A Disappointing Winter

Leysin, March 30, 2011 It's a grey, rainy day and Leysin is swathed in a veil of cloud that makes it feel as though my mountain eyrie is completely alone in the world. Quite pretty, very uninviting for outdoor activities, and so a perfect day to reflect on the last three months here in the Swiss Alps, while listening to a backlog of BBC and CBC radio podcasts. (Yes, I am a nerd!) When I last updated this blog (yes, Kent, I am still the world's laziest blogger!), the winter term here at Leysin American School was about to begin. I was looking forward to it, as Tuesdays and Thursdays during the winter are half-days for classes, ending at lunchtime, followed by afternoons on the ski slopes. It sounded idyllic, and, being a huge fan of skiing, I was looking forward to being on the slopes four days a week, plus a few evenings of skinning up the Berneuse for a nocturnal ski down. In fact, the winter turned out to be a colossal disappointment. After a beautiful snowfall on Christmas Eve, it simply stopped snowing. In Leysin, it was almost two months before it snowed again, although it did rain once or twice. Leysin's ski slopes were appalling: icy strips of artificial snow, frequently soggy and wet, with rocks peeking through. In addition to not having any new snow, it was also remarkably warm, sometimes hot, throughout January and early February. On February 6th and 7th, I took pictures of some of our students sunbathing in hammocks, and having class outdoors. On February 12th, I had a great bike ride to Interlaken, through the ski resort of Gstaad, with barely a flake of snow to be seen anywhere. It was not just Leysin that suffered, although we had probably the sunniest, warmest weather. Most of Switzerland also had an almost completely snow-free winter. I did go out skiing a few times, searching for that elusive endangered species, snow. I had a few good days at the nearest high-altitude resort, Glacier 3000, up above Diablerets, about a 30-minute drive from Leysin. It went bankrupt a few years ago and was bought by a few Gstaad residents, including Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone. The slopes on top of the glacier are generally not terribly steep, but between wind and very localized snowfall, there was often fresh powder up top. As well, the steeper slopes of the Combe d'Audon were open sometimes, and when they were in powder, they were truly excellent, despite the irritatingly long series of lifts to get back to the top. I went out on a ski tour to Le Metailler, a 3000-metre mountain south of the resort of Super Nendaz, in early February, but, although we were up high, and although the views were wonderful, the snow was mushy soup full of rocks. I did a very informative avalanche course with a local mountain guide, Roger Payne, at Glacier 3000 (since there wasn't enough snow in Leysin to even pretend that there could be an avalanche). I went with Terri to the lovely surroundings of the Gemmipass, up above Leukerbad, and had a great weekend playing on our inflatable Airboards. Another weekend, we hiked up the snowed-in road to the top of the Grand St. Bernard Pass, had soup and tea at the Hospice run by the local monks, and airboarded back down. Mostly I played squash and rode my bicycle, trying to make the most of a bad situation. My friends in BC and Japan kept e-mailing me to tell me about the epic snow years they were having, while I looked out at the flowers blooming in February and wondered what the hell I was doing in the Alps. A three-day weekend in late February had been pencilled in for some skiing, but with the drought continuing, I decided to add to my country count instead, and flew up to Copenhagen to visit my Yangon tennis friend Hans, who now works for the WHO in Copenhagen. It was cold and wintry and clear, and I had a great time, wandering the streets, visiting the Little Mermaid, gawking at the amazing displays in the flagship Lego store, and playing tennis with Hans. Neither a case of being poisoned by a dodgy kebab (in Denmark?!?!) nor the uniformly high prices put me off enjoying my 94th country. When I got back, it had actually snowed, and I had one week rather like the ones I had envisaged: skiing Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in Leysin, powder at Glacier 3000 on Saturday, and snowboarding on Sunday in fresh powder in Leysin. The following week, I toured up the Pic Chaussy with my sister Audie and a couple of my colleagues, and despite there not having been snow for three days, and despite the Pic Chaussy being perhaps the most popular ski touring peak in French-speaking Switzerland, we still had fresh tracks on the way down. That weekend, I did two ski tours near Leysin with Terri, one up the col beside the Pic Chaussy (some fantastic cold, deep powder on the shady north-facing slopes) and an eye-opener of the possibilities near Diablerets, when we toured from Isenau to L'Etivaz. A week after the last snowfall, and we still had great snow. I feel that if we could find that sort of snow in the worst winter in years in the Alps, next year I will have better ideas of where to go hunt elusive powder. A final weekend before the two-week spring break looked unpromising for snow in Switzerland, so Terri and I drove through the Grand St. Bernard tunnel to Aosta, Italy and its excellent food and general