Once again the French have excelled themselves at turning an otherwise hazardous, death creating force of nature into a mere tourist attraction. And a very cool one at that. The Mer De Glace is a glacier that runs out of the mountains and into Chamonix, where it unceremoniously melts into the hillside. For a the not too bad sum of €21 you can buy a ticket to ride the Montenvers Railway, then catch a télécabine down to the Mer De Glace itself and … go inside it.

Yes, you can go inside the glacier, not just touch it from behind a safety fence, or look at it from a distance of 100m. You can actually walk around inside it. And not content with just letting you walk around a carved tunnel they even went to the effort of carving out some pretty sculptures and fitting lights to refract off them.

It was really good, I have nearly filled my memory card in my camera with stuff from it.

No GPS route for today, it’s hard to get a fix under ten metres of solid ice