I am sitting here after a relaxing day trying to write of our adventures but getting distracted by all the Aussie film clips. I thought that the Brits were the only ones crazy enough to like Kylie Minogue but I saw a marathon here this morning as well as Natalie Imbruglia, INXS followed by Nick Cave (featuring Kylie Minogue) Weird.
Anyway back to my train of thought (and if you haven’t figured it out yet because of the poor spelling and gramma and erratic writing style this is the ever elusive / lazy Ri) Yesterday we had an awesome summer day... in the snow. We headed off in the late morning from La Bise at Bend 12 the French alps to bend 0 or "La Plagn" Ski resort on a Beautiful warm summers day. We bought some gondola tickets to take us around 7km across and 1km higher and walk over to the gondola only to find a rather awkward looking gondola jammed between the pulley and the ground. I'm not sure how they managed to do that but the maintenance guys were out to lunch at first to we took there lead and went and got ice creams.
After ice creams we were on our way and were blown away by the views. We thought that the views were amazing half way up the valley from la Bise but from the top they were unbelievable as you can see partly from the photo but even that doesn't do justice to the amazing contrast of colours. So after the incredible gondola ride which included on spot where it looks like you're going down a cliff we stepped out into the snow at around 3000m.
From the top we trekked through the Aussie style snow (a little bit slushy) up to a little rocky outcrop at the base of the glacier where that had created an ice cave. Her mum will probably kill me but Tori walked / Skied along in her bright yellow doc Martiens the whole way. I on the other had stomped a path in font with my ill equipped sand shoes with ankle socks(I just didn't think there would be that much snow when it was 30degrees+ at the bottom of the lift). At the rocky bit we set up a French style picnic (mmmmm cheese) and refuelled.
With the important stuff finished (mmmm cheese) we headed for the ice cave and met up with a very friendly black dog wearing very stylish sunglasses (not sure if this was to protect him from the glare of the glacia or just for the tourists, either way it was cool).
The ice cave was a little bigger then I was expecting and went almost 200m into the glacier and included ice sculpture of animals throughout, it was definitely worth the walk. I left my mark as appeared to be the trend by using my hand to melt a print into the ice walls, and then proceed to but my frost bitten hand on Tori's bare skin hehehe.
We skated back down through the snow and caught the gondola back down through the amazing scenery and even saw a glimpse of two marmots (described by the tourist info along the lines of "a stout fat rodent"). At the bottom we finished of the expedition how all expeditions should be finished. With French pastries. So in summary: Awesome day
Cheers Ri
Tori here. That took Ri ages to write. He was up and down, fact checking and researching every tiny detail. Asking me questions like "How do you spell picnic as one word?" to which I responded "How do you spell it as two?"
He has inspired me to add my bit on tourist brochures, which I love almost as much as a free audio tour.
In a French one about this region (written in English) I turned to the page about local animals and it spoke of a local mountain goat and said something along these lines "It is nothing more than a big goat..." Way to talk up the local wildlife!
In Bath I was reading a brochure on the Roman Baths and they had quotes from tourists and most of them were like "Wow this place is amazing/interesting/you haven't lived until you've seen it..." but down the bottom was a quote from a couple that read like this "It was bigger than we expected." Oh I want to go there! Mr and Mrs Smith say that it'll be bigger than I'm expecting!!!
Next time we post we won't be in France.
Cheers Tori
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