6 travel 7 27.09.09 timesonline.co.uk/travel SKIING conversations I have ever been a party to have taken place inside a four- or six-person bubble. Some- thing about the mixture of inti- macy and wildness — a hydrauli- cally sealed egg chugging high above the void — seems to pro- voke weird confidences. What a delightful way of travelling — and with such variety. The rick- ety two-man chair that compels intimacy on a cold afternoon when the sun has gone off the mountain, the sociable four- berth, and the padded six-man job with rugs thrown in... Then, at the top, there is the etiquette of bar-raising that reveals more than a Rorschach test about your fellow traveller: the one who keeps the bar down till the last minute because he fears to fall, or the one who likes to get the bar up early in case he is swept round again. These are deep questions, Herr Doktor. I am an early raiser myself, especially if the clear- ance between footrest and bar is too short for me to have got my knees in. I think we all dread the two- man hook or T-bar, the near- ubiquity of which at Klosters is a serious drawback to that resort. I know that the key is to relax, not pull; but with certain partners (no names) it inadvertently becomes a trial of strength that can only end one way: a bailout of Brownian proportions. Then there is the one-man drag or but- ton that on certain steep sections strains not just the forearm but also the soft tissues of the back- side. Not for nothing is it widely known as the Fister. Afterwards, there is lunch, a feature that has grown so much in importance over the years that it’s possible to view a short December day as little more than a complicated series of lifts and descents to and from the chosen restaurant. Once, it was a sand- wich prepacked at the hotel in a paper bag, though to be honest that was never enough, being disposed of by 11am and supple- mented from a self-service at 1pm. This year I had perhaps the best ski lunch I’ve ever had, at La Fruitière, a stylishly converted dairy in Val d’Isère, though at that price, one’s hopes were pretty high. Really, I prefer small huts that take navigational mastery (not mine: that of our regular Aus- trian navigator, or Fahrtmeister) to truffle out — hidden in some rocky cleft, a short and nasty schuss off the beaten piste. They offer little or no choice, but pro- vide good wine, strong meat and a startlingly handsome waitress who looks as though she has never seen a city type before. If you can’t be bothered to search for such treasures, go to L’Alpette, at the top of the Rochebrune cable car in Megève, and have the boudin noir et ses deux pommes. You don’t even need to ski to get stuck into this fabulous dish. The restaurants in the resort itself are often not as good as those up the mountain; or maybe one just has less of a sense of achievement after walking 100 yards along the street. In Le Miroir this year we had a gifted Scottish cook called Fiona, who had trained with Alastair Little and was happy to accom- modate the Fahrtmeister’s desire for offal at every meal (we even had a pig’s-ear amuse-gueule, which was a bit cartilaginous for me; I can’t imagine the late sow had very sharp hearing; a blessing if her husband was a boar) and, at the same time, the request of others for fresh fish, which I imagine is not easy to find in the Alps. And occasionally, when the lifting and the lunching have to stop, you do ski. Over the years your style becomes self-parodic as you give up trying to look good and rely instead on those move- ments that have served you well up till now. Thus one of our group is known as Reg Varney, since the burly arm movements of his turn look like a man steering a double-decker into a narrow high street; one is Man Friday for the way his stick, a long time raised then suddenly jabbed down, suggests an island native spearing fish in shallow water. Another is Le Saucisson Bleu. How an upright skier can look like a blue sausage is hard to explain; but take it from me, you almost want a nibble. And one is Deputy Dawg, but that’s because of his succession of ear-flapping hats. I don’t think I have a ski nickname; my suggestion of Killy didn’t seem to catch on. MY IDEAL piste is long, with some hefty moguls at the top, an exhilarating schuss at one point, a steep and narrow black part (to sort out the style queens) and a long, unwinding red section through forests of firs whose arms hang limply at their sides. It has a river in flood by the nar- row part and it has sun on the lower reaches where those of us (not me) who have a fancy hip wiggle can show it off before the final schuss down to an empty chair where an autochthonous mountain man serves free grog. I haven’t found it yet, but I’ve come close. The Marmolada (see page 6) has the length; the river- side run of the Madrisa in Klosters has the trees and the water; pistes in Verbier whose names I can’t remember have the moguls; the mighty Aiguille Rouge in Les Arcs has the addi- tional pleasures of snow bunt- ings and white ptarmigan. The things my ideal run em- phatically does not have are teenage snowboarders, making that grating icy noise behind that lets you know they’re not quite in control and, if they can- non into you and break your legs, they won’t stop to help. Nor does it have Volvo skiers, who go very slowly across the whole piste in front of you, giving every appear- ance of being about to turn right, then, at the very last second, bottle out and turn left again. Nor does it have ice or bare rock; nor that flat light that makes it hard to tell how the land lies. I skied well just once in my life, at Cortina. I don’t know why, but the skis just refused to be parted; they made the faint- est, unfamiliar wooden clacking all week long as they stuck together. We took a chair