Chamonix To Zermatt

Part 2:- The Journey down to The French Alps

Friday 5th August 1994

The fifth of August had been long awaited, it was the day of our departure for our ‘big adventure’. Together with my wife Irene, we were setting off to walk The Haute Route. There is only a short window of opportunity to do this walk without the risk of deep snow. The passes are mostly over 7,000 feet and in some cases almost up to 10,000 feet. It is essential to leave it late in the season to let the previous winter’s snow melt away, but to leave it much later would risk the fall of new snow. So sometime during the last three weeks of August is the optimum time for this walk.

The first part of the plan had already been rearranged. We had decided to travel down to Chamonix by train and get to use the brand new Eurotunnel which was going to open in May. The project ran slightly behind and although the tunnel was officially opened on the 6th May in a strange and disjointed ceremony involving The Queen and President Mitterand, it wasn’t open for passenger services until October of that year. With our train tickets already booked we decided to do it anyway and cross the channel by sea from Folkestone. We finished work on the Friday evening and donned our walking gear, picked up our rucksacks and walked up to the station, excited by what lay ahead of us. We were travelling down to London on the overnight sleeper. The slightly counter intuitive part of this was that to go south, first we had to go north, up to Carlisle, to get onto the sleeper train. There was much uncertainty about this part of the plan, there had been a series of one day rail strikes that threatened to make a mess of our immediate itinerary. But here we were at last, climbing onto the train, ready to relax and be whisked down to Euston. Trouble is, you don’t sleep much when you are being whisked! By 06:30 the train was swaying from side to side as it moved from one line to another on it’s final approach to Euston station.

We crossed London to Victoria station where we had an hour to wait for our connection to Folkestone, but instead of sitting and waiting, we headed out for a walk around Victoria. The train down to Folkestone was one of Network Southeast’s most authentic, capturing in one carriage the whole ethos of underfunding and neglect of one of our most fundamental industries. It’s filthy seats and littered isles did nothing to add to our comfort as the train lurched and creaked it’s way to the coast. Ironically, after a sleepless night on the ‘sleeper’, we slept most of the way down to Folkestone, nodding our way through the hop fields and orchards of Kent. We took the Seacat to Boulogne, just to add to all that was different about this adventure. I found it quite a strange experience, amusing even. It was like a large airport lounge on twin hulls, skimming across the sea, like a waiting room on water, not at all like the ferries.

As we entered the harbour at Boulogne-Sur-Mer it was clear to see that it is the largest fishing port in France. Employing some 7,000 of it’s inhabitants in the fishing industry the port plays a major role in the city’s economy. In Roman times it was the main crossing point to Britain and even today, the traveller has many options for crossing the channel from Boulogne to England. SNCF adopted responsibility for our safe onward passage from Boulogne to Paris and in just short of three hours we arrived at Gare du Nord. Tiredness was setting in, it was late on Saturday afternoon, a hot and sticky August afternoon on the Paris metro. No seats available and a 30 pound pack, feeling hungry and tired. We had been travelling for almost 24 hours now and I was beginning to feel like I needed to stop still for a while. But with 350 miles ahead of us, we boarded the TGV at Gare de Lyon, destination Geneva, where we had a room booked for the night.

The TGV did offer some respite, it was comfortable, air conditioned and as smooth a journey as anyone could imagine. As we slid silently out of the station and through the suburbs of Paris, past Orly airport and out into the French countryside, the train effortlessly glided up to 200 mph. We passed over hills and around carefully engineered bends, through the valley of The Seine and down towards Burgundy. The landscape began to change from wheat fields to vineyards as our progress south continued. On the seat behind us there was a little girl travelling with her Mum, three year old Sonia talked non stop and persisted in calling the train a TVG and every time her Mum corrected her. After a few hours even Mum was getting it wrong! But Sonia’s non stop chatter kept us entertained for a while and in a little over three hours we were pulling into Geneva station.

