Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Going South

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Friday 16 February 2024 – Just one sleep to go before what is very likely to be an epic journey, at least for Jane and me, both in terms of distance travelled and of cultures explored. For this is definitely an exploration: travelling to Antarctica.

Similarly to our Canada trip, the timing of this one has been bedevilled by events.  We started planning in 2019 for a 2020 trip which fell foul of the first pandemic lockdown.  Subsequent rescheduling then fell victim to the current unpleasantness in Ukraine, which trapped our vessel where it couldn’t get away in time. The excitement has been building, therefore for the best part of five years, and we owe a great deal to the patience, persistence and good humour of Joe Johnson at Sunvil for actually pulling the whole thing together for us.

The vessel we’ll be travelling on, M/V Hondius, is not simply a sort of floating Selfridges, it’s a proper exploration ship – “the first-registered Polar Class 6 vessel in the world, meeting the latest and highest Lloyd’s Register standards for ice-strengthened cruise ships.”  So there.

This is comforting in a way, particularly the knowledge that a Titanic-style end probably doesn’t await us. But I’m finding the overall trip to be a daunting prospect, principally on two counts.

Firstly, given that we’ll be travelling via, and staying for a couple of days in, Buenos Aires (current temperature 29℃) via Ushuaia (9℃) and Port Stanley on the Falkland Islands (12℃, winds gusting to gale force 8) to the pointy bit sticking up to the north of the Antarctic continent* (anywhere from freezing point to -40℃, as far as I can work out), how to pack for the variety of conditions?

Secondly – and much more importantly – the strictures placed, quite rightly, on visitors to the Antarctic and South Georgia are quite draconian.  There is a huge emphasis placed upon biosecurity generally and fighting avian flu particularly.  Whatever the conditions, we will be obliged to wear waterproof trousers and jackets, being careful about carrying everything with us in only one waterproof bag, and only being allowed to stand once we land: no sitting, squatting or putting anything down on the ground.  I absolutely understand and support the need for and the importance of these, but it’s going to make handling camera gear into a non-trivial task, complicated further, of course, by the need to wear robust enough gloves.

Here’s our cruise itinerary, spanning some three weeks in total.

This is, of course, only an initial plan – specific destinations will be subject to weather and sea conditions, as you’d expect.  But it’s an exciting prospect as well as a daunting one.

I’m hoping to get some suitably dramatic scenery photographs of snow and mountains (somewhat different from my recent skiing holiday vistas). Also, of course, there will be plenty of opportunities to take photos of the wildlife – seals, whales and a wide variety of birdlife, from albatrosses to terns. Among all the possibilities there are nearly a dozen types of whale, over half a dozen varieties of seals and penguins, five sorts of albatross and nearly two dozen different kinds of petrel.  So I doubt there will be a petrel shortage (indeed, I expect to Fulmar boots) and I might even get a shag out of the trip. But please don’t skua my pretensions, at least for the moment.

There are many challenges ahead, almost none of which are of any great pith or moment. What photographic gear to take? Will I be able to cope with being offline for possibly days on end?

I will write about them as I go along, but I have no idea as to when I’ll be able to publish anything. I hope you’ll be patient enough to wait for and then read about the trip, so watch this space!

 

*   Yes, I know that everything sticks up to the north of Antarctica

Skiing in the ’80s and 70s

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Wednesday 24 January 2024 – Some Guy has challenged me to show myself in my skiing gear, 20th vs 21st century.

So I will.  But you’ll have to read through some  more of my ramblings first.  For every prize, there’s a price!

I started skiing in 1980, 44 years ago, when I was 27, on a visit to Sauze D’Oulx.  The fact that I’ve now visited a further eight times since then shows that I like the place.  Is it perfect? No, not for several reasons. But its character is clearly something that resonates with me.

The place has changed somewhat since that first visit.

  • The best bar in town, Andy Capp’s Pub, closed down sometime before 2003; its eponymous ski race, that I always used to look forward to participating in, therefore is no longer run. When I mentioned this race to a group of Scottish people also staying in my hotel, there was a somewhat shocked reaction as they tried to absorb the implications of running a ski race on a public piste.  But the race course was set up every week and used for racing by  punters recruited from Andy’s and also by the ski school for people who had been taking lessons. More on this later.
  • The lift system has got better – a bit. The lift near the town now carries four people at a time rather than two, but is still slow; the large number of drag lifts have been replaced by a smaller number of (better located) chair lifts; the most important chair lifts have been upgraded to high-speed operation; and a few new lifts have been installed, and these now link Sauze to neighbouring resorts in a big area called the Via Lattea – the Milky Way.  It’s great to have the possibilities of skiing further afield, but I read somewhere a telling comment that the lift operator’s business model is cost minimisation rather than market share expansion.

