Monday, March 24, 2008

Skiing in the alps

Last week I went to France for a few days since Eastern in Norway is a big holliday. Despite some problems with my return flight (read previous post), it was an amazing experience.
I went to a little village called "Le Freney d'Oisans", very near to two main ski stations: "Les deux alpes" and "Alpe d'huez". I stayed at a hotel called "Le Cassini", and that by itself was a wonderful experience. I've traveled a lot and I was totally surprised by this hotel. It is simply excellent. It is a little hotel (not more than 20 rooms I think), it is very comfortable and the food is simply superb. I look forward to the next skiing season since I'm going back.
Now coming to the point of skiing: I simply have no words. It was amazingly incredible. I skied on "Les deux alpes" both days, and I had very different conditions. On Thursday, the sun was shining and the snow was perfect. I went to the glaciar (3200m), and I skied all the way down. I skied for about 8 hours and it was simply perfect. When going down, the "easy" way was closed because there was not enough snow, so I had to take a black slope called "The Valentin". It was very hard, very steep and above all incredible large. However, I managed to survive it.
On Friday, it was a totally different situation. There was a "small" snow storm, and everything that had little snow was now totally covered. Very good since many other slopes were ready to be used, but not so good since the wind was strong and the visibility was very bad. However I decided to go ahead and I went again all the way to the glaciar. It was a totally different place, the wind was blowing and the visibility was very reduced. I had to buy new lenses in the shop at the restaurant near the glaciar since mine were not up to the task. After a nice hot chocolate I decided to go down and I found out (not surprisingly) that most slopes were closed for safety reasons, however there was one slope open so me and some other people there went down that way. It was an amazing experience, going down the mountain with the snow falling, very limited visibility and a strong wind was simply superb. I mean, it was really tiring and it took almost two hours to get to where we were going, but it was totally worth it. After that, I ate a pizza at the restaurant and then continued my way down to the town. Luckily when I got to the last slope, the easy slope was open because I was too tired to even think about taking the black slope again.
Overall, it was a wonderful experience and I look forward to do it again. But next time I'll stay for at least a week there.

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