It was now after nine o’clock on Saturday evening, but all that was left for us to do now was find the Hotel St Gervais which we had booked two weeks prior to our journey. We had been travelling almost non stop for 27 hours and the fact that we had arrived in Geneva wasn’t going to stop us! We set out to find the hotel following street after street, returning to the station every 20 minutes to have another look at the map before we eventually found the hotel. It was remarkably convenient for the station, that was precisely why I booked it! but in true back packer style, we spurned the convenience and took an hour to find it. Tired, hungry and completely disorientated, we stumbled into the Hotel St Gervais. Although we were hungry, after a succession of ‘railway sandwiches’ food had lost it’s appeal. It was hard to think of food being something pleasurable anymore. So we abandoned thoughts of a meal and consumed a liquid supper. Ahh, Pression on a hot summer’s night really does take some beating….. even at £2.80 per pint! £2.80 seemed enormously extortionate, at that time, beer in the UK was less than half the price. Little did we know then that we would soon catch up to those prices.

It’s a strange phenomenon, but usually when we are on holiday Irene sees someone that she is almost certain she recognises. On this occasion it was Jimmy Knapp who, as leader of the train drivers union had been on the television news a lot in recent weeks. I was tempted to blame the beer, but as the tall, bald Scotsman came into the bar it became apparent that on this occasion it really was Jimmy Knapp. We found out later that he was in Geneva for an international railways conference. Irene told him that we had travelled all the way from the north of England to Geneva by train and asked if he had come by train. We anticipated his answer, surely he would use the railways. His answer rather wrong footed us as after a brief but thoughtful pause, he looked at us both and said ”Here on holiday are ye?”. Why don’t Railtrack want to negotiate with this man?

Sunday morning and the Paul Simon song Slip Sliding Away and particularly the line “….on the last leg of a journey we started a long time ago”, was running through my head. The last leg of this particular journey would be onto a train once more, around Lake Geneva to Martigny and then from there a mountain railway over to Chamonix, ready to start our Grande Aventure. “Last leg” also took on another meaning for me. I had twisted my knee six weeks before the walk and thrown the whole trip into doubt, but lots of rest and lots of physiotherapy had just about got me going again. What that had done though, was to stop us from walking and build up our stamina, ready for some of the huge days that lay ahead. I left our hotel room and edged sideways and slowly down the stairs. With all the sitting on trains my knee had stiffened and my cartaleges were very tender. As I edged down to breakfast I kept my thoughts to myself, but secretly I was thinking “there’s no way I can do this”, “I will make a start and see what I can do, but no way can I walk 175 miles over Alpine passes with a gammy knee!”.

So, things hadn’t got off to the best of starts, but strange though it may seem, we were having a  great time. We could not have known at this point, on a beautiful Sunday morning in Geneva, that things were about to take a dramatic turn for the worse.

In the light of the morning we could almost see the station from the pavement outside the hotel where we sat eating breakfast. We were refreshed and full of optimism and unlike the night before, we did the trip from hotel to station at the first attempt, taking us no more than five minutes. Now we had the very real pleasure of a trip with Swissrail, a very admirable organisation. I never fail to be impressed by their punctuality, courtesy, comfort and the sheer spread of their service. They appear to touch almost every community in this very mountainous country. They are the proof that railways can work and work extremely well. The high speed train gently swished along the northern shores of Lake Geneva, the mountain views increasing in height and intensity with each passing mile. Soon after we left Lake Geneva behind, we arrived at Martigny, where we changed to a mountain railway that takes us over the mountains and into France. There is a station on the border that has the rather grand title of Vallorcine Gare International. I was expecting a station of international importance, but Vallorcine Gare was a tiny little place in the mountains with no staff and certainly no passport control or border guards. From here the train bounced and lurched it’s way down the line, through countless unlit tunnels, crossing both footpaths and bridges. The railway was constructed in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the rough, mountainous terrain made me wonder about the difficulties and conditions that the engineers must have encountered.

