Slopes Around the World

The season is upon us, along with twinkling lights and snowflake decals, warm jackets and fur-rimmed boots. Winter is here and here to stay, at least for the next two months. Sipping hot gingerbread lattes and breathing in the cool Edinburgh air makes me think Christmas and for me, Christmas is inseparable from a trip to the mountains. I enjoy a snowball contest as much as the next person but what I’m really after are powdery, bumpy, steep ski slopes. I'm a skiing fanatic; it's my favorite sport in the world where I feel freedom, nature, speed and sometimes snow down my trousers. As I'm always searching for new sensations, and enjoy a life of travelling, I've had the opportunity to experience various slopes all around the world. I’ve compared them in beauty, difficulty, nightlife, danger and complete randomness and you’d be surprised at some of the slopes I’ve swooshed down.

I am French and as you may know, some of the most renowned skiing stations are in the French Alps. My grandparents bought an apartment in Val D’Isère back when they were really cheap, before the winter break rage, so I was lucky enough to escape the exorbitant prices of Savoy-style chalets and tiny apartments away from the town center (far from the good après-ski bars).

We’ll have to come back to Val d’Isère because this isn’t actually the place where I learned to ski. When I was two, my family moved to Colorado and this means the legendary Rocky Mountains. The first slope I went down was in the ever so chic Aspen and the best part was the giant mascots of Pink Panther and Cookie Monster whizzing down the slopes and giving out candy. In retrospect, I think that learning to ski as a child in the USA is a fun, easygoing experience. We French are very serious about our skiing; exams, medals and technical terms. In the Rockies, the snowplow (a beginner’s position, when the tip of your skis touch in a triangular form) was called the pizza slice and parallel skiing was called French fries. This still makes me chuckle. The Rockies' Aspen, Wolf Creek and Arapahoe Basins are, as well as fun, breathtaking. These are ancient mountains, with rich pine forests and deliciously white snow from November (great for the long Thanksgiving weekend) to the end of April (my birthday), and national parks so closeby you may find yourself running into a deer or giant grizzly.

After skiing in Colorado where there is so much space, Val d’Isère and its neighboring station, Tignes, seemed like dollhouses. As it's such a popular winter destination, Tignes becomes extremely crowded during the season peak and there's a good reason for this: state of the art equipment, crazy nightlife, variety of slopes, views from Mont Blanc and the fact that it's not yet as pretentious as rival Courchevel or Méribel. I say not yet because in the past few years I've spotted an increase in very rich, very tan, very blond Russian women in the trendy hotel bars, and I have had to pull a few fur-clad Russian men off the more difficult slopes and hors piste – they think very highly of their skiing skills when clearly they should be back at the hotel bars with the ladies. Instead, they yell and bicker noisily at each other, at the risk of provoking an avalanche, and just ruining it for everybody. Other than that, Val d’Isère is probably one of the best places for experienced skiers. The proof lies in the 1992 Winter Olympics and the fact that every year, Val d’Isère hosts some of the Alpine World Skiing Championships.

Val d’Isère is great during the day but something also needs to be said about the nightlife. I was too young to experience the apparently famous Aspen nightlife last time I went (although I had some pretty wild times in the kiddie park). Over the years more and more clubs have opened in Val d’Isère but the best bar remains “Le petit Danois” (The Little Danish”). Home to all the Danish visitors, it’s a great place for a pint or five after a delicious dinner of typical savoy melted cheese specialties, like fondue, raclette, tartiflette, or before a pizza from the all-night pizzeria which serves slices so hot they warm up your gloveless fingers in an instant.

To prepare yourself for a trip to Val d’Isère you need to make sure a few things find their way into your suitcase: warm socks, long underwear and the knowledge that you aren’t going to sleep more than 4 hours a night if you want to party with the saisonniers and be there when the lifts open in the morning! Don’t worry though' chances are when you stumble back to your room after Brit club Dick’s Tea Bar closes its doors, Chevalot, which is in my humble opinion the best boulangerie in all of France, will just be laying out their freshly baked croissant. Oh, and afternoon naps are compulsory.

Written by Camille Soulier

Camille's full profile can be found here.

Reflections: That Other Kind Of Travel

Just last week I was sitting in my garden watching this year’s batch of cabbage moths checking out my herbaceous borders. They finally settled for the nasturtiums growing around the herb garden and while I left them to their own devices I got to thinking about the past. It seems that after fifty, or in my case sixty, years you think about the past more and more. I'm sure this is brought about by the sure and certain knowledge that you have less distance to go in life than you've already travelled; in racing parlance you're settling down in the straight for the run to the judge. What's more, I suspect we will be judged if not by the almighty then certainly by our friends. It would therefore seem that the past has a stronger pull for us than the unknown future. It was the cabbage moths that got me started on a memory of me as a twelve year old - standing five feet tall like some ancient guardian of the gates, in the centre of my parents' tiny back garden set in the middle of a row of terraces, dealing out lethal and telling blows with my sister's old wooden tennis racquet to any poor cabbage moth that dared attempt a landing on my father’s lettuces. Forehand, backhand, overhead smash, I dealt out instant death to all. Nowadays, with a more liberal approach, I just let them get on with it.

It doesn’t just stop with the moths; moments of reflection can come unannounced at any time of the day or night. Day time I can handle - in fact, some days I positively encourage them by closing my eyes and settling back in an easy chair. Off I go into a trance where both the dead and the living come flooding into my life as if they never left. Night-time is a different kettle of fish all together; waking from a deep sleep at three am seems to invite all of those unwanted memories back for a good old think-a-thon. I've always believed that I can easily come to terms with things I've done in the past which on reflection I shouldn't have done. What I do have problems with is dealing with those things I didn’t do. These regrets are easily managed during the day with many distractions at hand but on a cold winter night one tends to roll around the bed unwilling to leave its warmth, agonizing over something that happened forty years ago. Why does it still bother me? There's no easy answer to this question; I've tried walking around the house, visiting rooms I hardly ever go in, watching television and checking for any new emails. On returning to bed the same thoughts crowd me and only disappear when sleep grudgingly returns.

So what does one do about the past, or at least about travelling into it? Is it a healthy road to travel and good for the soul or should it be avoided wherever possible and regarded as wasteful and self indulgent? After all, when we finally turn up our toes our past goes with us. We can write it down for posterity, hand it on to the up and coming, but it’s not the same and they will always be our memories, experiences, failures and triumphs no matter how well we recorded them. Perhaps I should continue to enjoy those solitary moments of travel when I drift back in time to relive some of those more rewarding and happy moments etched into my brain. Thinking back now I do recall a newspaper article written about a game of tennis I played in a Tuesday night comp. They described my forehand cross court as lethal. Oh how little did they know.

Written by Jeff Williams