The Face

While the cat’s away the mice will play. With Amelia up in the north I took the chance to get some of my more adventurous skiing in. I had been looking at these two chutes (or couloirs as the French call them) from early in the season. I had planned on doing the easier one on the right from the top but saw some tracks leading down so decided to give the harder one a nudge. After a couple of turns I had covered the other tracks with my sluff and was on my own.

There were a couple of hairy moments when I was wondering what I had gotten myself into, mostly at the top of the first rock band when I had taken a turn too many and was facing the wrong way. I then had to step over a rock backwards and keep my balance before navigating a second rock band and a 2m hop out to safety.

As I stopped and looked up I could only but think how lucky I was (even though later that night I was thinking, “I know the route now; I can do it a lot better next time”). I skied off and stopped down on the piste to dust off the snow and check my bases (I skied over a lot of rocks). A guy skied up and asked if I had just skied “The Face”. We talked and it turned out he had taken photos of it all. He laughed as I said it was a bit difficult for me. I asked if he had skied it to which he replied, “No, too many rocks, I prefer to ski on snow. Next time take a rope”. Anyway check out his photos here. I’m the black dot that moves position. The places where I am smaller are where I am sitting, stepping down rocks. Tomorrow Chamonix!!

Curling

Our latest staff extravaganza was a trip to the curling rink in Megève for a lesson in this most ancient and silly looking of winter sports. One shoe gets a slippery over-shoe put on it and the other shoe acts as your ‘grip’. The objective of the game is to launch your stone (which are incredibly heavy, there’s no way you’re lifting one of those babies up off the ice) straight down the centre of the rink (about 4.5m across and 45m long) and into the centre of the bulls eye. It is no easy task, as most of us found out despite the extremely friendly Sophie (our teacher, in the middle of the photo) doing her best to make us understand what to do!


If the stone touches the side of the rink or goes beyond the line at the end it’s out of play. The sweepers are there to a) give tactical advice to the person launching the stone and b) make the stone go faster by sweeping in front of it if needs be.

After get a few tutorials in the basics it was onto a game – girls versus boys (oh how obvious we are). Most of us were absolutely useless (see video here - hopefully the link works) but Lauren had the ultimate turn – check out the perfection in the photos!

Unfortunately, Lauren’s stone got knocked out by the eventually victorious boys’ team on the very next go…
Awesome fun though, so if ever anyone’s near NZ’s only curling rink somewhere deep in the heart of the South Island, I’d give it a go! Check out more photos here.

Megève fashion

Megève is one of the wealthiest French ski resorts going. It’s full of Michelin star restaurants and extremely expensive boutiques. My favourite is the coat in the window of the Aallard store which costs nearly 10,000 euro – that’s nearly a house deposit in New Zealand on a coat!!

There are always ladies walking around in massive fur coats, dripping in jewels and toting little dogs – it’s definitely a great place to people watch. We’ve been trying to get some snaps of some of the best ones, although usually we don’t have the camera on us when the best ones walk by. But here are two we did manage to capture (quite blatantly I might add!)

Here's just one of the fantastic ski outfits we see everyday on the slopes as well...

Big snow!

On the 22nd of March we woke up to one of the biggest overnight dumps of snow we’ve had yet. February and March seem to have been all mixed up, with hardly a flake of snow during February and temperatures reaching nearly 17 degrees, and March seeing temperatures plummet again with metres upon metres of snow.

This was outside our front door – that hill in the background which is known as the ‘Jaillet’ side of the mountain had been green grass only a couple of days before.

Check out the snow on the window wipers!


These pictures are from in front of the ice rink in town and then another one showing just how much snow the bulldozer had already taken off! (Nice bleary/puffy morning eyes are also on show in the latter pic).

This one’s the best though – how on earth is that car going to get out of there?!


Click here for the rest of the pictures.

Ice skating

Megève has an outdoor ice skating rink in the centre of town that has been on our ‘fun things to do’ list for quite a while now. The other day, conditions were perfect (as in, it was sunny and we had a bit of free time on our hands) so we paid our 15 or so euro each (see blog title to guess which person had some trouble handing over the money and which one did so with glee) and headed out onto the ice. The appropriate clothing (aka Elvis glasses we found at the chalet) was also required…

Being the beginning of springtime there was a decent series of puddles on the ice and some quite gnarly cracks that made disconcerting creaking noises as you skated over them, but luckily our lardy croissant packed bodies weren’t so bad as to actually fall through the ice. Adrian (as to be expected with all winter sports) picked it up incredibly quickly and started showing off doing fancy stops and going backwards etc. – I reckon he’d make a great figure skater – imagine the costumes!

I (Amelia) on the other hand made somewhat tentative progress, aided by my new best friend, Jan (a 5 year old French girl in Megève on holiday who told me several times this was her 3rd time ice skating and she could already go forward, turn, and stop). It was probably about my 3rd time too so I was pleased I got up to about her level by the end of the session…

Once we got a bit of practice in I got a bit cocky and challenged Adrian to a race down the length of the rink and back. Unfortunately, my lead which was unchallenged until ¾ of the way through the race, came to an abrupt end when I tripped up, fell backwards, and cracked my head on the ice…yet again proof that I am not naturally blessed with either balance or sporting ability… The people watching gave a collective ‘oooh’ that even I heard in my semi-concussed state, so I’m pleased that I at least managed to give them some entertainment! I took it grandma-slow for the rest of the evening I can tell you… Click here for some more photos.

