Slow Train to Switzerland

by Diccon Bewes

  After a couple of hours up above, the air feels oddly heavier and the sun so much warmer down in the valley, and we aren’t the only ones stripping off outer layers as we walk beside the muddy Arve. What was very necessary up there now feels like it’s cooking us alive, baking us in our jackets. By the time we reach the train station, I’m down to a T-shirt. It couldn’t be more different from yesterday.

  No wet walk in the woods for us today; we’re going to see a glacier. Since we’re having to compress our whole Chamonix experience into one day, we no longer have time to walk up, as Miss Jemima did. Luckily, there’s a rack railway to take us up to Montenvers (or Montanvert, as English visitors wrote it in the nineteenth century), at 1913m above sea level and overlooking France’s largest glacier. Next stop Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice.

  For the Junior United Alpine Club, the hike up to see the glacier was not only their first Alpine ascent, but also the first real natural highlight of their tour. In their excitement they were up very early, “cheerfully” paid well over the odds for their alpenstocks (large walking sticks) and engaged a guide

  “from among the groups that stood around the hotels, each man awaiting his turn, a rule which is rigorously enforced by the authorities. Our guide bore the celebrated name of Balmat, and probably owed his position to the name rather than for any shining merits of his own.”

  The Chamonix Guides’ Company was founded in 1821, making it the oldest company of mountain guides in the world. It is still going strong with 240 members, two of whom bear the surname Balmat.

  The guidebooks of the day had very clear advice on footwear for hiking: “The shoes or half-boots ought to be double-soled, provided with hobnails … and without iron heels, which are dangerous, and liable to slip in walking over rocks; three rows of nails are better, and Swiss nails are better than English, which are often too hard and slippery.” They don’t sound too comfy to me, but they helped our hikers toil up the zigzag paths, though Miss Jemima got a little distracted by the views, and also by the unexpected profusion of Alpine flowers:

  “If, like us, you had the impression that those Alpine mountains were sterile and bare, you will find it erroneous. For there, extending to a height of 6,000 feet, through a partial forest of firs, rise storey after storey of verdure, their banks blossomed over with deep rose Alpine rhododendrons. We gather its abundance, deck our hats with its branching sprays, and pluck bouquets from either side of our path which here and there is literally ribboned with a border of variegated flowers.”

  Hiking over the Mer de Glace was a must for every Victorian visitor

  The local fauna was as delightful to the visitors as the flora, with one of the group chasing after and catching a goat so he could milk it for all of them to taste. That’s not exactly a normal habit for tourists, either then or now. And then there were the other travellers: “A German gentleman of comfortable dimensions, with his Frau of ditto, passed us on mules.” It certainly wasn’t a dull hike up.

  Our own journey up is much shorter thanks to Swiss engineers. They came and built the rack railway in 1907, and there’s still one of the old steam trains on display, built in Winterthur and in use until the line was electrified in 1953. Our modern one is a sweet little train, painted bright red and with wooden seats that must win an award for their lack of comfort. At least the windows open, unlike so many trains these days where passengers are sealed into carriages. Chugging up the hill and curling round through pine-scented forests, we get fleeting glimpses of the valley below, receding further and further with every bend. From up here it’s easy to see how developed Chamonix has become: a wide ribbon of semi-urbanisation all along the banks of the Arve, with chalets creeping up almost every slope.

  The trip only takes 25 minutes (half the time of the inaugural journey in 1908) and is not nearly as busy as the Aiguille du Midi, but it’s much, much louder. A raucous gaggle of Italians fills most of the carriage, all of them talking at the same time, none of them listening. It reminds me of my childhood meals in Italian restaurants. Two voices rise above the others, those of two older men who are doing what older Italian men love to do: holding court and loudly declaring their views on anything and everything, except the passing countryside, which is ignored completely. Little do they know that my mother understands every word.

