english

Saying goodbye is hard.

And another baby, how original…

This one is Dolph’s and Mansa’s son, Christian.

My father and mother met each other in Glion, Switzerland where they both worked at a Dutch school. The school was for Dutch children with respiratory problems (“Swiss mountain air is good for you”) and also for diplomat’s offspring who paid more and thus sponsored the poorer kids. Glion is a very small village perched on a very steep hill with a splendid view overlooking the lake of Geneva.

The school was located in a huge former hotel. After the school suddenly closed, my parents quickly married, had a three day honeymoon (they took the funicular down the mountain, took a ferry powered by paddles and then spend two days in a hotel near the lake) and left for the Netherlands the building became a hotel again. The hotel business is apparently hard because the hotel is now closed and for sale.
Alison and I wander around, in sit on the moss covered steps in the gardens watching the clouds that approach fast over the lake and result in a huge downpour, 10 minutes after this picture was taken. Walking in Glion isn’t exactly a trip down memory lane, but in a way it is. If this hotel hadn’t existed I wouldn’t have.

Rain, low clouds and cold. So I can’t show Alison the Mont Blanc, the highest mountain of Europe, and all the other peaks I climbed in this region are also invisible behind thick layers of grey clouds.

Dowsing for free wireless access in Chamonix. It’s cloudy and cold, so there’s not much else to do here. I receive bad news by email, that upsets me, so it was not a good idea after all.

Yes, they do exist.

Gorgeous hike on the north side of the Matterhorn. We take the cable lift up, Alison had never been in one and it saves us a boring walk over tarmac roads. Zermatt, the village at the foot of this well known mountain, is car free, but it seems just a ploy to charge tourists through the nose for expensive train tickets and parking garages. We;re between seasons so a lot of the exclusive shops (with watches of 45,000 euros!) are closed and there aren’t that many tourists.

We sleep in Randa, after a nice ride through beautiful Wallis. We’re surrounded by huge mountains, many of them more that 4000 metre high. 15 years ago I tried to climb one of them, the 4500 metre Dom, but this climbing adventure also ended almost in a disaster. I got an very rapidly spreading infected blister on my ankle (the infection probably came from an infected tooth, as the dentist suggested a few months later) and that can have serious consequences when you are climbing at 4200 metre altitude. My concentration was totally gone, I had a high fever and I just told my climbing partners “Leave me here, while you go to the top and I’ll go down with you later.” I also was totally exhausted and had to take three breaths before every step. Unfortunately the symptoms started when we were climbing on a narrow, very steep, icy ridge and the only way out was 200 metres up. I did my best to ram my crampons in the snow as good as I could but when we were almost there I fell. My climbing partner, who was on the same rope as me, fortunately had already arrived on the rock and thus had enough traction to keep my fall. She did sprain a few ribs though. If I had fallen 20 metres lower we probably both would have been dead and maybe we had even killed some more people when we rolled down like two bowling balls with a rope between them.
But that didn’t happen and at the time I didn’t even realize it could have happened. I was just in a big groggy cloud. When my climbing partners finally got me safely to the hut I bought them an expensive bottle of wine and then I slept for 14 hours straight. The next day we still had to hike down 1500 metres to Randa, with my swollen and very painful foot. The helicopter that landed every 5 minutes to bring building materials to the hut wasn’t allowed to give me a lift. The first twenty minutes of the hike down were hell but after that my foot was so swollen in my boot that it didn’t hurt that much anymore. The infected foot took two weeks to heal, so my holiday was over for that year, after only 4 days in Switzerland.

But today, the weather is fine, and we’re only going for an easy hike, in Zermatt, near the Matterhorn.

After a lot of trouble getting the car out of the narrow road we camped (we had to back up 200 metres because the place that we thought was big enough to turn wasn’t) we drive from Italy into Switzerland again and head north over the Gotthard pass. I actually wanted to go through the Gotthard tunnel to show Alison how it feels to drive 16 kilometres through a tunnel with a whole lot of rock on top of you. But there was a big traffic jam, so taking the pass was much faster, and it’s an easy pass anyway, with wide road and big turns. When we arrive at the other end of the Gotthard pass in Andermatt, we find out that there is still so much snow that the Furka pass is closed. We drive a bit further to take the S¸sten pass but that one is also closed and the Nufenen pass as well.
So the only way to get into Wallis from canton Uri is putting the car on a train and going through a long tunnel under the Furka pass. So Alison got her tunnel after all, although this one wasn’t free.

[A loud scream like a barking cat]
“What was that?”
“Don’t know.”
[Two animals pass going very fast, one panting and the other making noises as if it is very afraid]
“Wow!”
[Something big approuches the tent. An angry Italian with a shot gun? ]
“Ssssshhhttt.”
[The steps stop and we hear a loud sound of tearing grass, very close to our tent.]
“A deer?”
“Yeah, migh be…”

The joys of illegaly camping in someone’s field in the mountains next to a lake in Italy. All campings are very expensive (25 euro for a tent and two persons) and full of beer drinking Dutchmen watching football on television. Italy is so crowded and busy after Switzerland and they drive like idiots. We eat bad pizza in a bad restaurant, and my holiday feeling is totally gone.

Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea. The church bell in the neighbouring village rings every hour, and I remember hearing all of them.