Riding strangers’ Cars from Zinal to Chamonix
On mountains and roads in the Alps — and what really matters
We woke up an hour and a bit before sunrise and quickly got started with breakfast. Old bread, some pretty good jam, and a few pieces of cheese.
Setting off, we crossed 3000m of altitude as we headed up the Col du Pigne and from there watched the sun rise over the Alps.
It was the fourth and last day of our hike, so we started making our way down slowly, with frequent pauses to take in the views. After all, we woke up early and weren’t going to be walking as much as we did in the previous days. We even took a nap by a waterfall we found on the way.
At last we arrived in Zinal and sat down to have a beer and discuss where to sleep the night.
After an hour trying to decide what to do, we settled for a pretty ambitious plan: hitchhike all the way to Chamonix, making sure to arrive before Carrefour (a grocery store) closed.
The biggest problem we had was that it was Saturday, and French stores close on Sundays. As we’d be camping in Chamonix, we needed food, and so we had to arrive before Carrefour closed. Otherwise we’d be forced to eat some very expensive burgers in town.
We paid the bill and started walking towards the end of the village. I put my thumb up and we stood there waiting, exchanging smiles with the drivers that passed us by.
It was taking a while to get a ride, so when a man stopped and said he was headed to Grimentz we just jumped in without a second thought. I like to say that when hitchhiking a ride forward in the direction you’re going never hurts, except in this case we didn’t realize Grimentz was actually a detour away from the main road that left the Zinal valley.
The driver didn’t interact much and seemed to be driving with rage. But then I mentioned I quite liked the hip hop he was playing and we ended up having a nice conversation.
In Grimentz, after a bit of a wait, a couple stopped by and offered us a ride. They asked us what we were doing out there and we told them about our four-day hike. They seemed pretty impressed with the difficult route we’d covered.
Then we started talking about South America and they mentioned they’d just come back from there. In short, they biked from the Southernmost (Ushuaia) to the Northernmost (Cartagena) town in South America over thirteen months. Not satisfied, they then flew to Miami and biked from there all the way to Toronto, which took another seven months. And to top it off, rather than flying straight to Switzerland, they flew to Paris and did a little comeback tour visiting friends all over France and Switzerland before getting home. They’d arrived the week before and were already biking in the mountains again.
Yet somehow they seemed genuinely impressed by what we’d just done.
They were headed to Martigny for dinner, so we said our goodbyes there and got ready to hitch our next ride to Cham.
Looking at the map, hitching a ride from Martigny to Chamonix seems like an easy task. There’s just one road going through the mountains that links the two cities, and no other big towns along the way.
However, just two weeks earlier I’d hitchhiked that exact road there and back, so I knew things were more complicated than they looked.
The problem is that the road that goes to Chamonix starts directly after a roundabout, and has no shoulder. Meaning there’s not really a place for a car to stop and pick you up.
We wrote “Chamonix” on our arms (more as a joke than a tactic), and stood there for a good while trying different strategies. First we did some math on which exits were the most likely to have drivers going to Chamonix and then each went to stand on one of them. Then we tried standing as close as possible to the roundabout while aggressively signalling to a parking lot nearby hoping someone was that keen on giving us a ride that they’d take a short detour. And yet, we got nothing.
At some point a man drove past asking where we were headed and mentioned he was going somewhere else. I didn’t think much of this interaction until a bit later I heard honking and whistling that seemed directed at me. I turned around and he was standing on the parking lot screaming over that he’d take us.
I felt a little off about this whole thing, and having once ended up at a guy’s house dodging his advances (a story for another day), I thanked him and said I didn’t want to take him out of his way. After a bit of back and forth he quit trying, but said: “It’s really hard to catch a ride from there. If you’re still around in fifteen minutes I’ll come back and drive you”. I nodded, hoping to find a ride before he came back around. Yet five minutes later he was circling the roundabout again staring at us.
Luckily not much later an older man hit the brakes hard and threw his car over a short patch of grass between the roundabout and the road and offered us a ride. He was calm and spoke softly and slowly.
Misjudging what gray hair truly means — life experience — I thought taking strangers in his car was maybe a new and crazy experience for him, so I asked him if he’d given someone a ride like this before. He stopped and thought for a bit, eventually saying that no, he hadn’t, but that he’d hitchhiked quite a bit himself.
And so, having spoken little and kept his answers short until now, he told us he was a retired doctor, and that when he retired at fifty, he and his wife traveled the world for seven years.
He told us about the Saudi desert, about having crossed the Himalayas on horseback, about his trip in Burkina Faso, and a ton of other things. And yet, having lived through all this, he wouldn’t stop talking about this one dam nearby his hometown.
He lived in Trient, a little Swiss town on the road to Chamonix, so he wasn’t going to take us all the way, but he made sure to cross over the border to France to get to a parking lot from where we could admire the dam. He mentioned having been there before and being impressed with its inner-workings.
There I learned a valuable lesson about appreciating the little things. Despite having traveled the world for seven years, this man lived in a two-hundred-person town and was content with admiring a nearby dam.
Anyway, having showed us the dam, we went back and he dropped us off in Switzerland, a couple hundred meters from the border. From there we quickly got a ride and arrived at the Carrefour ten minutes before it closed.
In fact, a few seconds after Will took the yogurt out of the shelf, some barrier came down (it’s called a night curtain and I had to Google that word) and closed the dairy section, eight minutes before the place closed. Lucky us, because we really wanted that yogurt.
After paying for the groceries we sat outside on the floor eating chicken and drinking beer, celebrating our victory of arriving in time. We spent four days out in the mountains, hiking with phenomenal views, sleeping in beautiful spots, and swimming in lakes and waterfalls, but that moment right there on the floor I hold as one of the best memories from the whole trip.
It’s the little things.