Some things haven’t changed much.

  • The Sportinia plateau that I mentioned earlier, is still a lively hub, with several restaurants and cafés, most of which are pretty much exactly as they were back then, and all of which provide great rest stops and a contribution to the charm of the place which (you’ll have noticed from my previous post) is important to me.

  • The best place on the mountain is still the best place – a hotel/restaurant called Ciao Pais.

  • The town is a lively place in the evenings.  There are some great bars, some dating back to 1980, like the Scotch Bar and Il Lampione, and some new ones, like the Ghost Bar. That said, I didn’t spend a lot of time in them, but that’s down to me; as a younger man, I was ever in favour of bar crawls, but I’ve grown out of that desire. Or maybe, as Robert Heinlein so memorably put it “It’s amazing how much ‘mature wisdom’ resembles being too tired”. OK, I’ll come clean; I was too tired even for a post-prandial drink in the hotel bar, far less an evening going out drinking. But I did take an after-dinner walk a couple of times around the town and it was clear that it’s still a lively place, if not quite as hooligan as I remember it.

And, finally, I’ve changed, in more than just my attitude to drinking.  I used to choose skiing resorts to visit on the basis of the extent of the ski area, as I used simply to want to cover as much of the lift system and as many of the pistes as I could.  On this holiday, I relished the exercise component of skiing; I’m now probably much fitter than I ever used to be, and my main objective this week was to ski from the start of a run to the end, without stopping (or crashing into something, of course).  This is something that I rarely, if ever, used to do, simply because I often needed to stop and rest on the way down. This week (after a slow start, admittedly), I could do a 4.5km run from top to bottom of the hill at an average 25kph with energy to spare, which I found rather gratifying at my age.

On my first day in Sauze this year, I covered 17km at an average of 18kph, and expended 747 calories doing so. On my last, I skied 18km at 25kph, expending just 395 calories, which is an elegant demonstration of how my confidence and ability increased over the course of the week. I even felt, at the end, that I was near regaining whatever used to pass for style when I was a regular skier:

A gentle potter down the piste in 1987 or thereabouts

And so to my friend Guy’s challenge – to display my skiing gear between the centuries.

Here is a selection of my various outfits between then and now.

1980, taking part in the Andy Capp Ski Race
1987 – WINNING the Andy Capp Ski Race. Be sure to clock the racing pants!
1996 – still using the Salomon boots and 205cm skis
2001 – using rented boots and more modern carving skis

And these days?  Well, the jacket and trousers haven’t changed since 2001 (just not quite so tight, these days), with one exception….

 

I used to hate wearing a hat or goggles. I only tolerated a woolly hat when my increasing baldness meant that I otherwise got a sunburnt scalp.  This year, as a precaution in case the 18-year lacuna led to a crash, I rented a helmet but was sure I wouldn’t use it after day 1.  Wrongly, as it turned out; should I ever go skiing again, I will be sure to be sporting one and using goggles as well.

And for a final laugh, here is my first ever lift pass

Will I ever buy another lift pass?  Who knows?  I certainly enjoyed myself enough to entertain the idea of skiing well into my 70s.

France v Italy

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Friday 19 January 2024 – One of the various activities that Crystal Ski had organised during the week was an outing from the Sauze end of the Via Lattea – Milky Way – skiing area over to the other end of the system: Montgenèvre, which is just over the border in France.  I had the very vaguest recollection that I might have visited there on a previous Sauze holiday, but couldn’t be certain.  Anyway, after a week of getting very familiar with the lifts and runs close to Sauze D’Oulx, I thought that a change would be as good as a rest.

I was slightly, but tellingly, wrong in that.  Read on to find out in what way….

While it’s possible to ski from Sauze to Montgenèvre, it’s somewhat time-consuming and in any case one couldn’t rely on the links being open, as high winds were bedevilling the area, resulting in some critical link lifts occasionally being closed for safety reasons. Crystal Ski had, in any case, organised a coach to take us over, a journey of about 40 minutes, at an extra cost of €25.  The coach was to depart from the Tourist information Office, which was where (you’ll remember) we were deposited on our arrival some days before – a 10 minute walk down through the town, carrying boots and skis.  So about 40 people arrived and checked in with the Crystal team, loaded skis and boots into the loading bays of the coach and hopped on board for the journey.

When we arrived, the reverse process was a little more chaotic, as people tried to unearth their skis and boots from piles of other people’s equipment

but soon enough we were heading for the nearest lift.

Montgenèvre’s skiing in split by the road. The majority of the lifts were on the same side as the coaches, but the Crystal team recommended crossing the road and heading up the other side, the Chalvet area, as this would get the benefit of the morning sun; so I hied myself thither. There was a bit of jostling for position for the gondola ride up but after only a short delay I was headed up the mountain.

