I’m back from the ski holiday, and sitting in my flat in Budapest while writing these lines.
Most of my pictures are meaningless for those who were not there without my comments, but you can find them here.
Despite some unluckiness...
… I could tell many pleasant experiences from visiting London 2nd time and Bergamo 1st time. It was worth to take some hours for sightseeing, I really enjoyed both.
A part of the road was closed due to heavy snowstorm, so after 2 hours of waiting for more information, the bus driver decided to take a 200km route-around instead of the the direct 50km through the pass. We arrived at midnight to our apartment. I got up 41 hours earlier to start my journey (and slept only some hours in Bergamo airport and on a meadow), my friends were on the bus for 25hr (departure was 1hr later than expected).
I’have been skiing for 13 years 5-6 days/ year on average. I knew some Austrian, Italian, Slovakian and Hungarian ski resorts, but I had never skied in France. We visited Alpe d’Huez for one day, and skied in Les2Alpes on the 5 other days. I’ve enjoyed the whole camp, but I don’t think I’ll return to France for skiing in the near future. It’s too far by bus either from Gib or Hungary. Les2Alpes had almost the same percentage of British skiers as Obertauern (Austria), so I expected such a good quality of service (slope grooming, lift facilities) as I experienced in Austria, but they were not comparable, eg. some of the black runs were closed, most of them was only groomed every 3rd day.
There were some real boring green connecting runs, and some black runs that we didn’t expect to be that hard (too bumpy / icy). It was interesting how we enjoyed a simple blue run just because it was well above 3000m and skiing with the lack of oxygen was a very special feeling. We preferred a red run with black alternatives having a 6 chair lift to let our team of five ski together.
There were no time/speed measuring slopes and such interesting things, but I enjoyed the jumps of the snowpark when we tested it on the last day.
We had some really snowy days, each bringing 9-15 cm of fresh snow to the slopes. We had 2 really foggy days with very limited visibility, and 2 very sunny days. Due to the relatively extreme weather, queuing was mostly negligible.
Snow quality was good in overall, but it was very dependent of the actual weather and height, and quality degradation was perceptible by the end of day. No artificial snow making was necessary, which is a very good news in the end of March.
There were many possibilities for partying at various places, but we didn’t have the mood, because we tried to ski as much as possible. On most of the days we were throwing our skis out of the apartment on 1800m directly to the snowy slope right in the minute of the lift opening. It was only on a very foggy day, when we decided not to ski until the last minute.
On that day we went to the ice rink, where the quality of the rented skates and the ice surface was way below our expectations, but when an ex-professional Slovenian ice dancer girl entered the rink, our small team of hobby ice-hockey players (former hobby ice-dancers) did the best to chase her all the way. It was hard to keep up with her professional skates (well, our strength, stamina, skating technique also had some differences), but she presented some very spectacular jumps to us for our applause.
In the evenings we cooked meal for ourselves, or rented a fondue set for a typical French dinner, and as most of us is a regular board-game player, we played some of our usual games (I played only two times, and tried to learn Spanish instead).