posted by ElDiablo at 23:30
I returned on Sunday from a week-long ski holiday in the French Alps. I had a fantastic time and I'm still struggling to readjust to normal life, my mind constantly going back to last week and how good it all was so I thought maybe posting about it here could help to draw a line under the whole thing and (sigh) get on with every day's boring routine.
Before this trip I had only been to the snow in three different occasions, just for the day, and couldn't ski at all. But I had always meant to take a proper ski holiday where I could have lessons and learn. I have some friends that are keen skiers and they had always asked me to go with them in one of their trips but for one reason or other I hadn't been able to make it until now. The original idea was to go somewhere in Spain but the lack of snow this winter forced us to change plans and look higher and further North. In the end we settled for
Tignes because being one of the highest resorts in Europe we reckoned we should almost certainly find snow there. We ended up being eight people: three lovely girls, Cristina, ski-mad Sandra and spunky Angeles; and five boys, Antonio, Fernando, Ricardo, Fernando's nephew Jose and myself. The whole party except me set off in two cars from Madrid, they had to go via Grenoble so I flew there to join them and we continued by road to Tignes.
The Tignes resort is split in five small villages at different altitudes:
Val Claret, Le Lac, Le Lavachet, Les Boisses and Les Brevieres. The place where we stayed is the UCPA auberge in Val Claret which at 2300m is the highest of the five. The
UCPA is a government-sponsored non-profit French organisation whose aim is to facilitate the practice of outdoor sporting activities. We had booked a week-long
ski program with them which included full-boarded accommodation, ski-pass for the entire
Espace Killy (Tignes and Val d'Isere resorts) for the whole week, third-party civil insurance, ski equipment and five hours of ski instruction per day, all that for less than 600euro. The program starts on a Sunday and finishes the following Saturday after lunch. You check in before 5:30pm and can collect your equipment from their ski shop until 6:30pm. You can ski then from that very first day although by the time we arrived to the auberge on Sunday afternoon and finished all the formalities at the reception the ski shop was already closed so we got our bags up to the rooms and went straight down to check out the place.
The UCPA auberge is a hostel-like establishment where all bedrooms are modules comprising two connected 4-person cabins: each cabin has independent heating, four bunks and a sink and each lodger has its own individual closet; the module has a shared shower and a toilet. You have to bring your own towels but bedding is provided (pillow cases, sheets and a duvet). The common area in the ground floor near the reception comprises the restaurant and kitchens; the bar and ad
jacent rest area with tables, chairs and beanie bags; a recreation zone with two pool tables, satellite TV and PlayStation and table games; a small stage/dance-floor area; and the common toilets. There are also additional rooms for after-ski activities such as stretching and aerobic. WiFi internet access is available in all areas. The place is not a hotel so they don't offer anything like bedroom or cleaning services: you are expected to keep the premises tidy and before you leave the cleaning lady checks your room and stamps your personal card to give the OK. On arrival you are given a key to your cabin, the ski pass and you personal lodger and equipment cards (which you have to present to collect you ski gear). You also have to leave a deposit (I think it was 50euro each) which is returned to you at check out time and covers any damage to the equipment or premises. Personal insurance is not included though: if you haven't got any the UCPA offers basic accident coverage for an extra 15euro, this includes first aid and airlift service from the slopes but not any further medical treatment. We all signed for this and as it turned out we were glad we did. You are also assigned to one of the instruction groups depending on your skiing ability. Our bunch was spread out across pretty much the whole spectrum: Sandra and Jose are top-level, extremely good skiers; Angeles and Antonio while not as good are fully competent and experienced ones; Cristina and Fernando fall more into an intermediate level; which left Ricardo and myself together in the same group of absolutely wet-behind-the-ears beginners.
The usual day went by as follows: you wake up early, between 7:30 and 8:00am, freshen up and go down to the restaurant for breakfast. You then go back up to your cabin, dress up in your ski clothes and get down to the storage room where your ski gear is kept (you are assigned one of the storage rooms in the basement when you pick your equipment, access is code-restricted) put on your boots and carry your skis out to your group's meeting point where you join your ski instructor and the rest of your group mates. Morning instruction starts at 9:00am and lasts for two and a half hours. Then is back to the auberge for lunch, which is served at 12:00pm. At 13:30pm is back to the slopes for the afternoon session, another two and a half hours of instruction until 5:00pm; then back to the auberge for a shower and free time for the rest of the day. Tea and pastries are served at 5:30pm, dinner at 7:30pm. The bar is open throughout and there are organised 'après-ski' events every day, like stretching sessions, 'Gym Tonic' work outs, French stand up comedy (funnier than it sounds) or themed night disco-parties. The atmosphere at the auberge is pretty much a collegiate one, most of the lodgers are young people in their twenties but there were also groups of thirtysomethings and even older. Of course you don't have to participate of any of this if you don't feel like it, most of the evenings we just sat down to chill-out with a couple of bottles of wine or headed off to Val Claret centre for a drink and check out the shops.
