After leaving Leuk, we got on a train to Visp, where we caught the bus to Saas Fee. Saas Fee is surrounded tightly on three sides by mountains, a number of them over 4000 meters (more than 13,000 feet) high. Until not so long ago, it was inaccessible to motor vehicles. Once a road was opened, however, it quickly became a major ski resort, with year-round skiing and ski-boarding. It is also a hiking center and has a revolving restaurant that, at 3500 meters (nearly 12,000 feet), is 500 meters (more than 1500 feet) higher than the Schilthorn’s.
We didn’t go to that restaurant. We didn’t do any (serious) hiking. We certainly didn’t go skiing and ski-boarding. Instead, we went up to the lowest lift destination, Hannig (2360 meters, about 7800 feet), walked about twenty minutes, to a nearby glacial valley, walked back, had prune cake and mineral water (Mary Joy) and Rivella (me), saw a tame marmot and took the gondola back down to Saas Fee.
Another digression. Earlier, I compared Rivella to Fanta. That might create an incorrect impression. Instead of being a bright orange color, Rivella is an orangish amber. It isn’t nearly as sweet-tasting as Orange Crush.
As to the marmot, when we had taken the Marmot Trail above Zermatt, we hadn’t seen any marmots (except for the carved, wooden variety), but they had seen us, as indicated by the whistles we heard. The marmot at Hannig was used to being fed by tourists, so he posed for us (down and left from the blue framework).
We took the Postal Bus back to Visp, along curving mountain roads. Occasionally a bus would have to honk its horn to warn oncoming traffic that it was coming around a curve. The horn of a Postal Bus is not like your usual car horn, it is more like a bicycle horn, or the taxi horns in Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” It has at least three different notes, and when I heard it on the way to Saas Fee, it sounded like the first three notes of George M. Cohan’s World War I song “Over There,” only with an equal dash-dash-dash rhythm, instead of the song’s dot-dot-dash (i.e., “Oh-Verr-Theere” instead of “O-Ver-Theere”).
Up ahead, we saw what looked like rain, and soon we were in the midst of it. Mary Joy was uncomfortable with how fast we were going around those curves on slick, wet roads, with lower visibility, but apparently the driver knew what he was doing, because he got us to Visp, where the rain was over as quickly as it had started. We took the train back to Brig.
We went to the 6:30 p.m. mass at Herz Jesu (Heart of Jesus) Church. It is a semi-circular church from the 1970s or 1980s, not very large, with a baroque-style organ on the right side. At this mass, a visiting church choir from somewhere in Germany was singing. They started off badly, with an off-key Gloria, but got better later on. They were not, however, as good as Mary Joy’s choir. Maybe she can wangle an invitation to sing in Brig.
We went again to Restaurant Channa, where our third meal was the worst of the three—pizza with canned vegetables as the topping.
We didn’t go to that restaurant. We didn’t do any (serious) hiking. We certainly didn’t go skiing and ski-boarding. Instead, we went up to the lowest lift destination, Hannig (2360 meters, about 7800 feet), walked about twenty minutes, to a nearby glacial valley, walked back, had prune cake and mineral water (Mary Joy) and Rivella (me), saw a tame marmot and took the gondola back down to Saas Fee.
Another digression. Earlier, I compared Rivella to Fanta. That might create an incorrect impression. Instead of being a bright orange color, Rivella is an orangish amber. It isn’t nearly as sweet-tasting as Orange Crush.
As to the marmot, when we had taken the Marmot Trail above Zermatt, we hadn’t seen any marmots (except for the carved, wooden variety), but they had seen us, as indicated by the whistles we heard. The marmot at Hannig was used to being fed by tourists, so he posed for us (down and left from the blue framework).
We took the Postal Bus back to Visp, along curving mountain roads. Occasionally a bus would have to honk its horn to warn oncoming traffic that it was coming around a curve. The horn of a Postal Bus is not like your usual car horn, it is more like a bicycle horn, or the taxi horns in Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” It has at least three different notes, and when I heard it on the way to Saas Fee, it sounded like the first three notes of George M. Cohan’s World War I song “Over There,” only with an equal dash-dash-dash rhythm, instead of the song’s dot-dot-dash (i.e., “Oh-Verr-Theere” instead of “O-Ver-Theere”).
Up ahead, we saw what looked like rain, and soon we were in the midst of it. Mary Joy was uncomfortable with how fast we were going around those curves on slick, wet roads, with lower visibility, but apparently the driver knew what he was doing, because he got us to Visp, where the rain was over as quickly as it had started. We took the train back to Brig.
We went to the 6:30 p.m. mass at Herz Jesu (Heart of Jesus) Church. It is a semi-circular church from the 1970s or 1980s, not very large, with a baroque-style organ on the right side. At this mass, a visiting church choir from somewhere in Germany was singing. They started off badly, with an off-key Gloria, but got better later on. They were not, however, as good as Mary Joy’s choir. Maybe she can wangle an invitation to sing in Brig.
We went again to Restaurant Channa, where our third meal was the worst of the three—pizza with canned vegetables as the topping.
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