cheeriness. It was a much snowier world down there, and we had a decent day of skiing in Pila, before spending the next day walking and lunching in the snowy, pretty valley of Cogne as great fat flakes of snow belted down out of us. I was excited at the prospects of snow back in Switzerland, but as soon as the car poked its nose out of the tunnel into Switzerland, it became obvious that, as had happened several times this winter, the snow clouds had only peeked over the mountains into Switzerland before turning back again into snowy Italy. In places near the Grand St. Bernard, snow levels were only 20% of their historical average this winter. It amazes me that after a winter spent living in a ski resort in the Alps, I only once went to one of the famous Swiss ski resorts (Zermatt), since most weekends the snow was so miserable that it wasn't worth driving a couple of hours for more rotten snow. I certainly hope next ski season is better! For the spring break, I had tossed up the idea of abandoning the Alps in favour of the Persian Gulf, but the occasional snowfall that we had started to receive made me decide to stay in the Alps for two weeks of ski touring. I planned two five-day trips: first the Wildstrubel Route (click on "Prospectus" for the route) from Glacier 3000 to Kandersteg, then, after a day off, the classic Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt. The Wildstrubel Route was fantastic. With my colleague Sion, I skied east under perfectly bluebird skies, along the crest of the Pre-Alpine Ridge, bagging a series of 3000-metre peaks and skiing down through fresh powder (the heavy snowfall the day before we set off helped make for fresh tracks every day). It was a seductive lifestyle: an early breakfast, five or six hours of skinning up and then skiing down peaks, arriving at our comfortable Swiss Alpine Club huts in the early afternoon, having a beer and some rosti, taking an afternoon nap, eating a lavish evening meal, and then tucking up into bed at an early hour, ready for another day of the same. There were 19 people following the same route and same itinerary, and it was fun getting to know them and sharing ideas and travel tips for the mountains. The fourth and fifth days, around the Laemerrenhutte and the Gemmipass, were the highlights, with fantastic views of the High Alps and the best powder descents, with the Rothorn providing probably the single best ski run of the entire winter. After a lazy day in Leysin, I changed ski partners and headed to Chamonix with my colleague Paul. The plan was to spend five days ski touring between the twin meccas of Alpine sports, Chamonix and Zermatt. The weather forecast looked less brilliant than it had for the Wildstrubel Route, and so it proved. Getting to Chamonix on the little train from Martigny was a highlight of the trip, as we chugged up the spectacular Trient Gorge. Chamonix was a shock to the system after the quiet and beauty of the Wildstrubel trip, with the train filled to overflowing with hordes of skiers, and the city pulsing with the energy of tens of thousands of tourists. After a less than restful night in a local dive, we set off for the Grand Montet lift, where we found ourselves in the worst lift lines I have ever seen anywhere. We got to the bottom by 9 am, and skied off the top at 11 am. For such a mega-resort, Chamonix has some pretty antiquated and poorly-designed lift infrastructure. It was hot as we skied down a bumpy, unpleasant slope to the Argentiere glacier and put on our skins for the climb up to the Col du Chardonnet. The climb was relatively easy, but the weather clouded over and it began to snow. At the top of the col, it became apparent that we had been misinformed about the existence of a fixed rope, and our short glacier rope was clearly too short to get us down the 100 metres of 45-degree icy slope below us. We got halfway down by abseiling on another group's rope, before they abandoned us halfway down, and it took a while to be rescued by the guides from a second group. We arrived at the first day's cabane chastened, late and tired. The second day was more of the same, with an advertised two-hour climb and descent to Champex taking five hours, as we ice-climbed up a hard, steep slope to the Fenetre d'Arpette, having missed the start of an easier col. By the time we skied down rotten, bumpy slush in the Val d'Arpette into Champex, we had missed the last bus to take us to Verbier and the next leg of the tour. With the weather forecast looking gloomy, and our confidence shaken by two epic, rather unpleasant days, we decided to abandon the rest of the Haute Route and leave it for another time. After the spring break, less than two months of actual school remain, and I am busy trying to line up my summer's travels. I have bought a ticket to Tbilisi, in Georgia, and I'm trying to get my Abkhazian, Russian and Belorussian visas for a bicycle ride from Tbilisi, across most of the Eastern European and post-Soviet states that I have yet to visit, to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. I'm really looking forward to this, as it will take me to a few places that I've wanted to visit for years: Svaneti, the Crimea, Transylvania and the Tatra mountains. I will certainly keep the blog updated during this trip, and maybe even before then, as the school year draws towards its close.

