Living in a local world, travelling to Europe

A change of tact

What's with the lack of exotic destinations on this supposedly Asian travel blog? Well, once upon a time I filled up my passport and had to return home to get a new one. That was almost two years ago.

In the mean time the new passport has been taken across various parts of Europe, some of it warm, some of them cities and some of it alpine from the temperate base of England.


A travel blogger who is not backpacking? Can this be? Can you claim to be a traveller when you use a suitcase or a snowboard bag? Do backpackers go on press trips instead of the budget blag?

Yes you can. And with this in mind, have a peak at these quick tips for travel to European mountains. 

Can I just say Les Deux Alpes in France, and can I just say, I don't think it's possible to tire of that resort. All it needed was global warming to turn on it's head and have a really good dump of snow. We shall persevere for the future and keep hoping.

Thankfully the Alps are under two hours away by plane, or if you're wary of the carbon footprint, many a mountain train will take you up there. Euro star does a ski train to the mountains that could be warranted a party in itself, either way most of Europe is cheap enough to get to now and holiday deals can be found any where, including ski pass, that unless you actually don't like riding (and if so my god why!) then there's no excuse not to go.
Unless you have no friends, in which case you have my sympathies, let's form a group or use the new tinder style ski dating app, Snowflake.

It certainly is that time of year again. Where the snow addicts among us start dreaming up where we would like to spend the next six months while the sun has it's long holiday to where it seems naturally more at home- on the other side of the planet and no where near England. And then some of us remember that we now have jobs and cars and rent to pay and wonder where the hell it all went wrong? How did being an adult creep up on us and get in the way of the fun?

Or is that just me and am I just really Peter Pan?

Any way, I was here and there and everywhere and now I'm just here, enjoying the stillness with a glass of red wine that doesn't have to be kept in the fridge to stop it 'maturing' in to vinegar for all the heat.

Then there was the trip to Tignes Val Claret, a place you can definitely get tired of unless you venture to other parts of the mountain. Despite that, when the time comes to leave you still don't want to, no matter how tired you might be of the same runs. Would anyone be up for a long mountainous road trip one day when we're all millionaires?

Tignes is a great resort, especially if you like the purpose built concrete look, which I oddly do. It's easy to ski in and out, good access to a pile of other resorts like Val D'Isere, Tignes' Le Lac and Les Brevieres in the Espace Killy ski area, which has two, count em two, glaciers! It's also in the Savoie region of France, best known for yummy mountain food like tartiflette.

Bit of local trivia or mountain myth for you, but one of the villages was flooded,Tignes' Lac Du Chevril when the dam was constructed. So the story goes, some villagers refused to move to where the authorities were rehousing them and stayed with their homes even when the village was sunk. Supposedly you can see the village when they drain the dam every couple of years. It's become such seasonaire urban myth that a tv show was made about it called Les Revenants - The Returned.

Other than that the international travel has paused apart from the  press trips to Deauville and Munich. Go by the way, go for the food, for the French riviera style glam even if it is on the North of France and not the south. Go to see the architecture and resilience of post war France at Le Havre, and to eat lovely crepes. Go to sample all the cider in the region and all the horses. Deauville is Normandy and, by the by, France's biggest cider producing and stud farm region. It must be the apples.

And might I add the light. Northern France is much less polluted and more forested than most of England. After three days there I felt like my lungs had been cleared of all smog, everything was so crisp and fresh, but also warm in the sparkling sunlight.

As you can also guess Munich was a great city break and I was never far from a beer or three. Their biergartens are pristine and with the weather not dipping below 30 degrees it was a no brainer to spend half the time walking around the city learning history so we could write, and the other half quenching thirsts in a sculpted biergarten. Or cycling around on a Dutchie down to the river to cool off in melted mountain ice that trickled its' way down to Munich. Or watching men's calves saunter around in lederhosen.
Men would, and still do, wear lederhosen because it was practical while working in the fields. Not only that it showed off their legs to nearby maidens who were looking for a strong farm boy to look after them. That's a historic fact about Bavaria there and I took my lead from that fact. There really were so many men and women walking around in their national dress. You wouldn't get that at home.

Have we lost out there?

That's the short extent of my non-exotic travels in 2015. An abismal lack when put against 2014! As I said, my radius of movement has drastically shortened down to something like 3 miles a day. Being static doesn't suit me and I frequently find myself looking for an escape button before reminding myself that sometimes you have to put down the bag and actually work to find some new experience that might lead you somewhere unexpected. Like in to a van across Europe, and with any luck with some company.

Les Deux Alpes, France! Catching snowflakes in my hair

I just spent a very serious 7 months in Asia contemplating my place in this world and living off £300 per month. I ate noodles, considered Buddhism, drank far more Sangsom than is deemed past the point of unhealthy and became thoroughly sick of overnight buses and introducing myself to people every. Single. Day.

So when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to work a new festival, "come stay in a chalet, the festival is in year one. We'll pay for your flights, accommodation and lift pass", who was I to pass up the chance to play guess who with some potential new friends?

Four months after landing in Heathrow, I took off from Luton, blinked out of the window at the sun that hides behind that thick Tupperware blanket of cloud we call the English sky and kissed hello to snow capped mountains. Sometimes I take for granted how much I love this travel malarkey. This time I would be eating cheese for ten days and not noodles. This time I would also be eating snow for the amount of bruising and cold wet bum I would gain from falling over.