up a steep couloir and at one point a sign said “If you are not a bril- liant skier, get off here”, or words to that effect in Italian. I was chuckling away at the very thought of jumping ship when I looked across and saw that my friend had done just that, leaving me alone. Shoot. The prospect from the top was not great: it was close to vertical, pretty bare and only about 20ft wide. But luckily I spotted the Daily Telegraph’s Russian corre- spondent, who had recently, if unjustly, been expelled from Moscow for spying. He was a resourceful ally in such a tight spot. I don’t remember much about it, but we got down some- how. The next year at St Anton I skied like a beginner again 2 miles Val d’Isère Le Miroir FRANCE ITALY Tignes Les Arcs Chambéry Where are the best slopes (and lunches) in the Alps? Let Sebastian Faulks be your guide Jean-Daniel Sudres/Hemis.fr; Holly Junak; Amit Lennon Getting air in Val d’Isère, left. Below, Chalet Merlo; and Sebastian and friend relax on the slopes Continued on page 8 T he helicopter drop- ped over the lip of the mountain and disappeared from sight. There was a stifled scream from the people watching by the road. A tense half-minute later, the sound of the rotors became audible again, then grew in volume until, with a rush, the white chopper came back into view, rising trium- phant over the distant line of peaks. Inside, there were four of us clinging on with fixed smiles. Once over the ridge, the pilot, whose name was Mike (in an ideal world all pilots would be called Mike), threw the little thing back and forth a bit before landing it — I promise — on the tow-trailer of his van. Then he backed it into his roomy garage. Usually, I just take the bus. The helicopter was the idea of Nick, the chalet manager, who was keen to spare us a 40-minute drive. It was technically not heli- skiing, which I think involves being deposited at the top of a vertical wall of ice — just a lift to the foot of the chair at Arc 1950, a village of Disney-like houses. This was in February, and we were in the valley of the Isère River, but not staying in Val d’Isère, Tignes or Les Arcs, the well-run but rather charmless resorts that dominate the skiing at this end of the valley. Instead, we had found a chalet in a rustic village called Le Miroir. Chalet Merlo belonged to a hedge-fund manager and was fitted out as you might expect: outdoor hot tub, bathrooms ensuite, resident chef, gantry of Bloomberg screens over the bed... No, I think I may have imagined the screens. But there was permanent cham- pagne as well as heated boot racks, a visiting masseuse, ex- tensive DVD collection and food better than in any restaurant. It was not always like this. Skiing, to begin with, was about pain: the clamp of boot, the screaming ache of thigh muscle, the frostbitten fingertips in threadbare, borrowed gloves, the trudge down tarmac roads with skis digging into your shoulder and the lower back always on the verge of spasm. Learning is hard enough, but trying to learn in cut-price resorts with a half-hour walk to the lift and then little more than ice and rock at the top was a test of one’s desire. Macug- naga, Sauze d’Oulx, Le Mont d’Or... These are not so much notches scored into the 1970s headboard as war wounds that on bad days can still fester. Yet at some point it must have started to become enjoyable. We found lodgings nearer to the lifts; we could afford to go to resorts that actually had snow. The design of the boots became bet- ter. And finally, at some point, we got the hang of the sport itself. Through the 1980s a regu- lar group of us tried different places: Cortina, Zermatt, Les Houches, St Anton, Arabba, Val d’Isère, Megève... All had their charms and their drawbacks. For what it’s worth, I thought Zermatt was, all in all, the best, though the apartment I had booked was so dingy that two of our number checked out on day two. Arabba had a knotty Italo-Austrian character and probably my favourite single run — the Marmolada: several min- utes of gently twisting pleasure. The drawback was that it needed two vertiginous cable cars to reach the 11,000ft summit, and in the second of these some sort of decompressive altitude effect invariably caused the less inhib- ited passengers to break wind. LIKE MANY things worth doing, skiing has a bad reputation. The horrible nylon clothes in garish colours; the posh yobs who do it; the vulgar yobs who do it; the expense; the danger... Well, my view is that you can’t live your life in fear of reputation and received ideas; and, above all, the pleasures so reliably outweigh the caveats. Take the lifts — as you are obliged to. Some of the best “The thing my ideal run emphatically does not have is teenage snowboarders” SITTING PRETTY IN THE ALPS
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6 travel 727.09.09timesonline.co.uk/travelSKIING
conversations I have ever been a party to have taken place inside a four- or six-person bubble. Some-thing about the mixture of inti-macy and wildness — a hydrauli-cally sealed egg chugging high above the void — seems to pro-voke weird confidences. What a delightful way of travelling — and with such variety. The rick-ety two-man chair that compels intimacy on a cold afternoon when the sun has gone off the mountain , the sociable four-berth, and the padded six-man job with rugs thrown in... Then, at the top, there is the etiquette of bar-raising that reveals more than a Rorschach test about your fellow traveller: the one who keeps the bar down till the last minute because he fears to fall, or the one who likes to get the bar up early in case he is swept round again. These are deep questions,
Herr Doktor. I am an early raiser myself, especially if the clear-ance between foot rest and bar is too short for me to have got my knees in.