A look back at my time in Leysin so far

January 3, 2010

It’s one of the first days of 2011 and I’m at home, nursing an extraordinarily painful tailbone, memento of a heavy fall on an icy slope two days ago while trying to re-learn snowboarding. It's probably not broken, but the bruising and swelling make any sort of sitting down, standing up or lunging forward pretty agonizing. Luckily (in some sense), snow conditions are so poor that I don't feel as though I'm missing much by not being out there every day. I still need to write up a bit about my trip to Newfoundland this summer with my mother, Audie, Saakje and Serge, but that will have to wait for another day to do it justice. The past four months have hurtled past rather like a luge track, and it’s only now, two weeks since classes finished, that I’m starting to feel alive again. Teaching can be a draining experience at the best of times, and when my students are neither particularly gifted (in general) nor particularly motivated, running through the donkey work necessary to run a class can be mentally pretty tough. My surroundings, perched on a mountain surrounded by higher peaks in the Swiss Alps, is pretty spectacular and the recreation opportunities they provide have been a sanity-saver since my arrival here 4 months ago, but I still find myself a bit tired and de-motivated as 2010 winds down. My friend Kent, who visited me at the end of August, called me “the world’s laziest blogger” in a post on his excellent (and un-lazy) blog The Dromomaniac. The charge is true; keeping my blog up-to-date has been one of the casualties of teaching. Now that I have some time to myself, I should really bring you, my faithful and long-suffering readers, up-to-date on my travels this fall. Part of the problem with living in a Western European country is that it’s not really very exotic. Searching for the unfamiliar is one of the main motivations I have for travel, and so I have perhaps travelled less than I would have otherwise. As well, not having a car is an impediment to travel here, despite the extensive public transport network. I hope to remedy that later this year, although used cars are more expensive and less reliable than in Japan, where most of my car ownership and driving has been done up until now. Leysin is a great location for cycling, with lots of mountain passes available for riding, and small tertiary roads and logging trails to escape from the heavy traffic. I tried to get out regularly for the first two months I was here, although I should have done better at taking advantage of the terrain. One of my favourite rides was in early September, when I rode down to Aigle (a very rapid 1000-metre vertical drop) and then up to Villars (another ski resort/international school town nearby), over the Col de la Croix, down to Les Diablerets, up and over the Col du Pillon, down to the gorgeous glitterati gathering place of Gstaad, along a pretty valley to Chateau d’Oex, over the Col des Mosses, down to Sepey and a final 500-vertical-metre climb back into Leysin. By the end of the day, I had climbed over 3000 vertical metres and covered part of a stage of next year’s Tour de Romandie, a professional cycling race used as a tune-up for the Tour de France. I also did a bit of cycling down along the Rhone Valley, where a well-designed bicycle path carries cyclists through forests and along the Rhone, far from the maddening traffic of the main roads. A lovely ride up to Morgins and down to Evian with fellow teachers was another great day in the saddle. Perhaps my favourite cycling of the fall, though, was a weekend spent riding through Burgundy with Terri, the Kiwi teacher I have been seeing here in Leysin, reliving my time as a Butterfield and Robinson cycling guide. I had forgotten how picture perfect the medieval stone villages and high-end vineyards are, and, to cap it off, we stayed in an atmospheric old castle, the Chateau Bellecroix. I also played some good quality tennis and squash here; there are a number of keen and competitive players at LAS, including one teacher who played collegiate tennis and who subsequently was a teaching pro for five years. Leysin is also a perfect spot for running, with forests and fields traversed by a network of trails perfect for trotting along. With my sister Audie eight months pregnant, she and her boyfriend Serge and another friend Daniel and I headed out to the mountains one Saturday to climb the nearby Dents du Midi, the 3000-metre peak that dominates the nearby stretch of the Rhone Valley. It was a long slog, but the weather was perfect and the views from the summit absolutely epic. