In which we struggle up to a high pass to find a crowd of tourists who had come up with the gondola, then descend into Switzerland to find it full of orthodox Jews.
Another excellent dinner at the end of an excellent free day... and a necessary one. After over 3500m of descent in the two days prior, I needed every hour to recover!
The weather forecast being good, we felt no need to rush despite the long hike ahead of us (8.5 hours estimate to do 17km, +1570m, -1200m), so we wandered off about 9:15. It was a nice hike, with great views back to the Monte Rosa massif, but it was also a tough one... we were both exhausted by the time we got up to the pass around 1:30PM. Which somehow made it all the more disappointing to find a crowd of gondola tourists scrambling around the moon-like landscape of rock and snow (not that there's snow on the moon, but still). Sometimes in such situations I feel superior -- they, after all, can't appreciate it (the pass, the peak) like I can because they haven't gotten there on their own legs) -- and sometimes I feel a little cheated. This was one of the latter days. Oh well.
One step further and we were in Switzerland, descending a steep rocky trail to a large artificial lake behind a dam (able to generate almost a quarter of a gigawatt of power). Neighbours separated just by a mountain pass, but it might have been a different world. Language, architecture, trail signs that indicate altitude, many more people on the trails, and, of course, all those Hasidic Jews.
:-)
There must have been a convention or a package tour holiday, because there was patriarchal family after patriarchal family complete with traditional clothing, yamulkahs, long curling side-burns and so on. I learned later that they were from Zurich, where there is apparently a large Hasidic community.
The hike down from the dam was objectively nice, but subjectively torturous because by that time we were very ready to have the day end. We finally arrived at our hotel shortly before 6PM, to find good news and bad news. The good news was that Thomas Gößl was waiting for us (he'll be hiking with us for the next few days). The bad news was that the hotel had lost my reservation. But all's well that ends well and the owner rustled up some rooms for us even before I showed her the confirmation email I had received :-).
We were not good company for Thomas that evening... at least not from the perspective of duration: we headed off to bed shortly after 9PM.
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