Stage 7: Martigny to Zinal, Monday July 30
Monday morning we were nervous nellies. Would Chris have a fever? Would the doctor let him out? SHOULD the doctor let him out?
The doctor let him out. She said he could carry on with oral amoxicillin, though he had to stay for the midday drip. She also gave us a perplexing admonition not to fly for at least a week. We never did figure out what that was all about, though it seemed to have to do with gas chemistry and air pressure.
I dashed out to pay the hotel, buy train tickets, and get more Swiss money, and then we were free! We filled his prescriptions at the Pharmacie de la Gare – the pharmacist was surprised by the need to actually charge us – and hopped on a train.
Alpine Exploratory had booked all our accommodations months ahead, so we couldn’t just resume where we’d left off. By this point, we were supposed to be walking from the Cabane de Moiry to Zinal, so we had to get ourselves to Zinal. But traveling in this area is a little fiddly.
The Haute Route goes up and over mountains and valleys in the most inconvenient way possible. Wheeled transportation follows the more sensible course of following the valleys. The Rhone valley is the main spine of transport, with a train line running through it east-west. The stops along the way are at the tops of the north-south valleys, which contain the towns where our route stopped for the nights. Most transportation routes therefore involved using the train to go one stop or two and then a bus for riding down to smaller towns. Only the Matterthal has its own train line between Visp and Zermatt.
From Martigny, we took a train 20 minutes east to Sierre/Siders. (Place names in the Rhone valley are generally presented in French/German pairs.) From Sierre, we took two separate buses south into the valley to Zinal. That was the scariest bit of the trip so far! The bus went up, up, up a winding mountain road that seemed to be right on the edge of a precipice at all times. I had to give Chris the window seat and keep my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to see when the bus drove right off the edge of the mountain.
Zinal was all Alps and cool air, a stark contrast to sunny Martigny. We felt like honeymooners!
