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Well I've had an interesting time in France. I've had adventures featuring Veronica the Chilean mountaineer, Pierre the French train robber, Avalanches, Fires, Danny and Franky (the terror of the Austrian roads) and the inside of a small Paris hotel room.

Chamonix and Geneva

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 12:30:42

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Well I've had an interesting time in France. I've had adventures featuring Veronica the Chilean mountaineer, Pierre the French train robber, Avalanches, Fires, Danny and Franky (the terror of the Austrian roads) and the inside of a small Paris hotel room.

All in all not bad for three days…

On my way back to London from Spain I decided to detour slightly across France in order to drop by and have coffee with friends of mine, Francis and Danny, who were honeymooning in Chamonix.

From Madrid I undertook one of those impossibly long train trips across Spain and up through France to Geneva. The route took me from Madrid to Barcelona, across the border to Ceberre and then by overnight train to Geneva via Lyon.

On the train from Barcelona to Ceberre I made a new friend. When a fierce French train conductor set upon the girl sitting next to me and drove her to tears I intervened and together we chased away the gallic bully.

Afterwards we started to talk, mostly about what arseholes the French could be. Veronica it turned out was Chilean and studying art in Milan. She was also a mountaineer which gave us common ground for conversation. We sat on a freezing cold platform at Ceberre and swapped stories about our homes, our lives and the perils of travelling in Europe. The mountains of Chile sound far removed from the open expanses of bush in Western Australia where I grew up. Chile, like most of South America, has its own share of wide open spaces apparently and the difference between the plains and the rugged mountains sounded so spectacular in Veronica's description that I immediately added it to my list of places I must see.

At about one o'clock in the morning our respective trains arrived, hers bound for Nice and Italy, and mine for the north east of France towards Lyon. Veronica and I swapped email addresses and promised ...