Tobogganing!

When the idea of throwing yourself down steep, snow covered hillsides on skis or snowboards becomes a bit passé, what else is there to do but throw yourself down less steep, snow covered hillsides on uncontrollable pieces of plastic. Yep, that’s right, it was time for some tobogganing. We couldn’t find the ‘uber’ toboggan (the one that actually has brakes and is adult-sized) so made do with what is stylishly known as ‘bum boards’ and a baby-sized toboggan.

The snow was a bit thin on the ground which meant runs had to be picked carefully, but we generally fell off before we’d made it too long anyway!

For anyone who hasn’t done it, tobogganing is o for oarsome – particularly the bit when you completely fall off and roll around in the mud (see classic example below - hopefully you don't get as sore a neck watching it as I got actually doing it!).


A bit of hiking is involved, although any and all cardio is a good thing these days considering the amount of croissant-related energy that needs to be burnt off on a daily basis…

Two styles of tobogganing were also in evidence – the planned approach and the ‘let’s just get down here whichever way possible’. As you can see by these two stills from the videos both get you to exactly the same place!

Do you know the way to St Gervais?

I’ve been away so long! Ah, enough with the singing already! (I know you’ve got that tune stuck in your head now). Lauren and I had an afternoon jaunt to St Gervais, one of the towns on the other side of the mountains. We took a series of telecabines up, over and down which was much preferable to paying the 10 euro bus fare! It wasn’t too bad a day and was luckily quiet on the slopes so we didn’t get taken out by some out of control skier!

St Gervais is much more of a traditional French town compared to Megève which is a fairy tale resort type of place. We did the obligatory check out of the local church which had some wicked paintings on the outside but was less ornate than the Sallanches or Megève churches on the inside. I particularly liked this carving on one of the side altars though.

After we finished with the touristy stuff we did a bit of shopping in the only shop that was open (we’d forgotten about the whole closed between 12-3pm thing…). I was sorely tempted to get one of these incredibly beautiful, sophisticated, and not at all tacky fake marmots but in the end decided to save my hard earned pennies ;-)

It was a pretty cold day which worked out for the guy doing ice sculptures in the town centre, and meant I could rock one of my myriad of scarves which have been languishing at the back of the wardrobe for a while.

We had a delicious hot chocolate and cake before we left the main town centre and stopped in at this fantastic boulangerie (bakery) on the way back to pick up some goodies for later. I got this thing called a ‘boule de neige’ (snowball) for Adrian which was a 10cm diameter white chocolate/coconut/meringue concoction that took us about a week to eat it was so massive!

On the way back to the telecabine we saw heaps of people milling about outside this deli which was in the process of reopening after lunch. They were putting out basket upon baskets of saucissons (salamis) which ranged from donkey flavoured to genepi flavoured (a local spirit which is like Chartreuse). We ventured inside and spent ages looking at all the great food – fortunately we were quite full so weren’t too tempted to buy much! It was clearly a local legend, everyone was queued up to buy their saucissons, bread and cheese for dinner, along with a couple of bottles of wine. Check out here for some more photos of the day.

Geneva

I had some time between a drop at the airport and the next arrival so popped into Geneva for a bit of a look around. There isn’t much there to be honest but a lake, the UN, and some sculptures. Here are some photos I took.

Ice hockey

As we were leaving the chalet on our night off last Monday one of the guests asked us if we were going to the ice hockey down at the sports centre – and so instead of $$, that became the tip from that guest! We headed down and got our 9 euro tickets (which came with a 30 euro voucher for dinner at the restaurant at the casino – score!) for the ‘friendly’ between Megève and Mt Blanc. It was a pretty low key and small crowd (only half the bleachers were open) so it took us until the end of the first third to realise that we were sitting with the Mt Blanc supporters instead of the Megève supporters!

In the beginning we weren’t sure what the deal was with the two teams (as in, were they normally playing at the same competition level etc) because Mt Blanc seemed to be a) younger and b) better than Megève. The first third score was pretty pitiful too, with Megève trailing by a couple of points. I (Amelia) decided that more support was in order so got myself an ‘Allez Megève’ (Go Megève) scarf and we also got some crazy cheap (and terrible) drinks at the bar. Here's a video of some of the action (we're is in the green/blue strip scoring the goal and Mt Blanc is in the blue).

The second third was much more like it – Megève scored a couple of goals (see the video below) and things were looking up for the home team. However, it was really the final third when things got interesting. As any sane person knows, even though it might have been a friendly, what everyone was out for was a fight, and they didn’t disappoint!

Number 86 (one of our favourites, he’d already been sin-binned a couple of times already) (Adrian = whatever! He spent more time in the sin bin than on the field!) was in the thick of it, as was the other favourite, Number 5 (see below ladies…). No idea who came out victor, but some good punches were thrown by both sides, it was a game of two halves, and ice hockey was the winner on the day.

Well, actually Megève triumphed to be the winner (8-6) and we went home happy and victorious – ALLEZ MEGÈVE! Check out more photos here.