Mountain Adventure Holidays
Julia's selfie photo bombed by Alf!
Our Family Walking Tour around Mont Blanc with Tracks and Trails was a really fantastic experience. We started the week feeling rather nervous about what lay ahead of us, but once we had done our acclimatisation walk to Lac Blanc and got to know a little bit about our really helpful, fun and nice guide, Julia, I felt much better and more confident about the whole thing. The first day was great, and we saw our first alpine animal- a chamois (a sort of mountain goat), which was really exciting!
The next two days walked through lovely Alpine meadows and on high balcony trails, through mushroom woods and past herds of cows. We stayed in a beautiful hotel called the Hotel Splendide, beside the lovely Champex Lac where we played table tennis and played on the swings. We also stayed in La Fouly, which was the only place on the holiday that it rained. On the way to Champex, we stumbled upon a normal looking chalet. Except it wasn't. Julia said to have a poke around inside and found that it was actually a secret Swiss bunker with machine guns and turrets and hidden doors! It was amazing! We then went on to the highest point on our tour, the Col de Ferret, standing at 2537 metres and the border of Switzerland and Italy, before going to the Rifugio Bonatti, where we stayed for the night and saw amazing views of the glaciers and mountains from our dormitory and played cards as the sun set. It was absolutely beautiful.
We then descended into Courmayeur, where delicious Italian pizza and gorgeous gelato (and the end) awaited us! There were many highlights of our 100 kilometre(!) trip including my favourite hotel (Hotel Splendide) which had fantastic views of the mountains and Champex Lac, and the delicious home made cheese from the cheese farm, along with buying a real Swiss Army knife from Switzerland!!! This has already come in very useful lots of times for when some serious whittling needs to be done! But my favourite part was when we saw the marmots running around next to Rifugio Bonatti, where we stayed on our last day, witnessing first hand a true Alpine experience.
In a nutshell, it was a really enjoyable trip that was not too hard, (but it wasn't too easy either!) and our guide (Julia) was really friendly and great company. I really felt like I had achieved something when I completed it and would thoroughly recommend it for a holiday.
Thank you!
Alf Broughton, age 12
Travel Writer in the Making