Contrary to that statement, I'm not a bad snowboarder. I can keep up with most boys, I can just about hold my own in the park but previous injuries have made me cautious and so I resent the somewhat back hand compliment "you're good for a girl." Thanks, that's nice of you to say, if not slightly annoying that you're subliminally making it known that girls are supposedly not as good as boys because of genetics or whatever. Not that I ignore the straight up fact that guys do appear to be more fearless (reckless?) but instead of saying that though, can we just say "you're good" and leave the gender specification out of it?

So, back to letting loose at a festival and generally having a rad time. Les Deux Alpes is in the French alpes, next do Alpe d'Huez, about two hours from Grenoble and three from Lyon. The town rests at a breathless 1600 meters above sea level and the highest glacier point is 3200. When you get to that topmost height, where the air is thinner, the sun closer and the snow about two years old, you'll see white-tipped peaks for miles in every direction and wish you'll never need to come down. This is an area of France where marmots poke out of the ground to play in the snow as you ride past.

On the way up the mountain the transfer bus swung through shuttered valley towns, bar one glaring and flashing pharmacy sign against a grey and quiet building. At this moment I hear that Moutier has France’s highest suicide rate as the sun can’t reach it through the mountains in winter. At night however, with a sprinkling of dampened orange glowing lights in houses, it feels like an exciting hint at the pre-Christmas fun to come.

Twig-like trees in characteristically French forests are trying to jolt me in to realising I’m away. I still feel like I’m in the UK- mainly because I haven’t flown for endless hours to get here. It’s very easy for Brits to forget that a whole and varying continent is on their front door and it’s something we should be more appreciative of. 

There are building works happening at Lyon airport and you can’t even tell. This doesn’t dawn on me until I’m winding through a slick, heated and well lit tunnel that runs down the side of the main airport building on the way to baggage reclaim.  In England you know if modifications are happening. orange signs yell of hazards with every step with yellow trip tape and bright cones shifting about in your path so you know that things aren’t right but we are trying to improve them in only the chaotic way that England can do this. Nothing is very smooth running in Britain at the best of times, even though we like to think we are an efficient nation. Something that goes hand in hand with the British values of puffing chests, and driving on the left equals superiority to all things foreign. Take any bus in the UK and you will be given evidence to the contrary, along with broken down trains, long car journeys and the inability to run a transport network on any weather other than mild or light drizzle. Weather is newsworthy in England and a preferred topic for small-talk. I am not so sure of the rest of Europe.

A giant statue of a bike on a roundabout welcomes us to the start of the steep upward slalom towards resort and all too quickly it’s too dark to see outside of the coach. I am left to feel the switchbacks and hairpins through the axel of the bus until the air becomes thinner and greater breaths are needed. Snow begins to appear under the streetlights that have emerged at the top of this road. We are at the bottom end of Les Deux Alpes. At the other end lies the 60ft sheer cliff drop.

There is no barrier or warning for this even when a few drunken individuals (unsurprisingly English) have met their makers falling off the edge of this. The lip is a stomach-churning trigonometry inducing nightmare and it seems testimony to a European way of thinking that they haven't signposted this hazard. Unlike in England, and America, where signs would pop up involuntarily, barriers would be raised and it would be deemed the council's responsibility to take care of any financial costs involved along with compensation. In Europe the attitude is much more, you fall off a cliff when you're drunk, that's your fault. Which, you have to admit, they have a point.

In New Zealand the attitude lies somewhere between. There are a few signs and a government scheme to prevent you losing earnings when you get injured, which doubles up as a way to prevent compensation claims, but also the ethos is 'don't be an idiot and you won't hurt yourself'. There's no health and safety law in the wild, not that New Zealand is the wilderness, but I prefer that kind if thinking to our growing culture of claiming.

Another thing I really enjoy about France is their strong cultural identity. The no nonsense - no arguments with a customer service rep, stop dancing on tables and at least try to order in French- way of living. Of course England's multi cultural environment is incredibly vibrant and there's so much that we're catered for and our culture is made more rich for it, which is always great, but there's something intoxicating about a country who still has a very firm grasp of their one solid cultural identity. Like Italy, Spain, Norway, Japan, Australia- they all have really interesting cultures that they're proud of. Most English pride comes from sayings like 'it's not the winning, it's the taking part', which goes to show our awkward abilities with sport (a few of those we made up and in some hilarious Karmic retribution, all the countries we took over and taught the sport, now far out strip us on the field or court).

Here are some things you can do in Les 2 Alpes. Go to Crepes a Go-Go for all manner of mountain meals including of course, crepes. Visit the charcuterie, go ice skating, go swimming, go to the cinema, do après at Pano bar, have dinner on a glacier after riding the inner mountain funicular, cheese out on fondue, tartiflette and raclette. Drink copious amounts of red wine, it's seriously good and usually way better priced because the French generally keep the best in country.

Here's the obvious thing you can do in the Alpes: ski. I'm a snowboarder so ignoring the boring rivalry for a moment, and for the sake of keeping my word count the tiniest bit lower, I will refer to it in general as riding. No not horse riding. Riding-a-board-or-skis. This is one of the best resorts in the world for terrain with all levels and interests catered to. You can hike up la grave with a guide and do some big back country riding, find some tree runs to slide through, stick to the wide variety of planned pistes and get in the park and tap the gnar button. Or in my case wuss out, head to the baby park, feel decidedly average, get annoyed with yourself and then wipe out on a jump before trying a big jump to get your balls back. Somehow it worked. I love snowboarding, I find that rhythmic swish and carve of edge against powder so addictive. I have to find more ways to be out there because I love it so much. And the culture that goes with it- of people just supporting each other, enjoying the sport and life a lot more than were they stuck to a computer 5 days a week. We have a lot to learn from the average ski bum.