  At Montenvers it’s immediately clear that the journey time isn’t the only thing that has changed dramatically in 150 years. We all pile out of the train and head straight for the edge, eager to be amazed by nature at its most spectacular. According to Murray:

  The view of this enormous sea of ice is one of the most striking scenes of wonder, but its great extent, from the vast size of every object about it, is not appreciated at first.

  Not any more. The grandeur of the setting is still there, with its towering backdrop of spiky mountains, but the ice is missing. What was once a sea of ice is now a river of rubble. A wide, S-shaped swathe of grey grinds its way between the sheer slopes carved out by the glacier, with a tide mark showing how high the ice once was. Towards the head of the deep gorge, the grey slowly gives way to white, with more ice than rock making up the surface of the glacier, but it’s a distant taste of past glory. Even so, the scale of the whole scene is still impressive, particularly once you spot the tiny black dots moving across the ridges in the ice: people, small enough to make Lilliputians look like giants.

  The reduction in drama feels like discovering that the Grand Canyon is the size of Cheddar Gorge. This was once a giant glacier that filled the whole U-shaped scene, with a tongue that stuck out so far beyond the mouth of the valley that it could easily be seen from Chamonix. The surface used to be almost level with the train station, its glacial tendrils lapping against the rocks beneath our feet. No wonder people came from Britain and beyond just to see the pinnacles of ice, a frozen forest that has long since melted away.

  Luckily, Miss Jemima’s words still conjure up something of its unique beauty, with her glacial version of finding figures in wispy clouds or flickering flames:

  “One writer compares it to a stream of ice-witches, hob-goblins and their children, and bag and baggage on their journey to the lowest pit, and to monks without heads, and giants. We traced the serrated spine of some antediluvian monster urging a kilted Highlander to charge on some enemy below. There, too, sat Sir Cresswell Cresswell, with wigged counsellors in a crowded court of blanched plaintiff and defendants. There were also hooded friars, a Madonna and Child, and ghostly figures such as would pass through Bunyan’s brain when he peopled the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Spires, pyramids, sphinxes, obelisks and every design in monumental marble might find a model in that sea of rugged ice.”

  I leave my mother to inspect the photos on display in the old stone hotel and jump into a tiny cable car that starts this next journey.

  The red gondola lift was originally built in 1960 to take people directly to the Mer de Glace. Now it’s merely a quicker way to begin a much deeper descent, as the glacier has long since retreated from its position in the 1960s, let alone the 1860s. The rest of the way is on foot, and walking down the zigzagging staircases towards the wall of ice is a sombre experience. Small wooden plaques nailed into the cliff at various intervals mark the spot where the glacier was in that year: a procession of gravestones charting the slow death of a mighty beast. The first marker, some way below the gondola station, is dated 1980, and it’s hard to believe that in a few decades the glacier has shrunk so much.

  In the 1860s the Mer de Glace still had its famous forest of pinnacles

  The more I descend, the greater the distance between the plaques: the 1990 level is another 53 steps lower, then 103 more stairs down to 2003, and still 155 more to today. How long until nothing remains? The staircases can barely keep up with the shrinkage. What started as wide concrete steps cemented into the rock become narrow metal ones that can more easily be extended and moved as the ice retreats.

  At the final platform is a hut beside a gate, which leads out to
the rocks and then up onto the glacier. A notice says that it is only for experienced and properly equipped walkers, and I am neither. As tempting as it is to follow in Miss Jemima’s footsteps (albeit at a few hundred metres lower down), I know it wouldn’t be long before someone came after me, either to stop me going any further or to rescue me after going too far.

  Instead, I walk across a long gangplank connecting the last step with a hole in the grubby ice, gateway to the latest cave inside the glacier wall (the first was carved out in 1946). A few metres to the left is the previous one, now disused and out of reach. Even as it shrinks as a whole, the glacier is still edging ever onwards as it always has done. Today it moves at 1cm per hour, or half the rate of 1890. The loss of ice has reduced the pressure from behind and above, and so also the speed (it was partly that speed that produced the eerie pinnacles when the ice was forced up and over rocky obstructions). I try not to think about it moving at all as I step onto the ice. As for the three people crushed to death in 1797 while in one of the glacier’s natural ice caves, they are not on my mind in the slightest.

