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On Monday Nigel & I set out early in the morning to up the Aiguille du Midi cable car which takes you 3842 metres up the mountain for a spectacular view! Before we left, we did a pretty stealthy food stock up from the breakfast buffet so we had plenty of baby bell cheese, bread, jam, & fruit to snack on along the way ;) Fortunately the cable car is pretty large & sturdy or I reckon it'd be a pretty scary ride up, because it's super, SUPER steep (like, pretty much vertical in places) and reeeeeeeeally high! It still does that stomach drop thing when you go over the telegraph pole thingys holding it up, but other than that it's not too bad hehe
The view up the top is amazing…mountains as far as you can possible see! And from that one point you can see France, Italy, & Switzerland. In fact, you can even take a cable car across to the Italian alps if you so choose! And because Chamonix sits pretty much right on the border between France and Switzerland, you're almost in two places at once! Very, very cool. Actually, it WAS very cool, minus 2 degrees Celcius! And fortunately I'd bought myself a beanie just before we went up to save my poor ears from freezing up. It's strange because it's so sunny that if you're sitting right out in the sun up there it's actually really warm, but the moment you go back in the shade it's freezing! We spent a couple of hours or so up there, checking out different vantage points & stopping for some hot soup to warm up, then we both began to feel a little bit ill from altitude sickness & decided to head back down to lower ground.
We stopped off mid-way back down the mountain & went for a walk out along the mountainside, where there are still big patches of snow un-melted from the winter. When we got off the cable car & walked outside, there was a hiker sunbathing in his jocks on a bench nearby. We decided to follow suit, minus the stripping off part, & lay down for a little nap on the grass for a while. So relaxing…I could have stayed there all afternoon! :) But the Mer de Glace awaits…
We took the Montenvers train up the mountainside to see the Mer de Glace. It takes about 20 minutes, & you ride in a little old-fashioned red rack & pinion train which zig zags it's way up the mountain. It's one of only two rack & pinion mountain trains left in France! The Mer de Glace (Sea of Ice) is the biggest glacier in France with 40 square kilometers of surface area over a length of 7km. Although it's still about 120 metres thick at the centre, this thickness has been reducing by 3 to 4 metres a year since 1988. Nigel's parents, Rod & Kay, visited it a few years ago & bought me the trip to go & see it as a birthday present this year. Seriously good present! We had a wonderful time :) Unfortunately because they have to re-excavate a tunnel inside the glacier every year due to the movement of the glacier, it was under construction when we there & we were just 4 days too early to walk inside it!! Damn! But it was still a really incredible thing to see & well worth the trip if you're ever in this part of the world :)
When we got back to Chamonix, we spent nearly 2 hours waiting for a bus that would take us back to Les Houches…eventually we were forced to give up & take a taxi back! That evening we had one of the few truly unpleasant dining experiences I've had on my travels. The restaurant normally serves a really nice buffet, along with the specialty meals like fondue or raclette. Having over-dosed on cheese the night before we were seriously looking forward to some salad & veges from the buffet…but alas! When we arrived home we found out there was some one-off issue with the kitchen & they would only be serving a set menu that night. With the main options only including a pork stew & a mysterious fish dish we decided to see what other options we had in town…which were non-existent. Unfortunately because it's the low season here, most of the restaurants close for a few months & we would have had to take another taxi back to Chamonix to find anything that was open! So we braved the pork stew & wow…I don't know what Matt Preston would have had to say about it, but it was not good. It was kinda grey…and, well, not really a stew. Nigel was brave enough to actually try some, but the expression on his face told me that my decision not to even go there was probably a good one. There was also an Asian salad starter, which was actually quite promising but was full of coriander, which I detest with a fiery passion! So basically we ate a lot of bread that evening haha But we figured it made for a fairly entertaining story :P And given how many delicious culinary experiences we've had along the way, we've really had it pretty damn good for the most part! :)
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