Ski holiday day 6: my first half-pipe - ouch!

Today, went across to La Plagne for the day. It's only about 45 minutes drive and I've been before with Sam and Lucy. You can buy your tickets at a station when you turn off the main road and then drive up to the resort. The chatty lady at the ticket office told me I should park in Plagne Montalbert, but that's quite low down and we were worried that the snow cover might be a little thin down there so we carried on to Plagne Centre at 1970m, where we can park free of charge just at the bottom of the Bergerie lift.

La Plagne is a confusing collection of resorts, but they are well connected by runs and lifts and you just need to get your head around the whole place. I am gradually getting it properly compartmentalised in my head, but this is my third visit, so it's about time. La Plagne is on a bigger scale than Les Arcs and I think the key difference is that you can often see one resort from the other, which makes it harder for me to know where one stops and the other starts. Like many ski resorts, there's a difference between the resorts and this is mainly down to when they were developed. The more recent projects are much nicer, presumably because the developers have aimed for a more upmarket clientele, but also perhaps because planning regulations have caught up with the monstrosities being built on the side of beautiful mountains.

As you drive up the mountain, there's one particular monstrosity up on the right. I think it's called Plagne Aime 2000 and basically it's one massive hotel complex. When Sam and Lucy first saw it they thought it was being built and the building was covered with scaffolding, but no, those are the balconies. It must be seven or eight storeys high and I'd like to think that no-one would build anything like that nowadays.

Compared to Sainte-Foy, the skiing is much more varied and there are many, many more runs, but it is a lot busier and not as pretty. Snowboards are very much in the minority in Sainte-Foy, but here they often seem to be dominant. I should make it clear that I don't really have a big issue with snowboards; they can be a nuisance, but then so can other skiers.

There was quite a long queue for the Bergerie lift (the first time we'd seen a queue this holiday, so we took a smaller lift into Plagne Centre.

We took a couple of lifts up with the idea of doing some long runs down through the trees, but these were closed so, instead, we worked our way across the resort towards Plagne Bellecote, but coming down the final blue into the resort, we took an off-piste diversion to try a half pipe. This is like an open spout and the way to ski it is to run up the side until you lose speed, then turn quickly, run down the steep bit, gathering speed again until you slow down at the other side - repeat until finished.

I was skiing it reasonably well, but then got a bit fast, stopped concentrating and had a backwards crash. I bashed my head quite hard, so hard that I was surprised by the force (normally ski falls - and I've had a few - are comic and painless, but this one whacked me good and hard) My first thought was that it was a good job I was wearing a helmet. A quick shout here for the excellent RX Sport, which has provided varifocal prescription lenses for my Oakley semi-wraps (one of the few companies able to do this) and also provided Bolle goggles (with prescription inserts) and Bolle helmet (which was thoroughly tested.

Sam treats me like a toddler when I have a fall. Before I can start crying and feeling sorry for myself, he tells me I'm fine and skis off.  He was trying the same trick here and was at the bottom of the slope and queuing for the Arpette lift before I'd caught up. I thought I was OK, but I wasn't sure; I think I was just shocked by the force of the blow and it's a long time since I hit my head that hard so I had no calibration. Anyway, I told Lucy I was going for a sit down and a hot drink, so we all ended up having an early lunch and a couple of drinks in Plagne Bellecote.

Fantastic views from the top near Roche de Mio

The plan was that Sam and Lucy were going to ski some blacks they had missed last year down towards Montchavin while I did a long blue called Mont Blanc (there's a Mont Blanc in every resort around here) which I did last year, but when we saw the map of open routes after lunch, they were almost all closed due to lack of snow. Mont Blanc was open as it's the run down to the fast cable car between La Plagne and Les Arcs (the Vanoise Express). Once that's closed there's no link between the resorts and no Paradiski. The snow cover is poor this year and I guess those blacks are just a little too low. Mont Blanc will be open with artificial snow from the blowers running every available night.

We were now on Plan C and so we took the cable car up to Roche De Mio at 2700m, where there's a good view of Courchevel in the Three Valleys on the way up. The views from the top are fantastic and we skied down via Le Tunnel through Belle Plagne, where my friend Chris goes skiing each Easter, and up the Colosses lift to make our way to Plagne Centre.

Ski essentials - helmet, lemon tea and a Ricard. That's
ugly Plagne Centre in the background.

