What happened when I went skiing in the Alps with a couple of friends. How I could have easily died on route 36, how I learned to ski in 5 days flat and where they make the best pizza in the world!
This was, on many levels, one of my most unusual excursions. Skiing holidays are something of a paradox. It’s the only holiday I think I’ve ever been on where I intentionally aimed to go somewhere which was colder than where I live. Usually, when you go on holiday and say the weather was good, it means the sun shone and you came back with the skin peeling off your forehead. In this case, when I saw the weather was good, I mean it was freezing cold enough to sustain a metre thick of snow.
I’ve only flown low cost a couple of times. Back when I used to go on holiday every year, the branded “low-cost airlines” of today did not really exist yet. Ryanair was unheard of, or at least unpopular. But having flown low cost this time I genuinely believe I know what it feels like to be a veil cow. And when you’re sitting with people you don’t know, it’s quite an unusual situation. Three people who don’t know each other, frankly a little too close together, it seemed like the polite thing to do was to casually pretend the other two weren’t there. They both returned the favour.
I am of course exceedingly grateful that we got there.
But all the travel was well worth while when I finally set eyes on The Italian Alps. The Alps are as dangerous as they are beautiful. But for an unassuming Yorkshire man, the first thing, and that which I can still not get over is the immense size of them. England is a pussy country when it comes to things like that. England doesn’t have a single mountain to its name. Our highest peak isn’t high enough to garner the title of mountain. It is simply a hill: the title shared by Scarfell Pike, and the little pile of soil that moles create in gardens. Hills. How very British. Even the four countries of the UK only have a couple of mountains between them. The Alps are enormous. And I would have had plenty of time to appreciate their enormity, as our coach snaked up through the foothills to the skiing resort of La Thuile. But I didn’t. Because I was asleep.
I was asleep because in order to be on that coach snaking up through the foothills of the Alps, I had had to catch a plane. And in order to do that I’d had to get to the airport. And in order to do that, I’d had to get up at about 4am. And at the time I had thought that the best way to successfully get up at 4am was not to go to sleep at all. So I didn’t. So it was quite sad, in retrospect.
The resort, when we finally arrived, was worth the wait. Having visited Switzerland in the past, I was now convinced that all architecture in the Alps looks pretty similar, be it French, Swiss, Italian or indeed Austrian. They were all cosy wooden buildings with peaked roofs and shutters around the windows.
La Thuile Resort & Planibel Apartments
In La Thuile there are two different places you can stay depending on your budget. The Planibel hotel and the Planibel Apartments. We stayed in an apartment. It was reasonably ample. I had no major complaints other than the duvet which didn’t have a good feel to it and made me feel more comfortable doing without. But then of course, I would wake up at about 5am every morning absolutely freezing cold.
But for an apartment it had certain degrees of luxury that I hadn’t expected – such as two bathrooms. It also had a balcony and a TV so I have no complaints about the apartment itself. (Although there was only one English TV channel. But watching Strictly Come Dancing in Italy was certainly a new angle on the show.)
There was no Internet connection – quite important for a geek like me – but you could, for €20, get a 7 day access card from the hotel, a short walk away. Expensive, yes. But worth it to me.
The resort itself had several restaurants ranging from a takeaway all the way up to a high end €18 for 100g of lamb chops restaurant. There was also a supermarket which catered to all our needs.
Perhaps the strangest thing about it for me, coming from the UK, which is lately a 24/7 country where supermarkets are open 24 hours a day, was the fact that everything closed in the afternoon. between about 1pm and 4pm everything was closed. Everybody went home for a long lunch and a nap. And that is how laid back life is in Italy and I think the Mediterranean in general. And I liked it. Apart from it meaning I couldn’t get a drink between those times, I thought it would be nice bit of culture to bring home with me.
After being introduced to our apartment we were given the rest of the day to recover from all the travel and generally regain our energy in anticipation of ski school the following day.