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day out in the mountains. Some of our students were on their way the following weekend to climb the mountain I got away from Switzerland briefly in October when I flew on EasyJet to Belgium to visit my friend Wido and his family. Wido is working for a company in Geel, a small town in the Flemish countryside, and it was great to see him again after a number of years. I spent a day poking around the city of Antwerp, which I had never seen before, and another playing tennis with Wido and his two boys, followed by a long ride through the countryside on the well-organized bicycle paths that run everywhere. The weather was perfect, and it was all in all the best possible way to spend a rare long weekend. Shortly thereafter, I took part in a couple of genuinely Swiss festivals. First of all I made it, slightly late, to the desalpage of Etivaz, a celebration of the seasonal migration of the cows that produce the famous local cheese from the high summer pastures to the warmer lowlands. The next day I went with my mother and Terri to another cow-centred event, the famous cowfights of Martigny. Swiss cows (the females; we’re not talking about bulls here, although these cows are bigger than most bulls I’ve ever seen) are bred to be territorial and aggressive, and in early October the local farmers bring their biggest and butchest to the 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre of Martigny to test their alpha dominance against other cows. Ten or so of these bovine behemoths are turned loose together, and after lots of ritualized snorting and pawing at the ground, eventually pairs of cows lock horns and the losers are escorted back out of the ring. I can’t say that I followed all the niceties of the rules, but I don’t think the crowd, big on biceps, mustaches, tattoos, motorcycles and wine, did much better than I did. It was a fascinating display, and one that I’m not sure occurs in many other parts of the world. It was a nice physical-cultural combination to have a wonderful bicycle ride along the Rhone to get to and from the Combat of the Queens. I accompanied a group of high school students on a school trip to an Outward Bound centre in the Bavarian Alps in Schwangau, Germany, a few kilometres from Mad King Ludwig’s fantastical Neuschwanstein castle at Fussen. The setting was excellent, and we had heavy snow to make the surroundings even more fairytale-like. The students were, by and large, not terribly enthusiastic or good company, but a few of them enjoyed it. We did some rock-climbing, a ropes course and built a home-made flying fox across a forest ravine. The highlight (for me) was a three-day hike up to stay in a back-country hut and a climb to the summit of a nearby mountain through a wonderful sugar-frosted treescape. I think the mountain guide and I enjoyed the walk far more than our seven students. I was struck, not for the first time, by the fact that the children of the hyper-rich seem to lack a great deal when it comes to motivation, determination and toughness. A wander through Neuschwanstein on the way home and an evening soaking in 19th-century thermal baths added a veneer of cultural to this “cultural trip”. Having our van engine crack and die on the way home, necessitating a long pit stop and then piling everyone into one overcrowded bus for the long haul back to Leysin was some sort of icing on the cake of this experience. In mid-November, I headed south of the Alps on a one-day marathon expedition to see a soccer match, the fabled Milan Derby between AC Milan (Silvio Berlusconi’s team, the most successful Italian team of all time) and Inter Milan (champion for the last 5 seasons and last year’s European champions). It was a long drive, and the weather in Milan was rainy and grim, but the atmosphere at the game was electrifying without there being any real threat of violence. The chanting, the flares, the banners and the cheering was great to see, although the game itself was a bit of a damp squib, with AC Milan winning 1-0 on an early penalty (scored by a former Inter star, Zlatan Ibrahimovic) and Inter barely making a single meaningful attempt on goal. The drive back was interminable, and I was glad I had packed my pillow so that I could sleep most of the way back. We arrived at 3:15 am and I had to be at work by 7:40 the next morning. Sleepy times! The game was a definite turning point for the Italian soccer season, with AC Milan now 13 points ahead of Inter and marching on inexorably towards the league title. Now that it’s Christmas break, my family, who have been gathering in Switzerland over the past couple of months rather like a tribe of steppe nomads, have spent the holidays together for the first time in 20 years. It’s been great fun: building a gingerbread house (or actually, a model of an entire street), luging on crazy Airboard inflatable luges, skinning up the mountain behind us, drinking wine, playing cards and board games and generally enjoying life. As I age, I realize that gatherings like this might not happen too many more times, so it’s been important to take advantage of having everyone around. The only downer has been a distinct lack of snow, curtailing real skiing. I hope the new year brings a lot more frequent powder dumps! So as 2011 begins, I hope to find more time and inspiration for writing and travel, and more powder for skiing. I hope that the new year finds you, my readers, enjoying the things that are important in your lives. Bonne annee!