Sadly, the howling wolf noises and projections of bats on the wall of the tunnel seem to have been dropped in favour of stars. It's not quite the same! I left Sam and Lucy at the top of Colosses so they could try some routes they hadn't done before and I headed back down the mountain to the bottom of Bergerie (my reference point). I skied a few of the blues from Bergerie back down to  Plagne Centre where it's fun to ski through an arch in the big hotel complex on a green back to the base of Bergerie. I bumped into Sam and Lucy there. They hadn't wanted much time and the skiing had been quite icy and scary for them.

Lesson for today - leave half-pipes for the kids on snowboards.

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.

All aboard the snow train!

Lunch in La Plagne

My skiing was much improved in February under the harsh regime of Sammy Ski School. After the bitter reality of Renard, how I longed for ESF and the sarcasm of Guy (are you looking for ze mushrooms Eric?) and those gentle days of Route Des Animaux.

But there's no pain without some gain and I was certainly skiing much better after February. These three days in March were something of a ski bonus brought about by Sam's misfortune with Parisian driving standards imported to Bourg Saint Maurice during Paris holiday week. Basically, don't bother looking right, just turn onto the main road and hope for the best.

Sam's car was written off, Max said he could have his old Polo to tide him over and I was delivery driver. This meant that after a quiet day on Tuesday to sort out a few jobs, we were good to go for skiing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

The weather was absolutely beautiful. It was super sunny and around 20 deg C, which meant the snow was quite slushy in the afternoon and quite icy in the morning. That caught me out on the first day when I found some marbles - little balls of ice - under my skis. It's the motoring equivalent of a patch of ice, one minute my edges were gripping, the next I'd lost the back end, crashed onto my back, cracked my head (good job I had the helmet on) and went sliding down the slope backwards and on my back.  It was a bizarre crash, especially when I overtook Sam, sliding by like an inverted tortoise.

There was no harm done and we headed across to the south side of the mountain where there's a big bowl (2300) where I could spend some time practising my turns. Unfortunately the lift there was out of action and so Sam had to revise his plans, which meant a trip down the dreaded Renard. This reddish-blue run is getting quite familiar and it was much easier than I remembered in February. I was skiing down fairly happily and reasonably quickly, so fast that I almost didn't notice the taped-off area where someone was being treated for a serious injury and the medical helicopter parked at the side of the piste! That’s Renard for you!

It was a good day, my stamina has improved and so has my technique, although I still need to work on the speed of the turn. It's OK down most blues, but when the slope is steeper, I have to make longer traverses to keep the speed down and that often means I'm ploughing through banks of snow kicked up by those taking a more direct route. Quicker turns would mean a straighter descent and more control.

We skied a shorter day on Thursday, but the weather was glorious again. Highlight of the day was Lucy sitting down in the snow to have her lunch, but slipping and then sliding backwards downhill out of the picnic area, over a bank and onto the piste below. It was a real comedy slow-motion sequence (worth £500 on You've Been Framed) and once we knew she was all right, we enjoyed a laugh at her expense. The only thing that would have made it better was if she'd had a cheese sandwich in her hand.

I felt that I was skiing well enough to be a little more ambitious, so on Friday, Sam and I went across to La Plagne. My old work friend Chris Perera is skiing there in April and I said I'd ski across and meet him. This was a bit of a recce and to see how long it would take us to get across there.

On board the Vanoise Express.

Getting to La Plagne from Arc 1600 means a few lifts and a fairly long traverse across the mountain down to the Vanoise Express. This is a massive cable car that links Les Arcs/La Plagne. The cars are double-deckers and can carry over 100 people and it gets you across pretty quickly. The cables stretch 1,800 metres and it rides 400 metres above the valley floor. I'm not one to be concerned about such things, but there are quite a few people who prefer not to look down. Actually looking out of the thing is quite hard because, for the lift's 10th anniversary, they painted pixelated graphics onto the side of the cars, so you peer out through a spotty haze. It rather spoils the view.

Getting across the valley is one thing; getting to the resort is another. It involves three lifts and from the top of one lift, you have to ski down to the start of another. One of the blue runs was incredibly steep. I’d already fallen once – quite painfully – on the way down to Vallandry and I had three more falls during the day, including one where a 10-year-old French girl skied into the back of me! Some of the runs were quite rutted and it was still a French holiday week, so the slopes were quite busy in places.

