I Wanted the Toblerone Photograph. Switzerland Charged Accordingly.

One perfect reflection, two mountain transport systems and a ridiculously expensive day above Zermatt.

There is a photograph of the Matterhorn on the wall of my office.

The mountain rises almost perfectly above Riffelsee, while its reflection points downward into water so still that Switzerland appears to have arranged itself specifically for my phone. It is one of nine photographs in an installation I called The Rhetoric of Monumentality in Nine Views: towers, bridges, palaces, religious symbols, cities and one mountain pretending to be eternal.

The photograph looks effortless.

It does not show the alarm before four in the morning, two separate mountain transport systems, a cable car with a glass floor, several restaurants that did not consider my intended expenditure commercially interesting, or the passenger who vomited on the train back to Visp.

It also does not show that I was still recovering from Covid.

Photographs are excellent liars.

A Mission Discovered on the Internet

The Swiss trip had not originally been organised around the Matterhorn. I was probably more excited about the hotels I had booked in Montreux and Flims. Zermatt was already part of the itinerary, but the photographic mission developed later, while I was researching what one was supposed to do there.

Travel forums kept mentioning Riffelsee.

Go early, they said. Take the mountain train to Rotenboden. Walk down to the lake. Arrive before the wind disturbs the water and before the crowds disturb everything else. With luck, the Matterhorn will appear twice: once above the horizon and once in the lake.

The repeated warnings turned a pleasant excursion into a challenge.

I did not merely want to see the Matterhorn. Millions of people had already done that. I wanted to produce the photograph myself: the one from the chocolate box, the tourism posters and the collective visual memory of Switzerland.

This was, admittedly, a slightly arrogant ambition for an amateur photographer carrying only a Samsung phone.

Then again, arrogance is sometimes useful. It gets you out of bed.

The 4:59 Train

I stayed in Sion for one reason: the Moxy was unusually affordable.

Sion was not a destination in this story. It was the financial compromise that made an expensive day marginally less absurd. The plan required the earliest useful train because I had only one opportunity. The itinerary could not be moved to another day if the weather turned bad.

At 4:59 in the morning, the station was nearly empty.

I travel first class whenever I reasonably can. This is not always financially rational, but I prefer my irrational decisions to be comfortable. I had also purchased a Swiss Half Fare Card for 120 francs, which gave foreign visitors up to fifty per cent off many railway and mountain tickets.

Switzerland had therefore charged me 120 francs for the privilege of being charged less by Switzerland.

At Visp, I changed to the Matterhorn Gotthard Railway for Zermatt. The valley narrowed, the landscape became more theatrical and the first serious light began to reach the mountains.

I was about a month past Covid. The acute illness had ended, but it had left me with a persistent cough, brain fog and pathological hunger that made normal appetite seem like an amateur effort. I was functional, but not entirely restored.

Still, I had planned the day, and when I plan something seriously, the internal debate has already ended.

The only remaining problem is execution.

Zermatt Before the Crowds

Zermatt was quiet when I arrived.

The streets, hotels and dark wooden buildings looked recognisably Swiss, but the town did not immediately charm me in the way Lucerne or Montreux had. It felt too thoroughly optimised for visitors. Everything was picturesque, efficient and ready to be consumed.

Above the roofs and trees, however, the Matterhorn needed no marketing department.

Switzerland had already charged me 120 francs for the privilege of receiving discounts. It now wanted another hundred, approximately, to let me explore one mountain from two directions.

I crossed to the Gornergrat Railway and bought a Peak2Peak ticket with the Crystal Ride supplement. The ticket covered the cogwheel train to Gornergrat and the sequence of cable cars connecting Riffelberg with Matterhorn Glacier Paradise. With my Swiss Half Fare Card, the Peak2Peak ticket cost CHF 98.50.

The red cogwheel train climbed above Zermatt.

Forests opened into alpine slopes. The town contracted beneath us. The Matterhorn appeared and disappeared behind terrain and windows, revealing itself in fragments like a monument that understood dramatic timing.

At Rotenboden, I got off.

The Mountain Appeared Twice

The walk from Rotenboden station to Riffelsee took about ten minutes. The trail was clearly marked, and even at that hour there was no realistic opportunity to get lost.

There were only a few other people, exactly as the forums had promised. The air was clear, the mountain completely visible and the water already calm enough to hold the reflection.

No waiting was necessary.

There was no storm to survive, no heroic struggle with a tripod and no agonising hour during which the clouds slowly parted. I walked to the water, took out my phone and started photographing.

The picture worked almost immediately

The mountain stood in the centre, framed by rock and grass. Its reflection fell into the lake with astonishing clarity. The water retained enough texture to remain water, but not enough movement to destroy the illusion of symmetry.

I had wanted the Toblerone photograph.

I had it.

Naturally, I took dozens more.

The photograph was already successful, but I continued in case Switzerland moved.

For a moment beside the lake, I felt an intense and entirely unapologetic satisfaction. It was not merely about obtaining a beautiful image. It was the sense of personal power that comes from constructing an unnecessary but difficult day and then executing it precisely.

Many people might want that photograph. Fewer would get up before four, navigate the trains alone, accept the prices and actually go to make it.

I had.

That was the life I wanted to live.

It was not yet nine in the morning.

Cake at 3,000 Metres

After photographing the lake, I walked back to Rotenboden and continued by train to Gornergrat.

The main photographic mission was complete, but the day still had several subsidiary objectives. I had come to see Zermatt, the glaciers, the summer ski slopes and the interior of a glacier. Success at Riffelsee did not reduce the rest of the mountain to an epilogue.

At Gornergrat, the landscape widened dramatically.

Glaciers curled through the valleys below. Peaks extended in every direction. The observatory and stone hotel stood on the ridge with the slightly improbable dignity of a remote scientific fortress.

