Le Franco Phoney

As promised, here’s an entry about last week’s Defi Foly here in La Clusaz, where people chuck themselves into freeing cold water just for fun. Actually, this year, the temperature was a balmy 8°C—a big improvement after last year’s iceberg-ridden lake. The winner was, predictably, a mono-skier, although the Pope Mobile fancy dress entry was quite funny. What better way to describe the even than with this really good video from the day. We’re the group with the big white marquee on the hill, but you only see us twice. If you get bored at any point, feel free to fast forward to the fancy dress at the end, or check out the photo below the video.

So, I took this photo morning. Two people trekked to the top of La Balme and left two glorious tracks down the heavy blanket of fresh powder. To get to the mid-station alone takes around an hour, and that’s the easy part. They must have started before the sun had even risen. Since then, they’ve walked back up a few more times and left a series of tracks throughout the day. Fantastic effort by them. Click on the photo below for a close-up. Things to notice in this photo:

• fresh tracks to the left;
• mogul course now almost completely covered (bottom right, visible in enlarged photo);
• fresh powder, blue sky, empty, halted chairlift (boo!)

One other thing that I’ve noticed during the day is that the two people have traversed left underneath the chair at the top of the peak. This is something that happens all season, as people attempt to get fresh tracks further away from the chairlift. But they’re the only two people up there! What are they thinking? Surely they could be spending their sliding time going down instead of across since they have such a huge expanse that is still mostly untracked. Or am I wrong? Is there a reason they’ve done this? Please tell me if I’m missing something here.

The ski season ended today when La Balme closed the lifts at 5pm. I drove past at around 5.30 and all the telecabines (bubbles/gondolas) were already off the cable that connects the car park to the ski area. And did I go skiing today? No. I caught last lifts yesterday, but there was something else going on at Les Confins (a small village of La Clusaz) to mark the end of the season, so I went to that instead. The event at Les Confins is called the Defi Foly and it’s an annual event which, I guess, is designed to distract us from the end-of-season sadness. I’ll write more about the Defi Foly next time because I haven’t had time to sort through the photos from today. Instead, I’ll talk about winter for the last time for a while.

This week, the snow was typically icy in the mornings and slushy to the point of waterskiing in the afternoons, but fresh snow fell just last night, and a whole lot more is due in the next few days. From my place, I will see a whole untracked mountain of fresh snow. Yes, this does sound lovely, doesn’t it. And people are always telling me how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place. However, while the visitors and seasonaires complain that they can’t see any of this because they have to go home, they clearly don’t understand the torture of seeing so much fresh snow and not being able to track it out. Okay, I could get some skins, wake up at 3am and start walking up to a peak with my skis on my feet and my snowboard on my back, but even the reward of fifteen minutes of untracked powder by the time the sun rises is not enough for the hours of effort that goes in to getting to the top for me. It is for some: last year, I could see their tracks on the fresh snow that fell after the resort had closed. But it’s not for me. No. Winter for me is officially over, and it’s time to find the bikini, get back into summer sports and start doing some road trips. Watch this space.

I broke my front tooth a few days ago. How? Well, how do you think I did it, given that I live in a ski resort, I love the half pipe on my snowboard, I prefer to attack moguls on my alpine skis, and I’m only just getting the hang of telemarking. Any of these would provide a great story to accompany the stitches in my lip and the jagged tooth I picked up after my accident.

Actually, I tripped over the shoelace of my snowboard boot in a car park and landed on my face. Yep. I hadn’t even touched the snow before my day was done.

My lip needed two stitches according to the doctor who looked, and acted, about ten years old. He started by ousting my friend from the room, then he sprayed some sort of numbing spray on my lip and said: “Just let me know if you can feel anything and I’ll give you an injection instead.” I’m not sure which bit of “ARGGHHHHH” the doctor didn’t understand while he pushed the needle through for the first stitch, then continued to pull the string through. Instead, he said: “Oh, that’s not very good because you moved: I’ll have to do it again” and pulled the entire length of string back through, which snagged on my flesh and stung every millimetre of the way back out. He did give me the injection after this, but he really couldn’t have made my experience much worse. After Doctor Pain’s actions, I was prepared for some sort of hell at the dental surgery.

But wait, I have to wind back a bit here, because the first person to help me when I tripped over was actually a dentist. He found my tooth, prevented me from fainting, and gave my friend the number of a good dental sculpter friend of his. His wife handed me tissues to sop up the blood spurting out of my lip. As my friend went to make the call to the dentist here in La Clusaz for some emergency patch-up work, a skier walking past stopped and said: “My dad is the dentist here, but he’ll be at lunch now. The appointment was arranged for me while I tried to slow the fountain of blood from my lip. So, that’s two dental connections in the car park alone. While I mourned the breakage of my otherwise strong and previously presentable teeth, I did feel a lot of gratitude for all these lovely people who had stopped to help, and I was just lucky that they had suitable dental knowledge. Okay, we can fast forward to the dental surgery now.

So, a few hours after the trauma of Doctor Pain and a stitched, swollen lip, I headed to the dental surgery. I have never met a nicer dentist than this man. Well, the one in the car park was pretty nice too, but of all the dentists who have worked on my teeth in various countries, this one was definitely the nicest. While he sculpted a new, improved-shape front tooth for me, we had a chat about a different son of his, who I know to look at, but who I don’t know personally. But this is the joy of living in a village. He knew the (only) other Australians in town, and we found common ground. I explained (with a numb tongue and probably lots of saliva) that I was still waiting for my Carte Vitale (as described just a few days ago, here), and he was very sympathetic and charged me less than he could have. In fact, he charged me less for sculpting a new front tooth than Doctor Pain charged me for stitching me up and splashing some Betadine around.

