As I flew over to Switzerland on Friday, it felt like I was the only person not wearing my skiing outfit and carrying a helmet. I don’t ski. I snowboard a little – badly and nervously and rarely, if ever, getting off my heel edge (and not for nearly thirteen years, so putting it in the present tense is probably incorrect too). But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to play in the snow and in my search for a good way to go sledging, I stumbled across a snowshoe lantern trail.
It’s run by MOB, la Compagnie du Chemin de fer Montreux Oberland bernois, the rail company behind the famous GoldenPass Express, the scenic train that runs between Montreux and Interlaken, but it also runs the train up to Les Rochurs-de-Naye , the funicular to Mont-Pèlerin and the cog railway to Les Pléiades, which is a mountaintop with views, a traditional-style restaurant, an open-air astronomy trail and just enough space to tumble around a tiny bit in the snow – and on Saturday evenings in the winter, this snowshoe trail.
Your ticket includes the train up from Vevey and a special train down (it’s not on the regular timetable; don’t panic when you can’t see it on the CFF website!), snowshoe and pole hire and either fondue or bacon Rösti in the restaurant afterwards.
I had a bit of a panic at Vevey when the 17:41 train suggested on my email ticket didn’t exist. That throws a whole lot of other stuff into doubt. Back to the website, however, and there they suggests the 17:02 or the 18:02 which do both exist. I’m assuming the email ticket was just last year’s ticket with the date changed and no one noticed the train timetable update. Well, best thing to do is probably to go up and find out. There’s at least one more train down if it turns out this isn’t real. But after a long (and hideously overheated!) pull up the side of the mountain, we fell out at Les Pléiades straight into people in red coats handing out hot wine and fitting us with snowshoes. Your shoe size is not your snowshoe size, by the way. I’m a pretty textbook size 39 (UK sizes can vary but European sizes are fairly consistent on me) but my snowshoe size was 27. A lady in a red coat pushed my feet into them and did up the straps and clips, then pointed me to a pile of poles and I was off.
Well, I wasn’t. I had to put on more layers, find all my gloves and then discover my GoPro had switched itself on in my bag at some point and was at 1% battery before I’d even started, so mittens off, gloves off, find the spare battery, wrestle with the case and the folding feet, put the whole thing back together and then get started.
I’d been envisioning something serene and beautiful but the reality was that although you’re following a trail of lanterns, some of them are pretty well-spaced and in between, it’s very dark. I’d read the website several times and they’d pointed out they’re not responsible for lack of suitable clothes or lighting, so I had more layers than I was ever going to wear and a caver’s approach to my lighting supply – one Petzl Actik head torch (on max brightness, 625 lumens for 2 hours with the rechargeable Li-ion Core battery) plus spare AAA batteries, backup Petzl e+Lite with brand new batteries and a tiny bike light my grandmother gave me for Christmas years ago (she saw “light” not “bike” but it’s tiny enough to be a really handy pocket spare). If anything else went wrong, at least I wasn’t going to be stranded in the dark.
So, with all my layers on, merino liner gloves under fleece mittens and my GoPro clinking gently against my pole on every step, off I went into the dark and the snow.
At first it was easy. Follow the platform round to the other side, then walk downwards but I rapidly began to realise this was not what I’d been expecting. For a start, it was snowing heavily and all I could see was… well, on the Iceland travel Facebook group, someone had described driving the Ring Road in February as being like piloting a starship at warp speed: “just white lines against blackness”, which is exactly what I could see by the light of my headtorch. Never mind following the lanterns; I just followed the churned-up snow of all the adventurers who’d gone before me – which was everyone on the 17:05 train and almost everyone on the 18:05 except two idiots who’d turned up in trainers with no light source except their cigarettes – never saw him without one in his mouth. At first the track went downhill, which was inevitably and immediately followed by a very steep uphill bit. Blind, thanks to the snow and to my scarf making my glasses steam up whenever I looked down, I huffed and puffed up the hill and the two stragglers overtook me. I found them several years later (well, it felt like it!) when I got to the top and wondered if they were waiting to take advantage of my light.
Now it was downhill again and I couldn’t take it anymore. The scarf needed to come off, mostly because it was constantly steaming up my glasses, and I also took off my proper coat and my mittens – climbing a hill in snowshoes may be exhausting but it warms you through very well. So the stragglers overtook me again and apparently decided to just roll in the snow for a while at the next lantern.