  Outside, the ice is grey, covered in dirt and moraine carved off and carried along by the glacier. Inside, it’s another world. Glistening walls of bluish white, polished smooth by hundreds of passing hands but still with intriguing undulations and depressions. Just beneath the surface thousands of tiny bubbles lie trapped inside the ice. It really is like standing inside a river that froze instantly, its powerful motion trapped for ever. Even more incredible is its age: this ice I am caressing was formed at roughly the same time as Napoleon was fighting his wars. It’s over 200 years old but as pristine as ever. It is a magical moment – or at least would be if I were somewhere else. As it is, I’m trapped inside a nightmare of new-age music, polar-bear carvings, official photo ops and coloured lighting, not forgetting the cacophony of voices: this is the Tunnel of Babel. There are also constant drips, most of which seem to know exactly when I’m passing beneath them so that every few metres is marked by an icy dribble down my neck. The ones that do manage to miss me splat onto the soggy carpet, there to stop us slipping, so we all squelch rather than slide our way round. I can’t wait to get outside again.

  In the mid-nineteenth century it was all very different. Most tourists came not to admire the glacier from above or below, but to walk across it. They had no training and no equipment, but no problem. Never mind that there were countless bottomless crevasses waiting to swallow anyone who missed their step, or that the sartorial rigours of the nineteenth century weren’t exactly suited to scrambling across ladders and over boulders of ice (at least as far as the ladies were concerned). They put on their hats, picked up their sticks and went for a jolly hike across to the other side, Miss Jemima included:

  “We were continually surprised to find that the proverbial dangers of Alpine travel to be, when in the beaten track, mere creatures of fancy, yet the descent into the bed of the glacier from the Montanvert at first tried somewhat the nerves of some of the lady members as yet unaccustomed to dizzy heights, when the strong arm of our new member was most acceptable! How strange, how intensely incongruous it felt on that hot summer’s day, to be crunching ice under our feet, and to be looking down yawning crevasses that showed eighty or a hundred feet of their blue and crystal-lined jaws. We step carefully in the track chipped out by the guide as we intersect the numerous pitfalls at our feet, spending about half an hour on its slippery surface.”

  Slippery indeed. Even with hobnail boots on, it must have been a daunting hike across the frozen ridges between the ravines, knowing that at any moment you could slip on the ice and disappear into a void. While your crinoline cage might have broken your fall, the sheer weight of clothing might equally have propelled you ever downwards. The Cook group did at least hire a guide, whose strong arm proved useful, but possibly only because there were ladies present. The Murray Handbook advises women about undertaking the trip, which “in ordinary seasons presents no danger. Ladies now very frequently cross, and the expedition is well worth taking, though those who are timid and nervous ought not to be urged to it. Each lady will require a guide to assist, and the guides generally make an extra demand for so doing.”

  As if crossing the glacier wasn’t enough, the group then had to negotiate the mauvais pas (literally “bad step”) in the rain:

  “We crawled along its slippery ledge, our only safeguard from slipping down 400 feet and alighting on the rocky moraine below being a hand-rail formed of a rope, fastened to the rock by iron holdfasts.”

  This precipitous route wasn’t exactly a relaxing stroll in the park, but it was the most direct back to Chamonix. It was either that or return across the ice, though sliding along the top of deep crevasses seems preferable to slipping down the wet rock of a cliff face. I was happy just to clamber back up from the glacier without letting the altitude go to my head. Miss Jemima was certainly a gutsy lady.