We started to think about the walk, which we intended to start that afternoon. The walk starts from Chamonix and the first section goes up the valley to Argentiere where we would be stopping on the first night of our trek. The train we were on was due to pass through Argentiere on it’s way down to Chamonix, so we decided to get off the train there and leave our packs at the hotel before continuing down to Chamonix. This would give us the opportunity to complete the first section unencumbered by our rather large rucksacks. It made sense to give us the chance to get our stiff limbs working again after such a longtime on various trains. It seemed a longtime since we got onto the train in Carlisle and we were keen to get started on this epic walk we had been planning and looking forward to for so long. We checked into The Belvedere, a hostel more than a hotel. We booked a room that was really for four people and agreed to pay for the extra places just to give ourselves some privacy. We were glad that we had done, because when we were taken to the room it was quite small and had a double bunk bed! It was a bit like a four poster with an upper deck. It was while we were amusing ourselves over the concept of a double bunk bed that an awful realisation hit me with such force. It was one of those distressing moments when nothing makes sense anymore, when your head suddenly starts to spin as you realise that the only explanation is disastrous! Our excitement, our high spirits, our expectations and anticipation, all plunged headlong into a black hole. Somewhere on the train journey between Vallorcine and Argentiere I had been relieved of my wallet. Money, credit cards, phone card, all gone. I didn’t know if it had been stollen in one of those unlit tunnels, or if I had simply lost it, but whatever the reason, when I got off the train in Argentiere, I still had my passport, but my Visa had continued down the line with my American Express.

My immediate thoughts were that the holiday is now over, there was no way we could continue, even if we wanted too. We still had our return railway tickets and just enough in travellers cheques to get us home, which is where I wanted to be right now. I don’t know what hurt most, was it the fact that our long held plans would now come to nothing, or was it the thought that another human being would do this to me. I think it was the latter and I tried to convince myself that the wallet had been lost and not stollen, but when we did get home my card statement showed that my card had been used to buy railway tickets in Chamonix that afternoon before I managed to stop the cards. It was so difficult to pick ourselves up and form new plans about what we could do. We couldn’t get our heads around what had happened, never mind think about what to do next. I just wanted to go home.

Eventually we started to think straight again and we realised that the train would reach Chamonix and then make the return journey, stopping in Argentiere on it’s way back up to Vallorcine. So we headed over to the station with the idea of jumping on the train when it stopped briefly, for a quick look around the carriage for my ‘lost’ wallet. We talked to the woman in charge at the station and she made every effort to help us, she was brilliant, making phone calls to other stations on the line to see if anything had been handed in. She took details of what had been ‘lost’ and when. When the train came in she helped us search the carriage, surely it would be there, undetected, just lying there on the floor, just maybe, all fat and full of money, just waiting for me to reclaim it. I so much wanted it to be so and that this nightmare could end here and now and we could resume the walk, the excitement and fun and lose this feeling that people can be so unkind. Not a cat in hell’s chance is the phrase that comes to mind and maybe Irene has nine lives too, because by the time Irene left the train, the train had already left the station! Well not entirely, but in her diligence to search until the wallet was found, she really cut it fine. The train was picking up speed along the platform as Irene appeared in the doorway. “Attention! Attention!” cried the guard, but Irene’s attention was firmly fixed on achieving a soft landing on a fast disappearing platform. A broken leg, or even a twisted ankle at this stage and any reviving thoughts of the walk continuing would be well and truly squashed. But Nicole, the station manager, who seemed to have made a personal crusade out of our plight, was on hand and she caught Irene as she leapt from the moving train. British Rail have a lot to learn about total customer service and maybe Jimmy Knapp could……. no, forget it.