I think we all dread the two-man hook or T-bar, the near-ubiquity of which at Klosters is a serious drawback to that resort. I know that the key is to relax, not pull; but with certain partners (no names) it inadvertently becomes a trial of strength that can only end one way: a bail out of Brownian proportions. Then there is the one-man drag or but-ton that on certain steep sections strains not just the forearm but also the soft tissues of the back-side. Not for nothing is it widely known as the Fister.
Afterwards, there is lunch, a feature that has grown so much in importance over the years that it’s possible to view a short Dec ember day as little more than a complicated series of lifts and des cents to and from the chosen restaurant. Once, it was a sand-wich pre packed at the hotel in a paper bag, though to be honest that was never enough, being dis posed of by 11am and supple-mented from a self-service at 1pm.This year I had perhaps the best ski lunch I’ve ever had, at La Fruit ière, a stylishly converted dairy in Val d’Isère, though at that price, one’s hopes were pretty high.
Really, I prefer small huts that take navigational mastery (not mine: that of our regular Aus-trian navigator, or Fahrtmeister) to truffle out — hidden in some rocky cleft, a short and nasty schuss off the beaten piste. They offer little or no choice, but pro-vide good wine, strong meat and a startlingly handsome waitress who looks as though she has never seen a city type before.
If you can’t be bothered to search for such treasures, go to L’Alpette, at the top of the Rochebrune cable car in Megève, and have the boudin noir et ses deux pommes . You don’t even need to ski to get stuck into this fabulous dish. The restaurants in the resort itself are often not as good as those up the mountain; or maybe one just has less of a sense of achievement after walking 100 yards along the street.
In Le Miroir this year we had a gifted Scottish cook called Fiona, who had trained with Alastair Little and was happy to accom-modate the Fahrtmeister’s desire for offal at every meal (we even had a pig’s-ear amuse-gueule, which was a bit cartilaginous for me; I can’t imagine the late sow had very sharp hearing; a blessing if her husband was a boar) and, at the same time, the request of others for fresh fish, which I imagine is not easy to find in the Alps.
And occasionally, when the lifting and the lunching ha ve to stop, you do ski. Over the years your style becomes self-parodic as you give up trying to look good and rely instead on those move-ments that have served you well up till now. Thus one of our group is known as Reg Varney, since the burly arm movements of his turn look like a man steering a double-decker into a narrow high street; one is Man Friday for the way his stick, a long time raised then suddenly jabbed down, suggests an island native spearing fish in shallow water. Another is Le Saucisson Bleu. How an upright skier can look like a blue sausage is hard to explain; but take it from me, you almost want a nibble. And one is Deputy Dawg, but that’s because
of his succession of ear-flapping hats. I don’t think I have a ski nickname; my suggestion of Killy didn’t seem to catch on.
MY IDEAL piste is long, with some hefty moguls at the top, an exhilarating schuss at one point, a steep and narrow black part (to sort out the style queens) and a long, unwinding red section through forests of firs whose arms hang limply at their sides. It has a river in flood by the nar-row part and it has sun on the lower reaches where those of us (not me) who have a fancy hip wiggle can show it off before the final schuss down to an empty chair where an autochthonous mountain man serves free grog.
I haven’t found it yet, but I’ve come close. The Marmolada (see page 6) has the length; the river-side run of the Madrisa in Klosters has the trees and the water; pistes in Verbier whose names I can’t remember have the moguls; the mighty Aiguille Rouge in Les Arcs has the addi-tional pleasures of snow bunt-ings and white ptarmigan.
The things my ideal run em-phatically does not have are teenage snowboarders, making that grating icy noise behind that lets you know they’re not quite in control and, if they can-non into you and break your legs, they won’t stop to help. Nor does
it have Volvo skiers , who go very slowly across the whole piste in front of you, giving every appear-ance of being about to turn right, then, at the very last second, bottle out and turn left again. Nor does it have ice or bare rock; nor that flat light that makes it hard to tell how the land lies.