  A few hours later we’re on board another train, a little larger and a lot whiter than the one to Montenvers. As we clatter up the narrowing Arve valley towards the Swiss border, we are treated to views of more rivers of ice spilling out from between sheer-sided cliffs. Streams tumble down from the tips of the ice fields, as if the glaciers are crying themselves to death. Come back in a few decades and even these distant peeks of ice may have become a memory.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise that Chamonix is now officially called Chamonix-Mont-Blanc. It’s as if the town realised it needed to remind everyone why to keep on coming. The Victorians flocked in their thousands for the Mer de Glace, a sight that is melting away as quickly as an ice cream in Baghdad. So Chamonix has reinvented itself as an adventure playground, in summer and winter alike, using the mountains as its trump card.

  Chamonix was already a prime destination when Thomas Cook brought his first customers here that summer. For them, it was one of the undoubted highlights; for the villagers they were most likely nothing new, another bunch of Brits eager to do mad things like walk across glaciers for fun. But it was a taste of things to come. Whereas previous visitors had arrived in ones and twos, groups were the new way to travel. And groups needed more hotels, bigger restaurants, better connections – even in somewhere that was already quite advanced in terms of tourist development. And Chamonix just carried on developing.

  Going down via the mauvais pas was a hair-raising hike

  Today there are 82,000 tourist beds (compared to a resident population of 10,000 people), although only about 5000 of those are in hotels; the rest are in chalets, holiday apartments and second homes. In contrast to the 1860s, the winter season is now busier than summer: of the 4.5 million overnight stays in Chamonix every year, well over half are in the winter months. Skiing is more popular than hiking. Foreigners make up around half of the guests, with the UK still dominating the annual invasion; in summer 35 per cent of foreign guests are British, whereas second-placed Japan manages only 9 per cent.

  Sightseeing in the mountains has become both more and less impressive at the same time: we can experience so much more but with much less effort. We expect to be able to go higher, faster, further than ever before and we no longer take the time to appreciate the simpler things. Why just admire the beauty of a mountain when you can heli-ski off the summit? Maybe that’s what yesterday’s travellers can teach us. Miss Jemima’s delight at the abundance of Alpine flowers is almost as great as her wonder at seeing the profusion of icy stalagmites.

  In our collective rush to see the sights, we often overlook what is in front of our noses; or by trying too hard to avoid the crowds, we miss something truly worth seeing. Of course, I am sometimes as guilty of that as anyone.

  My mother and I wanted to do as much as possible on one day, giving in to that subconscious fear of missing out. We could have walked up to Montenvers, appreciating the flowers in situ (Alpine flora is not for picking these days) and missed out on the Aiguille de Midi. But there’s always that niggle at the back of your mind, the dread that most travellers face: a
snide comment on your return, complete with raised eyebrows and pursed lips. Not forgetting that some people go out of their way to avoid the must-sees in the mistaken belief that it makes them “real” travellers. Peer pressure and snobbery are as prevalent in travel as in any other part of life.

  The funny thing is that Miss Jemima was actually doing exactly the same, just at a slower speed. That first tour crammed in as much as humanly possible, with early starts and long days, so that its participants could go home with their heads held as high as the mountains they had seen. For Miss Jemima and her companions this was all completely new and impossibly exciting, so of course they wanted to see everything, particularly what were then called the “lions”, the must-see list. At one point, as the group walked up out of the Arve valley, she commented on exactly that. The travellers couldn’t resist constantly looking back at the view, as if they regretted having had so little time in Chamonix:

  “When the labour of reaching this celebrated valley is taken into account it is much better to devote a longer time to its wonders. Indeed, to gain the fullest and most permanent satisfaction from the magnificence of national scenery, time is an essential element in order that every impression may be deepened, and rendered permanent possessions for life.”

  This is one of the few moments when she acknowledges the speed of their tour, which although slow by our standards was practically breakneck for that period. It was these package pioneers who set the agenda for every tour that came afterwards, even when the pace got faster and faster, a bit like the factory conveyor belt scene in Modern Times. The improvements in transport didn’t necessarily mean you spent more time in each place, it meant you saw more places in the same time. It wouldn’t be long before Cook’s customers were being loudly disparaged by other travellers, who moaned that they were rushing around and ruining the very things they had come to see. The same could be said today of Lonely Planet readers or TripAdvisor followers.