I would love to have my old front tooth back, but if I were to use a cheesy wedding speech cliché: “On this day, I don’t feel like I’ve lost a tooth. Instead, I’ve gained a dentist.”

Today, I headed down to Annecy, motivated to sort out my health care card, called a Carte Vitale, which means I will finally stop paying for all my own medical expenses and let my taxes work for me instead. French paperwork is renowned for being tedious and lengthy: I gave up importing my favourite car (edition not produced in France) from England because the paperwork was so horrendous, and indeed confusing.

So, I left La Clusaz armed with birth certificates, passports, and as much other paperwork I could find to prevent any hold-ups. I arrived in Annecy and parked in a central car park called Place des Romains and walked to the CPAM office I had been instructed to go to. After the usual “take a number” system, the staff member who looked into my request explained she could not process a health care card for me: I needed to go to the office on the other side of Annecy and request one there. She wrote down the street and office name for me and off I went. Somehow, I found the office despite the name being completely different to the one she has written down. I explained my request to the receptionist, but she got stuck when she discovered I had no social security number.

After some phone calls and people shuffling by to check out my paperwork and tut that I had no social security number, the woman instructed me to go to the office in Avenue des Isles—the road beside the Place des Romains car park, where I had started the day. I couldn’t be annoyed at the wasted hours because I had expected this to happen. My days are much less stressful when I’ve set my expectations low, and if there’s any French paperwork to be done, I’ve discovered it’s best to set my expectations as low as they will go.

The good news when I arrived at the third office was that it was the right office and I was the first in the queue. The bad news was, when I eventually did get to see someone after a long wait in a corridor with three seats which were soon in demand as the corridor filled with others, that the woman helping me could not find my details on the computer system in front of her. More tutting; more French I didn’t quite get; more confusion on both sides of the table. She scribbled some notes on a piece of paper and sent me on my way without looking at any of my papers. No Carte Vitale, and no receipt that I had been there. I have to wait for something to arrive in the mail in order to apply for a Carte Vitale, and I’m guessing that I will be required to return to Annecy and relive today’s events all over again. I’ve included a picture of the Carte Vitale in case I never actually get to see my own.

I really should have just gone skiing instead.

La Guêpe Ride is an annual event held in La Clusaz which sounds a lot like Gay Pride to French people. Apparently, this is another one of their plays on words, but nobody really understands why, since the event is a telemark ski weekend! Festivities include a parade of telemarkers bombing it down the slopes of l’Etale, at least one person dressed as a wasp (”gûepe” is French for “wasp”), booze, freebies, and the chance to try telemarking with a ski instructor for free, along with all the special equipment. Last year, the “telesnow” (a snowboard with telemark ski bindings attached) made an appearance, but I didn’t see it this year.

I did, however, see a girl in this rather ugly Burton one-piece. Yes, it’s yellow and black like a wasp, but I’ve seen her wearing it all season when everyone else was in normal gear She’s a great skier and I have a lot of respect for her for that, but I just can’t see how that justifies the outfit. She was there to match telemark skis with people’s abilities. Sure enough, she had a chat with me about a ski I was just about to try.  She knows her technical stuff and she was very amiable, but I just kept staring at that outfit. She spoke quickly in French. I got that the brand new, next year’s model Black Crows skis I was about to try out might be a bit snappy for me due to the wide nose on them. She went on, but I missed most of it, trying to concentrate on understanding her French but failing dismally and staring at the furry hood and the yellow zigzags.

Anyway, she was right: I felt like a beginner telemarker all over again, wobbling with every turn and feeling the skis take me where they wanted to go. I took them back after one run and said they felt like shovels on my feet to the yellow-zebra girl, but I’m not sure if she understood my French. No worries: all the staff and the other telemarkers hanging around are very accepting of ‘etrangers’ (foreigners and non-telemarkers), so I didn’t feel that my bad French was a problem for this lot. In fact, telemarking is a bit like owning a VW camper: you’re part of a special club and you give others in the club a special wave when you pass them. I switched the Black Crows for a pair of K2 Work Stinx and fell in love: they coped with the springtime superslush but were still forgiving of my dodgy ability and let me stay in control. After a few more runs and some burning thighs, I jumped back on my own telemarks and burnt my thighs some more before the parade of wasps could catch me and hassle me with their club-hand-wave to stay.

Just a few weeks ago, almost a metre of snow sat outside my door here in La Clusaz, and the sunny, south-facing hill behind me was still covered in snow too. As I look outside my door right now, I see green grass. Further in the distance, the snowmen and the kickers have melted into the thin layer of snow that’s acting as a piste for now. Spring arrived with a snap less than two weeks ago, and the warmth of the sun is melting the snow faster than I remember in seasons gone by.

Fortunately, I took some photos of some ice formations underneath the Fernuy telecabine (aka bubble/gondola/egg, depending which country you’re from) before they melted away. Now, the stark, brown rock shows no sign of the pretty ice formations that grew throughout winter.

But first, let me start with a photo of the St. Jean de Sixt roundabout. As you can see in the photo below, taken about a month ago, it’s festive, and wintry, and it has been like this since December. The decorative lights have gone, the snow has melted, and the roundabout awaits new adornments for spring. You can click on the image text below for larger images.

The final photo shows a sunset from last week after the last snowfall we had. I haven’t altered this photo: the sun really did make the trees orange like that, helped, obviously by the snow sitting in them. The clouds at the top have made the mountain vanish into the sky while the sun changed the colour of the trees until they finally darkened with the night sky. The photo really doesn’t do the scene justice. You’ll have to take my word for it, or see it for yourself next time. It really was magnificent.