I skied well just once in my life, at Cortina. I don’t know why, but the skis just refused to be parted; they made the faint-est, unfamiliar wooden clacking all week long as they stuck together. We took a chair up a steep couloir and at one point a sign said “If you are not a bril-liant skier, get off here”, or words to that effect in Italian. I was chuckling away at the very thought of jumping ship when I looked across and saw that my friend had done just that, leaving me alone. Shoot.
The prospect from the top was not great: it was close to vertical, pretty bare and only about 20ft wide. But luckily I spotted the Daily Telegraph’s Russian corre-spondent, who had recently, if unjustly, been expelled from Moscow for spying. He was a resourceful ally in such a tight spot. I don’t remember much about it, but we got down some-how. The next year at St Anton I skied like a beginner again
2 miles
Val d’Isère
Le Miroir
FRANCEITALY
Tignes
LesArcs
Chambéry
Where are thebest slopes (and lunches) in the Alps? Let Sebastian Faulksbe your guide
Jean-Daniel Sudres/Hemis.fr; Holly Junak; Amit Lennon
Getting air in Val d’Isère , left . Below, Chalet Merlo; and Sebastian and friend
relax on the slopes
Continued on page 8
T he helicopter drop-ped over the lip of the mountain and disappeared from sight. There was a stifled scream from the people watching by the road. A tense
half-minute later, the sound of the rotors became audible again, then grew in volume until, with a rush, the white chopper came back into view, rising trium-phant over the distant line of peaks. Inside, there were four of us clinging on with fixed smiles. Once over the ridge, the pilot, whose name was Mike (in an ideal world all pilots would be called Mike), threw the little thing back and forth a bit before landing it — I promise — on the tow-trailer of his van. Then he backed it into his roomy garage.
Usually, I just take the bus. The helicopter was the idea of Nick, the chalet manager, who was keen to spare us a 40-minute drive. It was technically not heli-skiing, which I think involves being deposited at the top of a vertical wall of ice — just a lift to the foot of the chair at Arc 1950, a village of Disney-like houses .
This was in February, and we were in the valley of the Isère River, but not staying in Val d’Isère, Tignes or Les Arcs, the well-run but rather charmless resorts that dominate the skiing at this end of the valley. Instead, we had found a chalet in a rustic village called Le Miroir. Chalet Merlo belonged to a hedge-fund manager and was fitted out as you might expect: outdoor hot tub, bathrooms en suite, resident chef, gantry of Bloomberg screens over the bed... No, I think I may have imagined the screens. But there was permanent cham-pagne as well as heated boot racks, a visiting masseuse, ex-tensive DVD collection and food better than in any restaurant.
It was not always like this. Skiing, to begin with, was about pain: the clamp of boot, the screaming ache of thigh muscle, the frostbitten fingertips in threadbare, borrowed gloves, the trudge down tarmac roads with skis digging into your shoulder and the lower back always on the verge of spasm. Learning is hard enough, but trying to learn in cut-price resorts with a half-hour walk to the lift and then little more than ice and rock at the top was a test of one’s desire. Macug-naga, Sauze d’Oulx, Le Mont d’Or... These are not so much notches scored into the 1970s headboard as war wounds that on bad days can still fester.
Yet at some point it must have started to become enjoyable. We found lodgings nearer to the lifts; we could afford to go to resorts that actually had snow. The
design of the boots became bet-ter . And finally, at some point, we got the hang of the sport itself. Through the 1980s a regu-lar group of us tried different places: Cortina, Zermatt, Les Houches, St Anton, Arabba, Val d’Isère, Megève...
All had their charms and their drawbacks. For what it’s worth, I thought Zermatt was, all in all, the best, though the apartment I had booked was so dingy that two of our number checked out on day two. Arabba had a knotty Italo-Austrian character and probably my favourite single run — the Marmolada: several min-utes of gently twisting pleasure. The drawback was that it needed two vertiginous cable cars to reach the 11,000ft summit, and in the second of these some sort of decompressive altitude effect invariably caused the less inhib-ited passengers to break wind.
LIKE MANY things worth doing, skiing has a bad reputation. The horrible nylon clothes in garish colours; the posh yobs who do it; the vulgar yobs who do it; the expense; the danger... Well, my view is that you can’t live your life in fear of reputation and received ideas; and, above all, the pleasures so reliably outweigh the caveats.