Libya, Malta, Italy and now Switzerland

Carrouge, Switzerland, January 21 The first three weeks of this new year, along with the last three weeks of 2009, were very busy in terms of travel, and I didn't have much chance to update, so I have a backlog of travel updates, starting from when I stopped cycling in early December. The first stop was Joanne's aunt's place in San Vito al Tagliamento. We visited the old Roman town of Aquileia (wonderful Byzantine floor mosaics in the church) and tried, unsuccessfully, to visit the tomb of Fra Odorico in Udine; Odorico was another European traveller to China, a few decades after Marco Polo, and I wanted to pay my respects to a fellow Silk Roader. We tried twice, but found the little church of Beata Virgine di Carmine locked both times. Then we headed into Venice for four wonderful days. My friend and tennis partner in Yangon, Franco, is a Venetian and he set up for Joanne and I to stay at the apartment of his cousin Manuel. Manuel actually lives at his girlfriend's place, so we had the whole apartment to ourselves. It was a stroke of amazing luck, and we took full advantage of it, cooking up great dinners and spending the days wandering the back streets of this unique city. Venice in the winter is much quieter than in the madness of summer tourist season, and the morning chill and fog make for a feeling of mystery. I am starting to really like Venice, after finding it too touristy, expensive and crowded on previous (summer) visits. From there, it was off to Rome, where we lucked out again and stayed with Joanne's cousin. Four more days of exploring the colossal amounts of multi-layered history that makes up this amazing city. I saw a lot more Roman ruins than I did on my first visit to the Eternal City; I particularly liked the Palatine ruins (the remnants of the gigantic imperial palace) and the Capitoline Museum. The mix of Baroque and ancient sculpture in the Galeria Borghese was impressive as well. Inbetween museum visits, I got my elusive translation of my passport information page into Arabic so I could get my Libyan visas. Dec. 18th saw us heading off to our long-awaited Libyan trip. We spent eleven days in the country, mostly seeing the amazing Roman and Greek ruins that dot the coastline, but also driving inland to the fascinating caravan-trading town of Ghadmes. In a sense we should have gone years ago, before the requirement to have a guide made a trip an expensive proposition. Still, though, despite the expense, it was an unforgettable trip. The Roman ruins at Sabratha are impressive, with their elaborate, well-preserved theatre by the sea the undoubted highlight. In the east, the Greek ruins of Cyrenaica are fantastic, located as they are in the fertile limestone plateaux of the Green Mountains. Cyrene, in particular, was a wonderful ruin that took an entire day to explore. The best, however, was saved for last: Leptis Magna. I had been hearing about this amazing Roman city for years, and was slightly worried that it wasn't going to live up to the hype. I needn't have worried. The city, hometown to the emperor Septimius Severus, benefited from imperial patronage and an orgy of building that resulted in a city of great scale and grandeur. It was buried very deep in sand over the centuries, meaning that walls were preserved to a much greater height than is usual in most ruins. The main forum and the Baths of Hadrian, along with the judicial basilica, brought to life the massive scale of Roman imperial building, with two stories of colonnades and some of the biggest granite and marble columns ever erected (the French consul in the early 1700s stole a lot of the best columns, and they were re-used in building Versailles Palace). The smaller details of the city, though, the wheel ruts in the streets, the graffiti, the rope marks on the marble counters of the market, were what really brought the city to life. I absolutely loved Leptis; it must be one of the top 3 classical ruins anywhere in the former Roman Empire, and it was almost deserted (unlike, say, Ephesus in the summer). Happy with what we had seen, we dropped in on Malta for four nights, an easy way to bag a new country as we had flown down on Air Malta. I was underimpressed with the island as a holiday destination; too much concrete, too little countryside or beach. However, the ancient megalithic