As a beginner the two first days of ski instruction are hard. At least I found them hard. To the physical exhaustion add the difficulty to understand and execute what the instructor is telling you which generally involves completely different groups of muscles to the ones you normally use while balance-wise going against everything your instinct tells you to do when standing on a steep slope. Then there is the fear factor, when you lack control you pick up speed pretty quickly and if panic sets in you'll almost certain to loose it completely making the fall inevitable. It didn't help that on Tuesday morning, barely ten minutes into the first descent (and in what would be the only negative incident of the whole trip) my group mate Ricardo had to pull out. We had descended a quite steep green (cat.: easy) piste up to the 'arret-net' (safety net) placed before a busy intersection. Ricardo, who was lagging behind, started loosing control and realising he was never going to make the turn made a dumb decision: instead of dropping to the ground he continued at speed and let the chest-high safety net stop him. Which it did, but also sent him over in a somersault, his right ski getting caught under the net and not releasing the bonding. He landed violently on the other side but by then the damage had been done. He lay on the snow writhing in agony, clutching his right knee. I took off my skis and hurried towards him. Nicolas, the ski instructor, was already there calming him down, making him check if he could move his toes inside the boot and trying to get an idea of the extent of the injury. Ricardo couldn't stand up on his right leg so Nicolas called the piste emergency service on his mobile. About four minutes later a nurse with the Red-Cross logo on his yellow ski jacket came skiing down the slope dragging a sledge-mounted stretcher. The first thing she did is ask if Ricardo had personal insurance; he did have it (we had all signed for it) but had forgotten to take with him the small ID card that certified it. I explained that to her and showed my own card, that seemed to convince her and she started examining his knee but it wasn't until Nicolas called the UCPA centre and confirmed that Ricardo was effectively covered that she agreed to take him down to the medical centre. In five minutes she had immobilised his knee and loaded and secured him (and his skis) on the stretcher. I offered to go down with them in case I could be of any help but she said there was no need since as soon as he had been examined by the doctor he would be transferred by ambulance to the UCPA. And so we wished Ricardo good luck and there she disappeared down the slope at incredible speed pulling the stretcher with my struck down mate on it behind her. After that the mood of the group remained sombre the whole morning, everyone was worried for Ricardo but also scared to realise that something like that could very well happen to any of us. Fortunately when we returned to the auberge for lunch Ricardo was already there and in relatively good shape: the doctor had ruled out any serious injury and what looked initially like something nasty ended up being just a sprained knee. Ski was over for him for at least a couple of weeks though. He also had to pay the doctor for the treatment, about 100euro; and again not having his insurance ID card on him resulted in the ambulance crew temporarily taking his skis as deposit.
The fun begins when what you're being taught starts making a difference. It's like something clicks somewhere and suddenly things fall into place: you manage to keep your body and the skis at the right angle, you finally shift your weight effectively and to the correct foot in the turns, your timing improves and you start getting into something resembling a rhythm. That moment of epiphany occurred to me on Wednesday. It was rest morning and we didn't have instruction but instead of sleeping in we took advantage to go and ski all the friends together for the first time. The plan was to take the chairlift up to the Col de Fresse and do some blue (cat.: medium) pistes on the way down. At last it had been snowing heavily on Tuesday which guaranteed some great snow the following morning. I was nervous at the prospect of going down my first blue and didn't sleep well that night. The day started grey and overcast but once we got on the chairlift it opened up and a glorious sun rose over the top of
La Grande Motte showing the beauty of the immaculate white valley in all its magnificence. We got off the lift at the top and headed down Prariond. There were very few people at that time so we had the ample, almost untouched piste for ourselves. I started tentatively, trying to familiarise myself with a slope more steep that anything I had done before, to remember every advice Nicolas had given me so far. Suddenly I realised I was trailing Angeles comfortably; admittedly she was minding me and therefore wasn't going as fast as she normally would in those conditions, but she kept a reasonable speed and I was following on her tracks, matching her on every turn; I could notice I was still leaning backwards a bit too much, keeping my arms to my sides and my upper body wasn't as loose at it should but I was aware of it and trying to correct it. I grew confident and started to really enjoy the descent. The high lasted almost the whole morning, until the moment when due to overconfidence and (if I was to be unfair) the advice information overload well-meaning Sandra was showering on me at the time I had a lapse in concentration and fell hard in a fast section, slamming my left shoulder into the ground. I was OK (although my shoulder is still a bit sore today) but it had the effect of sapping all the energy I had left; so from then on I just concentrated on trying to make it back to the auberge in one piece.
For the rest of the week we explored as much as we could of the awesome Espace Killy: on Wednesday afternoon Nicolas gave us our first taste of 'off-piste' skiing; on Thursday we skied through snow covered trees all the way down to Les Brevieres (1550m) where we had lunch at a restaurant, then took the lift up to
L'Aiguille Percee and skied back down to Val Claret; on Friday morning we took the funicular up to La Grande Motte glacier and descended Genepy, and in the afternoon went up to the Col de Fresse and crossed to Val d'Isere; Nicolas even taught us the basics of carving that same afternoon. And every day after the ski we all got together for a drink, some games and some banter well into the evening. I enjoyed it immensely.
Saturday morning was the last chance to put on the skis since we had to check out of the UCPA that same day at 2:00pm. Friday had been the last day of instruction so we had the morning free to do as we pleased; it was again a gorgeous day so we all took the funicular and then the cable car to the very top of the Col de La Grande Motte and skied down the bed of the glacier in the morning sun (well not all of us, Ricardo, accompanied by Cris, took the funicular back down for obvious reasons). After that we rode the chairlift to the Col de Ves where the girls convinced us to follow them down a not-groomed black (cat.: very difficult) slope. I couldn't believe it but there I was, less than a week after all started going down the most difficult kind of piste there is! (In all honesty I have to thank Antonio who minded me all the way down for being still alive). After that there was just time to go back to the auberge, have a last lunch, pack our stuff, clean our cabins, check out and reluctantly, leave.
It has been said that skiing and the mountains are addictive: once the bug bites you, you are in for life. I for one couldn't agree more. I'm already looking for my next fix.
Labels: ElDiablo, Ski, Tignes, Travel
