Aint no mountain high enough

As stated in our previous entry, the next mountain for us to conquer was Mont Blanc in Charmonix. Well to be honest, we didn’t actually conquer it, we took a cable car ride up, lol…

Mont Blanc

Ski season lasts pretty long for the ‘roof of Europe’ aka Mont Blanc. There were lots of people going up Mount Blanc for skiing and they looked pretty serious with all their gear like ice picks, axes and stuff. There were loads of warnings about how dangerous the slopes are and how the ski paths are neither groomed, marked nor patrolled, which seemed quite ominous. Everyone who was skiing looked super geared up so I assume they know the risks involved. You know it's serious stuff when the brochure has a note: "Bring GPS locator beacon".

Beginning of the treacherous ski down

Once you are up on Mont Blanc, you can actually take another cable car ride to Italy, which we didn’t do as that cable car looked way too scary for me. The views on Mont Blanc were great though and we had quite a lot of fun staring at the people skiing on the slopes. One guy wanted to do paragliding but there wasn’t enough wind for himto jump off. Aiguille du Midi which is where people ski and apparently paraglide is 3,842m high!!! It’s already freaky enough for me to be up that height, can you imagine jumping off a slope that high? Yikes!

Dreamy view

We had read about how the cablecar journey up can ‘make your heart leap’ but it was so jam-packed with people I could hardly see anything and so there was no leaping in my heart ascending. The journey back down was a whole different story however, the cable car kind of went freefalling for a while, which totally freaked me out. I think I gave a pretty loud gasp but then again almost everyone in the cable car did the same. CS said having that alone was worth the money we paid for the cable car journey, haha.

That's where little elves make Mont Blanc pens!

After all the leaping hearts, we decided a good meal was needed to restore ourselves back to vitality and thus we headed off to Lyon, gastronomical capital of France, for some lunch. We picked a restaurant in a guide-book and while the brasserie looked pretty impressive, the food was nothing to shout about. The escargots were pretty good, though honestly anything with garlic herb butter is bound to taste good. It seems like we have to get away from the big cities to get any decent food. Luckily we were heading to the Provence region next so beautiful scenery and hopefully good food awaits us there!

Escargot in garlic herb butter