Further Alpine Adventures

Before leaving the glorious escarpments of Switzerland we turned off up a sharp valley to investigate the very famous Matterhorn, the mountain that we have heard so much about. Unfortunately it seems that everyone else in the world has also heard so much about the Matterhorn, and now it has become a very popular destination. The road up the mountain side was blocked to the average Joe Blow, and everyone was shepherded onto trains that would take them en-masse to the tourist traps up there. Having been caught up in human swarms previously we declined to join the herd and instead turned around and moved off to further fields. There were plenty more pretty mountains to see.

At a tiny alpine village we stopped at the STOP sign on the French border and dutifully waited for the border guard to come out, but after realising that no-one was actually there we pushed on. We slowly meandered through the (slightly less well maintained than Switzerland’s*) twisty mountain roads, with tall forested mountains reaching up to incredible heights around us and bubbling streams roaring down the deep gullies beside us. We never did quite work out the cause of the slightly milky colour of the glacial meltwater, but otherwise it seemed clean enough.

* Switzerland is a very affluent country. Everybody there must have good wages and pay very high taxes because roads and buildings are in such good nick, and everything is so plurry expensive! You don’t buy petrol there, that’s for sure, the price goes up by 50c a litre immediately over the border! Plus the shops charge like wounded water buffaloes.

We wound our way along a zig-zagging path toward Mont Blanc, the highest peak in all the Alps. There enormous craggy glaciers reached incredible distances down the sides of that impressive monolith and had our jaws dropping in awe. Everything was on such a grand scale. The gob-smacking size of the mountains, the expansive blankets of snow, the long stretching and slowly sliding glaciers that carve their way down the sides of those incredible peaks. It was an unforgettable experience.

Ski lifts took walkers up into the high reaches, and healthy looking young people with hiking boots and back packs were everywhere. Because we had to empty Ebenezer’s almost overflowing on-board dunny into a proper receptacle and top up his almost empty water tank, we stayed in a camp ground where they did not have toilet seats but expected you to perch on the freezing porcelain! Crikey! Otherwise it was an OK place to camp and wash clothes, plus it was surrounded by very impressive mountains.

At this point we had to head toward civilisation to find a mechanic to cure Ebenezer’s progressively worsening clutch problem. We had so far managed to negotiate some pretty amazing steep mountain passes with only a little bit of clutch slippage, but we figured we shouldn’t push our luck too far. In the big city of Lyon we sat on a Ford dealer’s chairs nearly all day anxiously waiting on news about a) who would fix our vehicle, and b) the replacement hire car and accommodation. It turns out that France shuts down for all of August and no-one could repair Ebenezer until September! Whaaaat!?! Then Ford France told us they would only lend us a hire car for four days, which was totally useless, so, as the afternoon wore on and out of sheer frustration, we finally jumped back into our motorhome and carefully limped off towards Germany. We were off to Munich where we had managed to convince the original hire mob to give us a replacement vehicle for Ebenezer.

This did take us out our way a bit (we had originally intended to move on to central France then the Riviera) and used up a few valuable days of our paid vehicle hire back-tracking toward Germany, but we really didn’t have much choice. Ya gotta do wotcha gotta do.

But we made the best of it and mostly stuck to country roads, bush camping alongside the lovely Loire River and in the forested mountains somewhere, listening to the plinky plonky of the cow bells in the valley below. We got to see pretty country that we would have otherwise missed.

As we neared Munich there was a bit of crazy autobahn flying (we had Ebenezer cruising at 130 kph and overtaking cars were zooming past us) which was a bit stressful, but we got there.

Having arrived in the outskirts of that big city we stayed in a fully automated camp ground in order that we empty the on-board dunny and charge up our devices. Cool but weird, you might think, no humans to deal with. Trouble is, when something doesn’t work there is no human to fix it, you just lose all the money you put in the slot. Kicking a robot may give a small amount of satisfaction, but you have still done your dough.

One grand thing about Germany that really impressed Rod is that you can buy good quality beer in 500 mL bottles for only 1 Euro. Coooool!

Ebenezer’s replacement (Ebenezer Mk II) is very similar to the original, but not a Ford with the big motor and diesel guzzling turbo charger that the yanks love so much. It is a Fiat called a Ducato (!!!!! gotta love that!) with a smaller motor but lots of slightly better aspects. The front seats pivot around to make armchairs at the dining table, which is much roomier than Ebenezer Mk I. We are happy with our new motorhome.

Our first night in it was spent up in the German Alps somewhere on a rainy wet night. As we drove through the deep ravines and forest clad rock faces we realised that we were missing out on more spectacular scenery because of the mist and rain. We found a forestry trail and followed it up into a deep valley until we found a relatively level spot to set up camp, to await the next day and hopefully clearer conditions. We were well and truly settled in when at 11 pm a forestry grader drove up and turned around in front of us, twice. We figured he was taking advantage of the overnight ceased rain to grade the road that we were parked next to in preparation for tree lopping in the morning. So at sparrows fart Rod slowly drove Ebenezer Mk II down the valley to find another pozzie away from the forestry activities and allow Georgie to finish her morning kip.