Anyway, we managed to get up the lifts, down the slopes and skied down into the bowl of La Plagne. It seems a more compact resort complex than Les Arcs, where there are four centres and a couple of bowls. There's also a magic carpet, so I approve of that. We sat in the hot sun and had a beer and a Kit-Kat. I wasn't sure how long it would take to get back, so we didn't do Le Tunnel (the well-known blue in la Plagne, where you ski down and through a tunnel). Instead, there's a large lift from the bottom of the bowl (one of those six-seaters) where you can quickly get up to the edge of the bowl. For us, it was then a long, long blue called Mont Blanc all the way down to the Vanoise cable car. You can tell how long it was by the fact the piste post numbering started up around 150. Actually, it was quite a nice run and - apart from being tail-ended by a 10-year-old - I rather enjoyed it.

From there, it was a case of being back on familiar territory. I wanted to go on the top deck of the Vanoise on the way back, then it was up one lift and back on my old friend Foret, along Maitez and we were back in Arc 1800. I was pretty weary by this stage and so Sam took pity on me and allowed me to go up Chantelle and back along Golet.

This was my longest day skiing and the most distance I've ever covered. I really enjoyed it; it felt as if I'd been skiing with a purpose (to get somewhere, rather than just pootling about up and down different runs). However, I was pretty weary (a real weary, weary-woo) and very glad of a second beer and a cheese and ham galette in 1600.

Sam and Lucy were getting ready for the coming week, when Laura Bell (her good friend and bridesmaid at her wedding) was coming to stay. In fact, on the Saturday while I was killing time waiting for my train, Laura would have been on the long drive down from Calais. She was coming with one of her friends, whom Lucy had met before, and her friend's brother. There was a new skier (Laura), someone who had skied a couple of times (the friend) and a snowboarder (the brother), so a real mixed bunch.

On Saturday, we went down into Bourg where it was market day, with a collection of stalls top and bottom of the main street. I bought some farmhouse reblochon for a tartiflette treat back in Blighty and a Christmas tree ornament. I was going to buy some cheese from the farm next-door to Sam's chalet (they have a stall in the market on Saturdays) but it was very busy, there was a long queue and I didn't bother.

I did buy some sweets from a charity stall that was rescuing unwanted farm animals. They needed money for vets' fees and had a couple of little pigs in some straw on top of their stall. Margaret would rather like a pig and this pair seemed very cute, although rather intent on finding some lettuce hidden among the straw of their pen. It's unexpected to find the French trying to help (rather than eat) animals, so this was worth supporting.

Sam with the cute pigs on Bourg market.

I was a little worried about the 10.15pm snow train. When I've got Eurostar back from Brussels there were huge queues at the Midi station and once I almost missed the train. The Eurostar booking site said that I had one of the last eight seats on the train, so I thought it would be really busy.

In actual fact it couldn't have been much easier. There was a tiny queue, but we were through passport and baggage in 15 minutes and on the train. The biggest problem was than my carriage was right at the front and these trains are really long. There were only about eight people in my carriage and I was thinking that Eurostar was trying to make me panic buy a seat when we pulled into Moutiers ...

I had expected to go straight through to St Pancras, But at Moutiers, hundreds of people piled on board and the carriage was full. I was hoping that I could have stretched out across two seats, but now I was locked into position. The seats are quite comfortable and I did get some sleep, but there were two or three really loud snorers on the train, who disturbed the peace somewhat.

At Albertville, the train pulled into the station, waited for about 10 minutes and then set off in the opposite direction. It meant I was travelling forwards rather than backwards. You couldn't see much out of the window except darkness and the odd light flashing past. We stopped in one station for about 30 minutes (I think it must have been near Paris) and then I dozed off again and woke as we were entering the Channel Tunnel. In Kent, it was light and there was something to look at; we stopped at Ashford and then St Pancras.

It was just after 7am (GMT) and bang on time. It's an impressive service, if not the most comfortable journey. I guess the daytime train would be more pleasant because you would be able to stretch your legs without disturbing others (who were asleep) and there would be something to look at.

I had to queue for passport control at St Pancras, which is always annoying having done it at Bourg Saint Maurice, but I had lots of time and was even prepared for some light banter with the over-cheerful chap at border control. There was time for breakfast at King's Cross and a nice journey (via the Hertford loop) back to Peterborough, where Margaret and Holly were waiting for me outside the station. I got back to Peterborough about 10.15am, making it 12 hours in the clock and 13 hours with the switch from CET to GMT.

Sam and Lucy at the picnic area in Les Arcs - that's Mont Blanc just to the side of Sam's ear.