Family visit

My family again decided to visit me this summer. And as usual, I was supposed to come up with ideas for trips and excursions (and optimize them for travelling). Here is what I came up with

On Saturday, our first stop was Pissevache waterfall near Martigny. The waterfall is visible even from highway but standing below this impressive 60m high fall is another matter. After this short stop, we continued towards Sion and Sierre where we stopped at village Lac St Leonard with quite nice subterranean lake -- basically a cave filled with water. From there we continued to Blatten where I wanted to hike through a long suspension bridge. Unfortunately, I severely overestimated hiking speed of my mother and brother and therefore we made it only to Riederfurka (the weather wasn't so good and we would return too late from the trip)

Sunday was a bit harder to schedule. Especially because we wanted to visit salt mines in Bex and they recommend booking entry timeslots. As it turned out, we were not able to book the first possible entry and therefore needed to spend some time in the morning. Therefore, I decided to visit Orbe -- a village near where I live.

Orbe is small old village but it is really nice. Probably the biggest attraction is the Orbe castle and a big round tower called Tour Ronde.

From Orbe we went to Bex, an old salt mining city. The visit of salt mines starts with a more than 1km of ride in a train inside mine tunnels. From there, you will follow a short route during which you will learn about how the salt was mined in the past and what is different now. And in the end, you will get another long ride on a train.

Because the weather was really nice, after a lunch break we decided to try another trip. My plan was to go from Lac D'Emosson through Lac du Vieux Emosson to the place with real dinosaur traces. Unfortunately, my plans were destroyed because of construction works at Vieux Emosson. They are building another hydroelectric power plant and the whole road to the second dam is closed. As we learnt later, they even completely drained it. Anyway, because of this complication, the only possible road to the dinosaur traces was through mountain and I got a lot of complaints for this.

On the other hand, going through the gorge and mountain had its advantages. We saw a lot of Alpine Ibexes and they weren't really afraid of us. One of them let us to go just a few meters from him (but did not let us to touch him). Overall, a very nice bonus to the trip.





Photos from Saturday: Pissevachefalle, Lac St. Leonard and trip Blatten-Riederfurka.
Photos from Sunday: Orbe, Salt mines Bex and Lac D'Emosson