Other than a couple of nights when we all met up in the pub, we were mainly with our smaller group of seven which included ourselves, Wendy, Jason, Angela, Frances and for half the week only, Paula. Cheese, wine and chocolate was the order of the day (every day!) and a fine time was had by all. Or maybe Jason would argue with that  - early in the week he hurt his ribs badly and on the second last day, he broke his arm. It seems beginners snowboarding is not for the faint hearted!

The rest of us are all skiers of various levels, and were able to get on to the higher runs and explore the valleys nearby. Alpe d’Huez is a great resort, with plenty of runs for all levels. I was very proud to complete an 18km black, La Sarenne, on the last day, when Eddie and I covered a lot of ground with the lovely Claire Westbrook as our ski buddy (PJ we missed you!). Many Vin Chauds followed and although the bars were lacking the Apres Ski madness you get in Austria, I actually enjoyed the more chilled out approach to unwinding after a day on the slopes.

I absolutely loved this skiing holiday.  We stayed in an apartment - Pierre & Vacances Ours Blanc Privilege – which was better than we’d expected, the rooms were small (as accommodation in France tends to be) but the living space was big and comfy enough for us all to eat and sit around in comfortably. The lifts were bit of a trek (15 minutes with your ski boots on ain’t easy) but there was a free shuttle bus, thank God.  Having flown with Ryanair and travelled to/from the airport with Ben’s Bus, the trip didn’t cost the earth either. Big thanks to our apartment chef Frances for feeding us well on the nights we ate in, to Meatball for doing the initial legwork and to Jason for sorting out all the gear, transfers and apartment.  Roll on skiing 2011!!!

]]> http://www.lickablewallpaper.com/2010/02/alpe-dhuez-skiing-2010/feed/ 1 http://www.lickablewallpaper.com/2008/09/back-to-school-in-bariloche/ http://www.lickablewallpaper.com/2008/09/back-to-school-in-bariloche/#comments Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:11:38 +0000 Eddie http://www.lickablewallpaper.com/?p=31 We were lucky to come across Casa de Mara! After crossing from Pucon to San Martin de los Andes in Argentina (beautiful scenery, Riona is constantly overwhelmed by the Andes), we decided to slow things down a little and spend some time doing a Spanish course. We did some research and found a lot of good things said about La Montaña, a Dutch owned school in Bariloche. A number of people who´d written about the school also wrote about the immersion programme that they organised, where you could stay with a local family for the duration of your course. One home in particular sounded nice, with a great cook as host and large double room with its own bathroom and kitchenette – it sounded ideal and staying with a local family would be something different, so we rang the school, booked four days classes and a week’s homestay, and after taking another bus down to Bariloche were in our new home for the week trying to make sense of our surrogate madre, Mara!

It was pretty difficult considering our only Spanish came from a phrase book we´d picked up a few weeks earlier and Mara´s English was limited to a few words, but we managed to express ourselves with lots of hand motions and a little help from Mara´s friend, Mariana.

The Spanish classes lasted for four hours each day, from nine until one with a break for coffee and ´medialunas´ (croissants) in between. We´d one teacher (Flavia) between the two of us so it worked out well, and the fact that we were doing the classes out of interest and not because we had to made it much easier to pick up. A lot of the Spanish verbs and words are similar to French and English which also helped, and by the end of the four days we were able to follow most conversations, although we´re still speaking in very broken sentences and all in the present tense but it´s a start! We met some nice folk at the school and got to visit a community centre in a poor neighbourhood to help out with kid´s English lessons – it was interesting to see another side of Bariloche that we wouldn´t have seen otherwise, a long way off the chocolate shops and fancy cafes of the city centre.

Dinner was at nine each evening (the Argentinians do everything very late) and always yummy. There were usually six of us (Mara, her son Martin, friend Mariana and another girl from the US who was at school with us, Katie) and it was probably where we learned most of our Spanish. We´d head down to our own wee apartment at about eleven and do our homework while watching Gray’s Anatomy which neither of us had ever followed but will be sure to when we get back, its a good show :-)

Bariloche itself is a pretty place, an alpine style city set on a large lake at the foot of the Andes and full of fancy chocolate shops (Tante Friada´s at 686 Mitre has the best combo deals and the fastest internet we found in town).  Known as the ´Gateway to Patagonia´, its also the main access point for Cerro Catedral, one of Argentina´s main skiing areas.

We weren´t too pushed about doing much more skiing as we thought the conditions would be a bit crap given that it was the very end of the season, but we were proved very wrong and had some of our best days skiing ever. Catedral is a fantastic spot, far better than the last place we´d been, Whakapapa in New Zealand – the resort had much more buzz to it and the runs were uncrowded and in great condition, with only the lower pistes affected by the springtime weather. The view of the lake and the Andes from the very top of the mountain didn´t hurt either. The first day had clear skies and was really sunny and really was spectacular. We did two more days before deciding it was time to move on.

After nine days in Mara’s place, we filled up on an excellent steak dinner in El Boliche de Alberto (delicious fillet steak meal was about €7 each), packed our bags again and were dropped off at the station by Madre Mara, who packed us us a box of chocs and some tea for the journey. We then boarded the bus to Buenos Aires, a 19 hour journey north and away from the mountains, lakes and generally stunning scenery of northern Patagonia.

The scenery on the North Island is very different to the South, not as pretty (or at least for the parts we managed to see) but very green nonetheless. After doing a few food and coffee stops (the Kiwis do great coffee, make sure you try their ´flat white´ if you´re over there, it´s like a latte but with more coffee and less milk), we visited the Huka falls for a look. Huka falls aren´t very high or wide, but the volume of water that passes through them is ridiculous (about a quarter of a million litres per second!) and worth experiencing – not somewhere you´d want to fall in.

We arrived at our hostel called ´The Park´ later that night, which was really nice and more like a hotel than a backpackers. It was in the style of a log cabin that you´d see in Austria or Germany, complete with the open stove to sit around, nice and comfy. The next morning, we got ourselves skis and boots and made our way to the ´skifields´ which are actually on an active volcano. The setup was pretty different to what we were used to in Europe – there were lots of different runs on the mountain, but no trees and very few boundary markings so it was a bit like skiing on one big piste. We´d been lucky with the weather again (one of the locals reckoned that they´d had the best conditions in ten years) and once we got the ski legs back we had a good session – a lovely way to spend my birthday. I have to say though, skiing for me is as much about the apres ski and the craic and it wasnt the same going out without the usual gang and a fuzzy head from the night before!

There was a snowboarding competition down in the village that night, so we headed out for a while to watch the local talent strut their stuff. The organisers had gone to the trouble of bringing a lorrlyload of snow down down from the mountain since there was none to be found on the streets.

The following day we made off for Raglan, a charming little town and New Zealands best known surfing area which was another days drive away. We stopped off at Wai-o-tapu to break the journey, a geothermal area near Rotorua which was worth a visit to see the mudpools and hotsprings (the colors were fantastic).

When we arrived in Raglan later that evening, I got chatting to the chef in the local pub who gave me a loan of his wetsuit which saved me a few bob. I hired a board the next morning and headed for Manu bay which is supposedly the longest left hand break in the world, but I didn´t have too much joy even though the conditions were great – the board I had was too small for me and after a while my arms were like lead :-( It was a Saturday too and the break was fairly crowded which made catching good waves even harder. When I got out I decided to swap the board for something bigger and return early the next morning, but the swell had picked up a lot overnight and I couldn´t even get out the back! I left Raglan and New Zealand later that day determined to spend as much time as I could in the water at the next opportunity to build up my paddling arms, roll on South America!