Laser sailor scores in St Moritz

Anne Hinton reports from the match racing in the winter stomping ground for the jet-set

The Glacier Express

A unique way to get to St Moritz is from Switzerland’s famous year-round ski resort (only slightly less expensive than St Moritz) - Zermatt, in the shadow of the Matterhorn, to the top of which the America’s Cup was taken shortly after its arrival in Switzerland.

The Glacier Express something of a misnomer, given that only a very few tiny stretches of ice are visible from the ‘langsamsten schnell Zug der Welt’ (the slowest express train in the world), runs from Zermatt to St Moritz, many times a day. To travel in proper style, one should also go first class… Passengers in first class are led to believe that they will have extra large windows, with additional ones in the roof, for ease of viewing the passing scenery. This does not always occur! It was pointed out to me that the advantage of not having full windows is that one gets to open the windows, which makes photography easier. True - but being able to open the windows also applies to passengers in second class…

This may be Switzerland - the wealthy country where all mod cons are readily available - but some of the glacier express carriages are quite old. The one that I travelled in (first class) had a toilet which was simply a hole through to the track. Therefore
i. be extra careful as to what you drop down the hole
ii. women travellers (and men taking a rest) should be aware that this can make a visit to the toilet a chilly experience for the nether regions…!!

This rail journey is a very long one - lasting up to eight and a half hours, depending on time of day. In the main the train does go very slowly. There are three main sections of the route that are especially worth travelling for the scenery - the initial section down the narrow valley from Zermatt to Visp, the Oberalp pass eastwards from Andermatt (which is very steep out of Andermatt and is one of the sections where the train uses a cog-wheel track), and - for something completely different - the limestone/badland area just east of Ilanz in the Romansch district of Switzerland (completely atypical for Swiss scenery).