La Plagne and Le Tunnel

Skiing through Le Tunnel

I'd arranged to meet my former work colleague Chris Perera in La Plagne on Tuesday, so on Monday we decided to go across and have a little pootle around just to get to know some of the slopes.

When I was across in March, Sam and I had taken the Vanoise Express cable car across from Les Arcs to La Plagne, but this time we decided to drive. There's a place at the bottom (just off the main road) where you can buy a ski pass, then it's a long drive up the mountain through a series of helpfully numbered hairpin bends.

There are a number of resorts where you can park and get a chairlift up into the main bowl, but the lower ones now have little snow. Some of the runs are closed and those that would be open would offer a long, slushy ski back. We kept on the road to nearer the top where it was much colder, still freezing in fact.

I find La Plagne a little confusing. The individual resorts have quite similar names, they are closely spaced and one looks very much like another. The architecture looks a little more classy than Les Arcs (with the exception of 1950) and the runs are more densely packed, although you can range quite wide if you want to.

We did a small number of blues and my skiing was much improved over the previous day's. It is in your head - conditions were better, but I was also in a better place mentally; I was determined not to be so useless.

Having said that, I almost skied off down one of the hardest reds in the resort, but I even managed the start of that without difficulty. The run we'd come to recce was Le Tunnel, a long blue, steep in places but nice and wide and with plenty of undulation. It's a good run, but its main distinguishing feature is (and the name gives it away) a tunnel in the middle of the run.

The tunnel is around 100 metres perhaps, gentle descent inside and as you ski through, animal shapes are projected onto the floor and sides and there are animal sounds as well. It's quite good fun. I was happy with my skiing and looking forward to meeting Chris the next day. We skied the morning and, in the afternoon, I thought it would be nice for Margaret to see Arc 1600 and maybe have a late lunch up there.

We'd had a nice pizza in the square back in February, but it had been freezing cold and we'd had to sit inside. It was quite different today - the sun was strong and it was pleasant to sit outside, despite quite a gusty wind. The snow had gone from the square and also from around the lower lifts, so skiers were having to use a narrow strip of snow or ski across mats. The learner area was completely devoid of snow and the place where we used to meet for ESF lessons was now grass.

After lunch, we drove back down to town and called in at Super U to fill up with diesel at €1.33 a litre and also get my sister a French Easter egg. We got her a chocolate hen, sitting on the chocolate nest full of chocolate eggs. It's not the sort of thing you see in the UK. I also picked up a bottle of Genepi, which I've developed a taste for. Basically, it's alcohol and sugar flavoured with wormwood.

We also bought four fillet steaks and some oven chips so that we could have steak and chips for our last meal in Villaret the next night. Plans for that were scuppered when Adam (the chap who owns our chalet) came round in the evening and invited us all to eat with his family the next day. He was there with his partner, two children and his in-laws. His mother-in-law, who sounds slightly German, had suffered an unfortunate accident the day before. She'd been hit awkwardly by a chairlift, had failed to get seated properly and had fallen off just after it left the entry point. She'd fallen about 10 feet and had fractured her leg. She's a very slight woman of 73-ish and a good skier. Anyway, we were pleased to go for dinner, but it meant I missed my steak and chips, while Sam and Lucy had double helpings.