Geneva, Switzerland & Chamonix, French Alps

From Paris we caught the train to meet Kirsty in Geneva.  I liked what I saw in Switzerland.  It was a clean city, and there were no sleezy men - unlike most of the other cities we have visited so far.

We were in Geneva for one full day, so we wandered around the small town, and went to the Lake Geneva where we saw the Jet d'Eau.  I bought a swiss army knife :-D

The next day we caught the train to Chaminox.  This is in the French Alps.  Chaminox is quite a skiers town in the winter, but there are still plenty of people around in the summer too.

The next day we went up the mountain to Aiguille du Midi.  We went up so high that we got a touch of altitude sickness.  We all felt a bit light headed and Tash was dizzy.  Once you relaxed, you then felt tired - while we were up there, I sat down and managed to fall asleep for a second.  We all felt shattered, yet it was still early in the day and we hadn't done that much.  It was also cold up there - it was snowing.  So we had to dress warmly.  Such a contrast to the hot weather we have had lately, and even further down the mountain it was hot as.The view from up there was amazing though.  From there we caught a gondola half way down, and then had to walk to our next stop - Mer de Glace.  This was meant to be a 2 hour, however it turned out to be 3 hours.  And what they told us was an easy walk, turned out to be quite challenging!  The sun was hot too, no snow down there, luckily I had both warm and cool clothes.

Finally we made it to the glacier.  It is the second largest glacier in the alps, apparently 14kms long, 1800m wide and 400m deep.  It has melted quite a bit though, the height of the glacier has dropped dramatically over the years, maybe due to global warming?  Each year they carve out ice caves for the tourists to explore - Grotte de la Mer de Glace.  We went in to see that, it was quite cool!  We were shattered after that day with all that walking!

From Chamonix we caught the train to Genoa in Italy.