temples (dating from as long ago as 3500 BC, eight centuries before the Pyramids were built) and the remains of the culture that built them (visible in the archaeological museums) were fascinating. I also liked tracking the Knights of St. John back to their final lair, having already seen traces of them in Jerusalem, Acre, Krak des Chevaliers, Tartus, Bodrum and Rhodes (from which they had been progressively driven by generations of Turkish armies). On New Year's Day we flew into Sicily and spent a week on a flying tour of the island's impressive ancient sites. Greek colonists settled much of the coastline of Sicily, and left behind some of the most complete and impressive Greek (as opposed to Roman) temples to be seen anywhere. Soluntum, Segesta and Agrigento all boast temples that put the Parthenon in Athens to shame. The Roman mosaics in Piazza Armerina are the most extensive to be found anywhere, and Syracuse, although less visually striking than the big temple sites, was once the most important Greek city anywhere, and the home to one of my favourite mathematicians and scientists, Archimedes; its archaeological museum is vast and overwhelming, but well worth seeing. Palermo, with its air of seediness in the historic centre, was the only blot on the landscape, but the impressive mosaics lining the massive cathedral of Monreale made up for modern decay. We drove up to Naples, spending the night near Rosarno, in Calabria; the day after we left Rosarno, the town exploded into violence, with racist mobs running hundreds of African migrant workers out of town. That seemed appropriate, for the section of Italy running from Calabria up to Naples is the most economically depressed and Mafia-infested part of the country. Naples itself was a shocking dump of a city, a failed civilization that made Albania's capital Tirana look like a miracle of town planning. At least it had great pizza and a fantastic museum, maybe the single best collection of Roman antiquities anywhere on the planet. That's because Naples is surrounded by a series of A-list attractions: Pompeii, Herculaneum, Oplontis, Paestum and the Amalfi Coast. Despite 4 days of heavy rain, the history and well-preserved nature of the towns buried by Mt. Vesuvius really brought everyday life in a Roman town to life. In some ways Herculaneum overshadowed its bigger and better-known neighbour Pompeii: smaller, better preserved, more open to visitors (most of Pompeii was off-limits when we were there) and somehow more evocative. The single villa at Oplontis was enjoyable for its wall paintings and overall state of preservation, although getting there involved driving through the hellish failed city of Torre Annunziata with its decaying buildings, mountains of trash and air of general menace. Paestum, the Greek town south of Naples, contained three more almost intact Greek temples that were like a visual history of the Doric architectural style, from its Egyptian-influenced roots in the Archaic to the elegant perfection of the late 5th century BC. The natural attractions of the Amalfi Coast merited a drive-by, but with the steady rain, we didn't see very much. What little we did see, however, suggests that the hype about "the most beautiful coast in Europe" is warranted: sheer cliffs tumbling into an azure sea, with vineyards, citrus plantations and picturesque villages clinging to the rock. And then, sadly, it was time to flee the rain and drive back to San Vito, where we were fed like royalty by Joanne's Zia Severina for five days. I got my bike wheel fixed, finally got to see Fra Odorico's tomb in Udine (third time lucky) and then drew a line under the Silk Road Ride by riding the repaired bike into Venice and right to the site of Marco Polo's house. Manuel organized the local press to come out and see my arrival, and it resulted in three news articles (in Italian) that you can see here and here and here. As well, there is a short writeup in English here. I came up to Switzerland by train yesterday as far as Vevey, and then rode my bike up to my sister's place in Carrouge through a heavy snowfall. The plan is to stay here for a little while before heading off for one more bike adventure; Ethiopia is the likely next destination. Then a return to Canada to start trying to write a book about the Silk Road Ride. Can't wait to get started! Peace and Tailwinds Graydon