The first time I see Martigny, it’s dark and we’re lost (writes Jim Alexander). We’ve been lost all day, actually - driving to Switzerland using maps that include roads not built yet might be rock ‘n’ roll but it isn’t fast. The shiny new autoroute we’ve been following has simply.... stopped, in the middle of a giant dustbowl; the Swiss border guards hate us; and driving over an Alp in the gathering dusk is frankly terrifying. 

We roll into Martigny in a blaze of grumpiness. Well-lit streets picking out the facades of incredibly clean Swiss buildings. By night, the town looks small, well-kept and quiet.

By day, it looks exactly the same only sunnier. A little harder to concentrate on, though, because of all the mountains.

Martigny is surrounded by mountains. Huge, epic, blue-white mountains that look like God dropped them on his way to Canada. You don’t see them at night, of course, but the next morning? Well. If you’re going to get to Martigny, do it in the dark. When the sun whips the covers off of ranges that look like they are marching into the sky, you’ll see what I mean. It’s like looking at one of those wobbly-dot pictures that suddenly becomes a 3D projection of a goat: for a moment, nothing computes. Then everything resolves itself in a dizzying twitch of perspectives.

I’ve stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I’ve climbed ancient rock cities in Sri Lanka. And I have no visual memory that comes close to beating those mountains. 

Christophe, a very nice local promoter, wants to show us the area around his home town. So, still reeling, we troop out to the car park and haul our smelly van through pleasant streets to the local railway station, a quaint little gabled thing sitting off a small crossroads.

Christophe is standing outside the station wrapped in a coat that makes him look like a writer. He hops in, tactfully making no mention of the smell, and directs us out onto a road quickly hemmed by the churchlike foothills of the Alps. Pine trees leap up towards an impossible sky, broken in places by black shoulders of rock. One of these shoulders humps grumpily over a dangerous-looking layby. Christophe points. We stop. 

He leads us along a scree path into a mountain glade littered with boulders. The forest falls away behind us, the boulders glisten in the morning air – and a huge waterfall stretches its white rope from a smooth shelf to a broad pool at the far side of the clearing. Rocks break the surface of the water like whales; rainbow rings wheel in clouds of spray. 

I’m dumbstruck. Everyone is dumbstruck, even Christophe, who lives by the damn thing. Then the spell is broken with a whoop as we charge together for a series of slippery boulders that lead an awfully dangerous route out through the water to the fall. The rainbow rings (I never realised that rainbows were circular until I saw them dancing in the mist) glitter above us like bonus points in a computer game. 

That’s not all. Tearing us, eventually (I’ll never know how), away from the fall, Christophe frogmarches us back to the van and has us drive back through the grandiloquence of the mountains to a wide car park at the foot of a cliff. Hacked into this cliff are hundreds of steps leading steeply past holes stuffed with votive objects to a tiny church. The church is hewn from the cliff and is, Christophe tells us, a place of pilgrimage. The holes along the staircase are waystations in which the pilgrims leave offerings. 

We wheeze feebly up the steps, each footfall reminding us a little more strongly than the last that pilgrimages are supposed to be hard. Staggering finally over a little stony lip, we stand gasping in a crazy garden in which pink and purple flowers exude scents that attract drunkenly buzzing insects. Red spots describe Venn diagrams before our eyes.

When we’ve regained (sort of) our composure, we enter the church. The air inside is dark and wet and the bright Alpine light filters into it through the bubbled panes of primitive stained glass windows. It feels as though the day has gone, vanished like the phantom autoroute. When we come out, the sky is a surprise. The day’s warmth, the smell of pine and blossom, the drone of insects. Around us, mountains march their impossible painting. And I have to remind myself: this is Europe.

About the author

Jim Alexander is a writer and roadie who has been travelling Europe and the rest of the world for the last ten years. He currently calls a little village in Devon, UK, his home – for now, at least...