Ski School
Our ski group and our instructor, Carlo
Bright and early the next morning, virtually everybody in the resort gathered in a single coffee shop for a shot of Expresso and a criossant before heading to the slopes. We started out on the nursery slopes, a modest snow coated incline directly across the road from our apartment block, where we met our skiing instructor, Carlo from Milano, who would for the next 5 days teach us how to ski. As I stood there in anticipation with my other two friends and a family from Milton Keynes, I could not have imagined the level of skiing we would be doing in just 5 days time.
On our first day, we learned the basics of speed control, a rather cumbersome and uncomfortable move which 5 days later we would no longer need, called the “snow plough”. It basically involves spreading your legs out wide and pointing the tips of your skis together so as to make a V sign in the snow, bringing you to a stop. It’s all well and good on the nursery slopes but at the high speeds we would soon be reaching, it simply doesn’t work.
Danger on Route 36!
Ski school finished every day at between 12 and 1pm which left us the rest of the day to practise. Given that the nursery slopes were not very long, it didn’t take us long to get bored of doing the same thing every ten minutes. So we decided to try one of the mountain routes. In our novice wisdom, we decided to try one of the shortest routes first, the now infamous “36″, which had a ski lift all of its own and only went about a third of the way up the mountain.
This map shows all the skiing routes in La Thuile. Difficulty order: blue, red, black.
We clambered onto the chair lift and were hoisted high into the air above the mountain and transported to the start of the route. There was, however, something odd about the chair lift in that it there didn’t seem to be any safety protection. We were just three people sitting on a seat about 20m above ground. And ground that happened to be textured with fir trees, enormous logs and stones. There was no safety bar – nothing to prevent gravity taking its course, should any of us fidget too much. At the time we just thought that maybe the Italians were not as bothered about safety as we would be in Britain. Maybe no-win no-fee injury claims were not big business here?
Arriving at the top of the slope, we began a cautious low speed ski down. But it didn’t take long for us to realize we were out of our depth. Upon hearing that I was going skiing in Italy, my brother, who had already been skiing in the Alps, had – being a man of few words – given me one line of advice, “Be careful. The Alps are no joke.” Right now, while edging my way down route 36, I was realizing that. The ski track had no fences. There were plenty of sheer drops that you could just fall down. It was easy to see how somebody could come to a very sticky end out here.
Before long we ended up taking our skis off and shuffling down the slope on our bums. It wasn’t much fun but we, you know, didn’t want to die.
The Rest of Ski School
A nice man from London kindly took a photo of us on the French border
On day two of ski school, Carlo took us up into the mountains, a sprawling wonderland of snow covered peaks and high speed ski slopes stretching for miles and as wide as freeways. It was now that we realized that ski lifts did have safety bars but that they were not automatic. This was not, after all, Alton Towers. You simply had to pull the safety bar down from above your head. Didn’t we all feel like muppets!
Over the next few days we would learn the skills needed to safely negotiate many of the routes and, what amazed me the most, ski at high speed without hitting any other skiers. If you want an idea of what this is like, it reminded me of the pod race scenes from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Towards the end of the week we even went over the border into France.
The Food
Restaurant where you can get fresh pizza
Italian food is known around the world. And to have authentic freshly made versions of many of the world famous dishes was one of those pleasures that words cannot describe. From freshly made pasta and freshly baked pizza to the best croissants I had ever tasted, authentic Italian food took my tongue to heaven for a week.
High in the mountains, very close to the French border, there was a restaurant where you could watch the chef turn a dough ball, some tomato paste and mozerella cheese into a freshly made pizza, and eat it 5 minutes out of the oven. It was the most delicious pizza I have ever had in my life. It was so good, I had it twice.
The Italians tend to serve pasta al dente – a little hard. What we in the UK might call undercooked. And depending on which restaurant I went to, the style would vary, from pasta that had a slightly chewy, rubbery texture to pasta that my teeth would just sink through. I think the quality of the tomato sauce, though, was what really made pasta great. And this varied too.
La Thuile In A Nutshell
For £450, it was worth every penny. It must be the best holiday I’ve ever been on that just allows you to forget everything going on back home and enjoy where you are. La Thuile was a place of unparalleled beauty and somewhere I would be happy to return to.
