Blame It on the Altitude!
Today we had planned to get high…geographically that is! We had been warned that the temperature would plummet, the closer we got to the summit (I’m a poet and didn’t know it!) and the warmest clothes I’d brought to France were a cotton long-sleeved shirt and a flimsy spray jacket. Luckily for us, the whole of Chamonix was on sale today, every street lined with racks of bargains. We both invested in warmer jackets - with prices slashed - and Ross even bought himself a beanie. We felt ready.
Making our way across to the big ticketing area at the foot of the mountains, there was already a substantial queue. Our little shopping expedition had meant we were a bit further down the line than we’d wanted to be. We were told that for the big one: the Aiguille Midi cable car, the entire morning had already sold out. We could purchase a day pass that would give us access to the cog train that goes up to the glacier, so we could do that first and we could come back at 2:30 for the big one.
Boarding the little red cog train was chaos. Though we had all been lined up on the platform in orderly lines, the minute the train choo-chooed in, it was a free for all, people diving for the door and shoving others out of the way. The teacher voice, in my head said, “there we are, we all got a seat in the end. I’m not sure what all the fuss was about”. Calm down people.
I was surprised with the pace of the cog train as it glided up the face of the mountain towards the glacier. There were lots of oohs and ahhs as we approached the tree-line and the snow-topped peaks became visible in all their glory, the morning sun glinting off their tops and almost blinding us with the glare. The village of Chamonix had shrunk down to ant-ville, cars and people only just visible from our lofty perch. As soon as the doors opened for us to disembark, the fresh, cool air hit us and everyone grabbed for their extra layers. Everyone except Ross that is, who decided to take his chances in his sleeveless vest and t-shirt.
The Mer de Glace glacier was down, down, down a series of metal stairs (170 to be exact); the kind with a metal grid that you can see through, bringing to your attention, the great heights you are now scaling. I tried not to look down, the whole time thinking: what goes down, must come up. The living glacier itself has been fashioned into a multi-roomed ice cave. The place is like a roomy house! Every year, a team of dedicated ice diggers, picks in hand, take around three weeks to carve the grotto from scratch. There is so much room in there and in actual fact, the temperature was quite refreshing. It was the perfect home for a menopausal woman, just saying.
There was a little museum, showing the history of the train and all the long-skirted women with bustles that had to squeeze onto their uncomfortable wooden seats back in the 1800s, and there was a souvenir shop with a cafe attached. I had my favourite French lunch - a ham and cheese baguette. Apart from the deliciously crunchy, fresh bread, the best part is the butter, which is absolutely mandatory in this country and is slathered on almost as thickly as the cheese!
Being Father’s Day back in Australia, the kids called Ross to tell him what a great dad he was and how much they loved him, which really made his day, With a spring in his step (and still no warm jacket) Ross and I ventured back to where the Aiguille cable car was set to depart. Everyone was given a ticket with a number on it and when the number appears on the screen, you know it’s your turn to enter, kind of like waiting for your number to come up at Maccas.
The cable car was massive and held around 65 people, so there were 65 other ticket holders with the same number as we had. Again, there was no such thing as an orderly queue and when the doors opened, there was a rampage for the front; the best seat in the house. As we climbed up an almost vertical climb, I had to hang onto Ross for the bumpy bits, when we went over a pole and the whole carriage rocked a little, causing everyone onboard to lose their tummies a little bit and to say: Whoah!” (or something to that affect).
We arrived at the midway station, where there was a bar and restaurant and access to some walking tracks. Most of our carriage joined us as we lined back up, ready for the final leg of the uphill adventure. It was seriously cold at the top (an unconfirmed 7 degrees C) and Ross wasn’t the only one getting around in summer gear. There was one woman wearing a tiny little mini skirt, her legs exposed to all the elements. Ross was becoming Mr Popular, by offering to take photos for people, so they could ALL be in the photo.
As soon as we disembarked the cable car, we bounded up the first few flights of stairs and I was suddenly overwhelmed with dizziness and felt like I might throw up. Hello Altitude Sickness, my old friend. Rossco seemed fine and continued up to the next viewing platform while I sat down and tried to stop my head from spinning and was joined by quite a few others who obviously felt exactly the same way after coming up the stairs. We were in a little makeshift sick bay for altitude sickness. After a few minutes I felt OK to keep ascending but the dizziness was intense and didn’t wear off.
There was an English tour guide giving an awesome rundown of all the mountain’s names and I hovered at the back so I could identify them all too. You could see all the way to Italy and Switzerland from up there in that one spot. We could even see the Matterhorn peeping up on the horizon. It was CRAZY!! The mountains were magical and It felt like we were on top of the world. We were twice as high now as we had been on the cog train and I’d thought that was high! There was a glass box you could stand in, way up at the top of the ‘lighthouse’ but the queue was a mile long and I don’t think I would have been brave enough for that. Ross was keen but we didn’t want to be stuck in a queue when there was so much to explore.
It blew my mind that there, way up in the sky, there was a bustling little community, including a cafe, the ubiquitous souvenir shop, a climbing museum, a small theatre and a toilet block. It felt like a space station; we were SO high! My visit to the toilet was enlightening. It was a pit toilet with a difference. As I sat down, a whoosh of the coldest updraft hit me right in the nether regions; the S-bend was a tunnel straight to the outside world. I hoped what I was doing there didn’t hit some poor unsuspecting climber in the head.
Speaking of climbers, when we were waiting in line for our return trip down the mountain, we spotted a guy with a roll of rope on his arm and the biggest collection of carabiners I’ve ever seen in my life. They would’ve weighed a ton! His water bottle was ENORMOUS! I’m surprised he didn’t need a separate backpack just to carry it. So many people started gathering in the holding bay for our cable car, we were all wondering how we were going to fit in. Carabiner Man would have weighed as much as 4 guys at least with all those accessories. Oh well, if anything was going to happen to our overloaded cabin, at least he had enough carabiners to strap each of the 65 passengers to his belt and swing us to safety.
Inside the climbing museum we read about madmen (and women) free climbing, sans ropes, with just a bag of chalk to keep them company. There were pictures of all sorts of death-defying feats taking place high above the world below. I felt sick just thinking about it!
Paragliders and base jumpers abound in the sky here. We counted over 20 in one spot today, all buzzing around the summit like bees around a beehive.
Tonight we wandered into a little restaurant down the road, only to be ushered upstairs to find we were in a very flash dining room with starched white tablecloths. We decided to stay, heck it was father’s Day. Ross was so keen to get his dessert, he called the waitress over to request the menu while I was still eating my main. She told him to wait until I’d finished and that she wasn’t bringing the dessert menu a moment before!