Any thoughts of retrieving the wallet were now diminishing and damage limitation came to mind. I cancelled the cards and the card company requested that we report the incident to the local police, after all, we would need a crime report number for any insurance claim. So we took the train down to Chamonix to visit the local Gendarmerie. The police were not at all interested, no eye contact, minimal expression, no sympathy, no empathy, just apathy. The officer filled out the necessary forms and gave us the insurance document. Other than that he just made us feel like the necessary statistic that we undoubtedly were, but just a little bit more visible compassion would have been very welcome at that point. Maybe it’s hard to display compassion when you are carrying a gun.

The Mer De Glace, high in the Chamonix Valley.

It’s surprising what a good meal and a good night’s sleep can do. It was Sunday evening and we hadn’t really had a proper meal since Friday and a good sleep in our double bunks, found us facing Monday morning feeling much more like fighting back. Most of the money for the holiday was in my bank account and we also had a few travellers cheques. I began to think that if I could transfer the money from my account to Irene’s we could still pull this off. Bare in mind that these were the days of old fashioned banking, long before the days of the internet and managing your account online. International links between banks was not something available to mere current account holders like me. So how could I achieve this?

Over breakfast I began to hatch a plan. I wondered if I could ring my branch of the TSB in Kendal, would they transfer my money into Irene’s account? I don’t even know their phone number. What if I ring the office at work, I wonder if I could get someone to find me that phone number? It was worth a try. I rang the office and asked for the Kendal TSB phone number, an unusual request that needed some fairly lengthy explanation. I didn’t have much cash left for the international call from a phone box, but tried not to sound anxious and hurried because I desperately needed that phone number. Eventually I got the number, we were getting somewhere at last! Now I had to make a make or break call. I had one chance to get this right, it is something that would never happen now in this world of security questions and passwords and probably shouldn’t really have happened then. Can you imagine ringing your bank and asking them to empty one account into another? I thought about the odds of making this happen and put it at no more than 20%, it seemed a slim chance that they would do this with no security, I could be anyone asking them to do this. I have never felt so nervous about making a phone call in my life, my heart was pounding as I opened the door on the phone box, lifted the receiver and started to dial. The phone rang and my heart beat louder. “Hello, TSB Kendal, James speaking” (not his real name). That was my first lucky break. On the Friday, before we set off on our travels, I had been into the TSB and James was the person behind the counter who served me. We had a brief, but bright and friendly conversation while he arranged my travellers cheques and he wished me a good holiday as I left. “Hi James, I don’t know if you remember me, I was in the bank on Friday….” He did remember and when I explained the situation he was very sympathetic and with out further questioning, he transferred the whole of my account balance into Irene’s account. I walked out of that phone box by the station in Argentiere and into the bright, warm, alpine sunshine. Julie Andrews was singing “The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Music”, I swear it’s true!

We were ecstatic and immediately set off walking down the valley, along the Petit Balcon-Sud to Chamonix to complete the first section of the walk. We arrived in Chamonix at lunchtime and turned around immediately to do the walk back up the valley along the Petit Balcon-Nord. I think with the excitement of getting back on track we had got carried away and did twice as much walking as we needed to. Worse still, the return up to Argentiere was uphill, we didn’t have nearly enough to drink with us and we weren’t yet acclimatised. The afternoon sun can be very hot in the Chamonix Valley and we arrived back in Argentiere, tired, hot and dehydrated, but still incredibly relieved to be free to continue out walk and by now, desperate to make progress and leave the Chamonix valley behind us. Tomorrow we would do that and walk the next section of The Haut Route over into Switzerland, but not before one last little surprise. Just when we thought we would be leaving the valley with only bad memories, we were proved wrong. As we sat in the restaurant that evening, the clouds lifted and played with the setting sun around the summit of Mont Blanc and  the surrounding Aiguilles. First the clouds and then the snow turned pink in the glow of the setting sun. An Alpenglow is a brief, magical moment that never fails to lift the spirits and is always a privilege to see.

 

                                                      An Alpenglow on Mont Blanc