At the top of the gondola, there was a very limited choice of activity – ski back down, or choose between two lifts. The nearer of these, a chair lift, was very iced up and not operational, so I headed for the other, a drag lift. As I approached it, it also stopped going, which was a bit dull. There was obviously Something Going On, as a skidoo with flashing lights headed up the track after a few minutes; perhaps someone had had a misfortune? We never knew. After some moments, people got fed up and began to drift away to other parts of the mountain, so of course the lift started again. So I hopped on.

It was a long, long drag lift – and cold. It was difficult to get an accurate idea of temperature, but I suspect it was several degrees below freezing and there was quite a stiff and chilly wind blowing.  As I went up, I looked for evidence of pistes to ski down, and such evidence seemed a bit scant.

(Actually, if you look carefully at the picture above, you can just see that there’s a track in the distance on the left.)

Having reached the top, it was clear that there was only one way down – the piste to a further lift was marked “closed”

and it was here that the difference in style between this resort and Sauze began to be borne in on me. Much of Sauze’s skiing area is below the tree line, which I find very attractive, and which helps when trying to work out which general direction one is supposed to take.  Much of  Montgenèvre’s is above the tree line, and hence very open, making the choice of direction less intuitive.  These wide open spaces are great for people who are looking to ski off-piste, but I wasn’t – it’s fucking dangerous to go off piste by oneself – so I found the area a bit disorienting.  What was even more disconcerting was the discovery that very few people had skied in the area, and so the snow was soft and deep.  Again, expert skiers tend to love this and actively seek it out.  Me? Not so much – particularly since I was on my own, meaning potential problems if I fell and incapacitated myself.  I could just about see where people had skied before and so followed this general direction

but it was hard work for me, as the soft snow highlighted the shortcomings of my technique, and frankly I didn’t enjoy myself hugely.  However, I was where I was, so I blundered about, fortunately without falling or doing anyone else any damage.  Restful, it was not – skiing in this deep stuff saw the one and only time during the week when I actually had to stop and take a breather because I was exhausted. I did, though, eventually find some satisfaction in being able to link a few turns even in the softer snow. I doubt I’d have got many points for technical expertise, but my artistic impression, consisting mainly of swearing loudly when the conditions caught me out, was certainly unique, and I have to admit that the views were pretty good.

At this point – the point at which I could really have done with a rest and a coffee, the other key difference between this French resort and the Italian one I was used to became clear – finding a mountainside restaurant was difficult, because they’re very few and far between and don’t advertise themselves with any clarity.  In Sauze, it is difficult to ski more than a few hundred metres without passing a sun deck that announces the presence of a restaurant or café.  Here, I couldn’t find any such evidence.  Montgenèvre is a purpose-built ski area, and the priority was clearly on getting people skiing rather than relaxing.

I decided to get down to the town in search of a coffee, so skied down and crossed the road.  The other side did feature some trees, but was largely more of the same wide-open space

and even standing by the main buildings, I couldn’t detect anywhere to have a coffee.  Anyway, it was getting close to lunchtime, so I decided that a restaurant was what I should seek.  I got Google Maps out and could see that there were just a couple anywhere near the skiing area, which, again, I thought was odd; I would have expected several to be available.  The first one was packed, but the second one had space, so I sat myself down to a simple, but very good, lunch of steak haché and chips with a beer.

After lunch I skied on the other side, where more people had skied and thus the pistes were firmer – indeed, icy in places.  A couple of the pistes and lifts I wanted to explore were closed, but it was a decent afternoon’s skiing.  Again, there were some fine views to be had

but I found that I had used up a lot of my energy dealing with the morning’s more challenging (to me) conditions, so I stopped skiing quite early in the afternoon, making sure that I had enough time to find that elusive cup of coffee before the 4pm deadline for getting back on the coach home.

The skiing was more varied and more challenging than in Sauze;

but, being a purpose-built skiing operation, I found it less charming.  This is not a view shared by others who were part of this excursion, for whom, the views and the existence of some very easy skiing made for great enjoyment. But I missed the charm – and particularly being able easily to stop for a coffee/beer and a rest. This is, I think, a difference in my current approach to skiing and how I used to go about things; before, I was more interested in covering ground and ticking off all the lifts and runs in an area; now, I’m more engaged by simply being active and relishing the exercise, not minding repeating pistes if I found them enjoyable. The net of this is that, at least for this limited sample of two resorts, I found the Italian experience the more attractive.

I’ve got a couple more posts up my sleeve about this holiday and how I’ve found it, so I hope you’ll check in to read them in the coming days. For now, au revoir!