I stayed for perhaps half an hour.

This was enough time to look properly and, more importantly, to eat cake with the Matterhorn in the background.

The thought from Riffelsee returned with greater precision.

This was the life I wanted: the freedom to organise the day myself, travel comfortably, pay for an experience without pretending the price did not matter, complete the objective I had chosen and then sit above the glaciers eating an unnecessary cake.

Not everyone would dare to do it. Not everyone would decide that it was worth doing. And not everyone would pay the Swiss invoice without collapsing into moral philosophy.

The combination of the photograph and the cake mattered. Achievement without pleasure would have felt too Protestant.

Another Ticket, Another Mountain

From Gornergrat, I descended by train to Riffelberg and transferred toward Matterhorn Glacier Paradise.

Switzerland had already presented one version of the Matterhorn: quiet water, morning light and classical symmetry. The second half of the day offered something more technological.

Cable cars climbed over forests, rocks and increasingly barren terrain.

For the final section, I used the Crystal Ride cabin, which included a transparent floor.

It was fun.

It was also unmistakably on the tourist side of experience: a controlled dose of vertigo designed, priced and packaged for visitors. Looking through the glass beneath my feet was visually effective, but I did not mistake it for mountaineering.

At 3,883 metres, even a packaged experience acquires physical credibility.

I felt slightly dizzy and more easily out of breath. Nothing dramatic happened, but the altitude made itself known. The landscape outside had become almost lunar—grey rock, ice, machinery and summer ski infrastructure arranged across the glacier.

People were skiing in August.

The scene was fascinating and faintly absurd. Summer continued far below in the valleys while, at the top of the cable-car system, skiers crossed a white landscape under a heavy sky.

I was still coughing occasionally and still living inside the post-Covid fog. The thinner air did not magically transform me into a healthier man. Yet the day felt easier than it should have, considering the early start and the altitude.

Only the following day did I realise that the cough had stopped.

Perhaps the timing was coincidental. I am not going to claim that a cable car cured me. The brain fog remained for several more months, as did the pathological hunger.

Covid surrendered selectively.

Inside the Glacier

The Glacier Palace was my second major objective.

A tunnel led into the ice, where blue-white walls, illuminated passages and frozen sculptures created an underground world that was both impressive and slightly ridiculous.

It was tourist kitsch executed with enough aesthetic force to earn forgiveness.

The lighting brought out layers and textures in the ice. Transparent surfaces changed colour as I moved. Sculptures emerged from the frozen interior, including animals and decorative scenes whose presence inside a glacier required no intellectual defence beyond the fact that they looked good.

This was my first time walking through such a place, and that mattered. Familiarity might have made the artificiality more obvious. Instead, the tunnels retained some genuine strangeness.

The mountain was no longer merely a distant shape or a reflection. For a few minutes, I was moving through its frozen interior—or at least through the carefully managed portion of it that had been prepared for people with tickets.

The distinction mattered less than I expected.

Zermatt Calculates My Value

By the time I returned to Zermatt, hunger was no longer a theoretical issue.

The town was now fully awake: flags, flower boxes, dark timber, horse-drawn carriages and visitors moving through a carefully maintained image of alpine tradition.

I wanted fondue.

This did not seem like an unreasonable request in a Swiss mountain resort. Yet at two better restaurants, I was asked what I intended to order and then informed, with admirable commercial clarity, that fondue represented too little money to justify the table.

They did not reject me because they were full.

They rejected my projected revenue.

The situation was particularly irritating because the post-Covid hunger had made me capable of eating with the seriousness of an agricultural machine. I might have become an excellent customer if they had allowed the experiment to proceed.

Eventually, a more ordinary restaurant accepted both me and my inadequate financial ambition.

I received the fondue.

It was good.

Zermatt remained attractive but overly tourist-oriented: recognisably Swiss, well organised and easy to photograph, yet lacking the particular charm I had found in Lucerne or Montreux. The restaurants had merely made the town’s economic logic unusually explicit.

The mountain did not care what I ordered.

That was another point in its favour.

The Passenger to Visp

I returned to the railway station after a day that had begun before dawn and climbed to almost 3,900 metres.

I was only mildly tired.

This surprised me. The schedule had been excessive, but the experience had supplied more energy than it consumed. The photograph was safely stored on my phone and had already gone to Instagram, where most contemporary victories are first registered.

On the train from Zermatt to Visp, a passenger vomited.

There are few better methods for ending alpine transcendence.

The peaks receded, the carriage returned to the valley and Switzerland resumed its ordinary transport function. I changed trains and continued to Sion, where the affordable Moxy awaited me.

By evening, the Matterhorn had already become a photograph.

For the next three years, that was mostly what it remained: a digital image, an Instagram memory and proof that the mission had succeeded.

Then I redesigned my office.

Nine Views

In 2025, I selected nine of my travel photographs for a wall installation.

I called it The Rhetoric of Monumentality in Nine Views: My Photographic Dialogue with Cities, Nations and Their Symbols.

All nine photographs were mine.

The matrix included cities, towers, bridges, palaces, religious structures and architecture shaped by power, ambition and collective identity. At the upper right, I placed the Matterhorn.

It was the only pure natural monument among human constructions, yet it belonged there. The mountain had been used as a symbol so many times that it had almost become architecture: Switzerland’s unofficial pyramid, replicated on packaging, advertisements and screens.

My photograph had begun as a challenge discovered on an internet forum.

It had then become a successful morning, an Instagram post and a private symbol of competence. Printed and placed among eight other views, it became part of my visual signature.

The picture still does not show the cost, the early train, the slight dizziness, the rejected fondue or the vomit in the carriage.

It simply shows a mountain reflected in a lake.

But I know what surrounds the frame.

And this one is mine.