we were here! We were expecting to have to wonder about for ages at this point looking for some where to stay. But no, the Swiss had thought about this, Zermatt is designed, from the ground up to be a place for winter sports. In the Zermatt station there is a notice board, which has every hotel, the rates, and the facilities, and the code. Next to the notice board is a phone, dial the 3 digit code (for free) and you’re connected to the hotel, sweet eh? The second hotel we tried on the list (a 4 star hotel) had spaces, and sent a little electric buggy to come pick us up from the station (again for free). it worked out at about 30 quid for the night. We checked in, but they said the room would not be ready till 12:00.
Labels: Driving, Frankfurt, Glassier, Holiday, Matterhorn, Photos, Snow, Switzerland, Tasch, Walking, Zermatt