Take the lifts — as you are obliged to. Some of the best
“The thing my ideal run emphaticallydoes not have is teenagesnowboarders”
Be informed. Be inspired.Be there
The Sunday Times Travel Magazine October issue £3.60 – in newsagents now
ON SALENOW
SITTING PRETTY IN
THE ALPS
travel8 SKIING
Booking a whole chalet with friends this winter? Then read this first.
1 Ask for discounts. Tour operators who sell their properties on a room-by-room basis love it when someone wants to fill a whole chalet with a single group, so you’re in a good bargaining position. They’ll almost certainly offer a discount as a result. For an overview of what you can get from whom, talk to a specialist travel agent such as Ski Solutions (0207 471 7700, skisolutions.co.uk), which sells chalets from lots of different companies.
2 Ask for floor plans. The smaller, specialist chalet operators usually provide these as a matter of course. They’re a valuable tool when it comes to working out who sleeps where, and you’ll save yourself a lot of holiday tension if you sort this before you travel, rather than letting the first people through the front door grab the best room.
3 Work on your guest list. First-timers and non skiers will darken the atmosphere
if they’re on their own, so make sure they have company. An all-children or no-children policy is essential, too. And don’t let anyone bring a hot date — if it doesn’t work out, you’ll all share the gloom and probably end up playing relationship counsellors for the rest of the week.
4 Book early. After last year’s blood-letting in the ski industry, a lot of operators have cut back on their chalet stock this season, so if you’re looking for a particular resort, get in fast. Good specialist companies include Scott Dunn (020 8682 5000, scottdunn.com) and YSE (0845 122 1414, yseski.co.uk) for upmarket options ; and VIP/Snowline (0844 557 3119, vip-chalets.com), Ski Beat (01243 780405, skibeat.co.uk), Le Ski (01484 548996, leski.com) and Ski Total (01252 618333, skitotal.com) for keen prices.
Win a chalet holiday for two people in Méribel with Inghams — see page 34
and have never recaptured that week-long knack; I sometimes think I only dream t it.
At the end of the day, there remains one difficult question to sort out. Tea, bath, book and deep sleep are given; but in which order should they be taken? There is a certain kind of densely written, high-quality but faintly soporific novel that is ideal in these circumstances, and I think one would have to go a long way to find an apter book than The
Centaur by John Updike. And, ah, the rapture of the slow reawakening.
Occasionally, as I get worse and worse at it, I have toyed with the idea of not going skiing any more. But it only takes two or three runs to remember not just the exhilaration but the uniquely calming and mind-clearing qual-ities of the sport. When the mas-ters of Zen were looking for a way to reach a higher mental plane, they didn’t suggest lying on a beach, covered in oil, rotating like a chicken on a spit. This was
not only because it’s so boring and uncomfortable and gives you skin cancer; it’s because if you try to think about nothing, you end up thinking about everything. No, the key is to think hard, but about one single thing. With meditation, it is a mantra; with skiing, it is about trying to stay alive at high speed. Nothing else. Soon your mind empties of all other thoughts and a vacuous smile comes over your face; songs you hadn’t thought about for 20 years form on your chapped lips.
Perhaps it was in this state of calm that a friend of my sister-in-law, taken short after too much water at lunch, dropped her salopettes and knickers to squat in a wood beside the piste. A well brought-up young woman of impeccable manners, she alas forgot the vital thing: to make sure the tips of her skis were pointing up the mountain. Some minor movement caused a loss of grip — and then a friction-less glissade from between the sheltering trees and back onto the piste, which was crowded with post lunch revellers. And thus, unable to snow plough
with ankles roped together by her underwear, she made her unusual, though nicely parallel, descent.
Sebastian Faulks was a guest of Chalet Merlo and Eurostar
Travel brief: Chalet Merlo (0845 324 3521, chaletmerlo.eu), in the village of Le Miroir, sleeps up to 12 and costs £6,150 to £16,790 a week, half-board, including wine, champagne and daily ski transfers.
With Eurostar (0870 518 6186, eurostar.com) , rail returns from London St Pancras to Bourg-St Maurice start at £149.
Snowjet (snowjet.co.uk) flies to Chambéry from Bristol, Bir-mingham, Manchester, Stansted and Gatwick, with return fares from £58 .
For something approaching the Le Miroir experience at a lower price, try the small, quiet Ste Foy, a 10-minute drive away. Peak Retreats (0844 576 0170, peakretreats.co.uk) offers two-bedroom self-catering flats sleep-ing six from £969 , including Eurotunnel crossings for a car and passengers.
Holly Junak
Continued from page 7
TOP TIPS FOR BIG SKI GANGS
The wintry charms of Le Miroir
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