In which I suffer an attack of "this is not my beautiful train"-itis.
The day of departure having finally dawned, I grabbed my pack (which had been ready for two days) and at precisely 8AM headed out the door. Everything had been carefully timed so as to get me to Entreves, where the first part of the H3H finished, in time to walk from there to our hotel in Courmayeur (thereby allowing me to say that I "walked the whole way"). S-Bahn arrives on time, check. At the airport on time, check. Flight leaves on time, check. Arrives on time, check. Luggage appears, check. Purchase train ticket to Chamonix, check. Train leaves on time, check.
And then it all goes kablooey. We get to the station in Geneva, and I surface from reading Tolkien on my phone to hear the announcer list the stations at which the train will stop. Urk! Martigny, my destination is not one of them. I'm on the wrong train! I jump off the train, thinking fuzzily while I do that I thought there was something wrong because this train was going to Brig, to the east, and Chamonix is to the south. I run to the next information point and explain my dilemma... only to hear that I was in fact on the right train: they just don't list all the stations they stop at. By the time I'm back on the platform, the train, of course, has left. There should be a word for this sort of sudden fear that one is on the wrong train... it isn't the first time that it has happened to me, and Russ says it has happened to him more than once as well.
Anyway, as a result my arrival time in Chamonix is pushed back an hour... and we won't have the time to hike from Entreves down to Coumayeur. Drat. I SMS Russ to tell him why I'm going to be late and he says, why didn't you just take the bus from the airport? The bus, it turns out, takes 40 minutes and costs 35 Euros... the train takes 2 hours and 20 minutes and costs 65 Euros. Hmmm... who planned this trip? I feel as a result even more disoriented and that is perhaps why, in Martigny, I take Swiss Francs from an ATM so as to be able to pay the taxi driver who will take us from Chamonix to Courmayeur through the Mont Blanc tunnel. Ahem. Chamonix is in France and Courmayeur is in Italy. Oh well.
On the plus side, the train ride along Lake Geneva via Montreux, then up the Rhone valley to Martigny, then on a cog railway climbing up a mountainside and through a high valley to a pass leading to the Chamonix valley is spectacular. Much better than the bus ride would have been. Seriously. No, really. Honest, I'm not just saying that. Why are you laughing?
So, aside from the fact that there is this niggling gap in the H3H that makes it impossible, at the moment, for me to say that I have hiked the whole way, everything is fine. Met up with Russ in Chamonix, and Jean-Paul in Courmayeur, the hotel is fine, we had a good dinner, and the sky is blue this morning. Not sure where the other five hikers are who reserved... but that's a story for another blog entry. The trails call....
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