Now one of the redshirts coats overtook me. I’d been wondering about how they knew if anyone was still out there by the time the train left and of course, the lanterns needed to be extinguished and probably brought back. It’s nice to know there’s someone out there but not so much when they overtake and make you feel like you should be hurrying up.
The last bit, the home stretch, was uphill again, alongside a closed ski lift. Yeah, normally people would get towed up and here I was trudging like an idiot! Looking at my Strava data, that was a far bigger climb than the first but a slightly less exhausting angle. I stopped many times but at no point did the words “I can’t do this!!” come into my brain, which they had on the first big climb. I admit, I’d had to do the self-pep talk on that. But here I could see the top, the silhouetted wires of the railway not all that far up and I knew how many hours I had until the train (nearly two and a half. I can climb that in two and a half hours!).
I think in future, if I’m going snowshoeing I want to do it in daylight. For me, half the point is to enjoy the scenery and the snow at a leisurely pace, not to see white lines in the darkness and my own feet and feel rushed along. Snowshoeing is, by its nature, something of a mindful way of walking – every time I tried to think of something other than my slow, plodding steps, my snowshoes caught on each other. I didn’t fall over and the shoes didn’t come off (both issues I had on a Northern Lights snowshoe adventure in Sweden in 2014) but I had to concentrate on what I was doing.
At the top, sweating far too much for someone who’d been out in a snowstorm, I was relieved of my snowshoes and poles and pranced along so light-footedly to the restaurant, visible as a lot of lights on the horizon beyond the station, and the only sign of life up there on the mountain. If you miss the train, I don’t even know what would happen to you up here overnight. Nothing good, I guess.
The restaurant was pure chaos. I admit, I was sweaty and wanted to sit down and take everything off and drink something cold but fondue and Rösti were on the menu. Somehow, requesting the fondue got me an explanation of what Rösti is and an “I’ll come back, take your time” and despite discussion of the snowshoe trip and an explanation that the restaurant is only open for the special event, my waitress somehow didn’t realise I was on the snowshoeing event and presented me with a bill for 27 francs for the fondue. I’d been expecting to pay for the orange juice I’d ordered so once she found me on the snowshoe list and screwed up and binned my bill, I was slightly surprised and confused again but by the time I was standing by the door getting ready to go back out into the snow, I got called back to pay for the juice after all and now everything was in place and right with the world.
When you’re a solo traveller, trying fondue is difficult. No one serves it for one. It’s a social dish. At best, you might find fondue for two, at a price you’d expect to divide between two. I’d taken a look and decided I wasn’t getting any fondue on this trip but having it included in your snowshoe adventure is an excellent way to do it.
I had fondue over twenty years ago, in Zermatt, with my triplets when we were all students studying French in Neuchâtel. I’ve never had a pan of it brought to me personally, with enough light to actually take pictures of it or properly study the burner. My waitress unscrewed a brass cap from the bit where I’d expect the fire and without seeming to turn anything to activate the gas, lit it. The internet says it’s probably gel rather than gas, which I suppose makes sense in hindsight, as there was no gas canister visible. How you then control the flame, I have no idea, but another waitress came and turned it down later on, just as I was reflecting that fondue cheese is just the same texture as lava.
I have no idea whether this is a single-serving of fondue or whether fondue for two is the smallest size. Either way, I wasn’t going to get through half of it! Watching other people, I wasn’t using anywhere near enough cheese – I dipped but I didn’t swirl it to bring out more cheese than I had bread, and I was breaking the bread into tiny pieces anyway because I physically can’t swallow that much bread and cheese in one go.
I was defeated very easily – easily enough that my waitress took it away, changed her mind, brought it back and then asked if it was my first time having fondue, which just means “you’re eating it wrong”, doesn’t it? Well, I probably was but she meant that I hadn’t finished it. No, and if you had acid indigestion all the way back to Lausanne, you wouldn’t have finished it either.
The train was right there when I left so I sat and started writing this while I waited. We crawled down to Blonay, apparently the big resort on this route, where we changed driver and then sat for ten pointless minutes before setting off for Vevey at easily five times the speed. Mysteriously, we stopped at most of the request stops to let people on. How did they know it was an option? It wasn’t on any of the departure boards or the CFF website and even on the snowshoe event site it only listed Les Pléiades, Lally, Blonay and Vevey.
We got in to Vevey a minute or two early, which meant I could hurry over to platform 1 and be on my way back to Lausanne less than five minutes later, which is nice – even nicer that the metro was still running and I didn’t need to hike all the way back up the hill to my hotel!
I Am A Polar Bear 