This morning we unwrapped our Swiss Care Package from Graeme's mother. It was an envelope of Swiss francs left over from her many years of travel to Europe. When we opened the package, we found a range of Swiss Frances cellotaped carefully to a piece of cardboard!!
We've packed our passports, and we're off to visit Le Tour & Vallorcine today! We hope to ski down into Switzerland and spend our sticky (from the cellotape) SF's on a hot chocolate or two !!
Le Tour / Vallorcine is at the very northern end of the Chamonix valley. Vallorcine is the last french village before crossing into Switzerland.
We had a good run from Araches and arrived at Le Tour around 9:30am. Another brilliant cold sunny day. We know that it snows here, butI I think Hughie ("the snow god") only has 2 switches for the European winter - cold and sunny, or cold and snowy?
On the Chamonix piste map, Le Tour looks to be the smallest of the Chamonix resorts but in fact the off-piste terrain is endless and it took us most of the morning to get our bearings. We snuck onto the tail end of a big guided group who were winding their way down the shaded Vallorcine side of the mountain. We know that the local guides, hate "hangers-on" like us but we were skiing a bit blind. (Someone...you know that person? ..forgot to bring our topo map and even our piste map). Thank goodness I remembered our Chamonix-Off Piste Guide book!! Once we found our way to the chairlift and gondola on the Vallorcine face, we were set! Rather than continue to bumble around, we scooted down the pretty 10km tree run to the Vallorcine village to pick up a new trail map and headed back up in the new gondola.
2/ The view to the Vallorcine village
We have an excellent guide book to off piste skiing in Chamonix and later in the morning we took a tour over to the Les Jours bowl in Switzerland! While much of the off-piste has been tracked, the snow is still very dry and in good condition. We just applied the same principles as in NZ (just in reverse, of course) and found good snow on all the northerly aspects. We had a fantastic ski in good safe snow conditions but we were very cautious. As we did not have a topo map we were never 100% sure whether we were going to end up somewhere we didn't want to be!! [At this point, Graeme has chimed in : "Can you let the topo map thing go....Andy??!!!"]
D'Accor!! To get back to the chairlift, a little bit of creative skiing through the trees was required. Skiing in Europe reminds me so much of my childhood skiing in Australia, where my ever-intrepid father would lead the family down through the snow gums, woolybutts and mountain ash until there was literally no snow left to ski on!! We would all start to complain when we saw the snow thinning as we all knew that it was going to be a long walk back up the hill!!
Alas, there were no restaurants or cafes on the Swiss side of the hill and our sticky SF's remained in our pockets. Our only option to spend them would have been if we skied right to the base of the mountain which may have involved taking our skis off and walking for the last bit! I was again reminded of my childhood and will admit to "piking" and voting to sidle through the forest back to the chairlift!!
3/ Graeme - Bushbashing in Suisse!!
Lunch was a laugh! We climbed up to a little Refuge right on the French-Swiss border at Col de Balme (2190m) and ate our packed lunch outside in the sunshine before heading into this ancient refuge for a hot chocolate. (Tragically, the budget does not stretch to a restaurant lunch everyday!!) Think Cardrona Pub before the renovations and that would best capture the feel of this crumbling old place. The walls were covered with old skiing maps and dog-eared postcards from the 70's. Run by the original Mr & Mrs Eidelwiess, an elderly couple well into their sixties the place was a time capsule. Sadly, it did not seem to be well patronised, mainly we think because people have to take their skis off and walk up the hill. When there are alternatives more easily accessed, this little place obviously misses out. Sad but true! We suspect that Mr & Mrs Eidelwiess have been running this Refuge all their lives and that there have been few changes during their stewardship!!
4/ The Salon at Refuge - Col de Balme
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