Le Franco Phoney

Well well well, January is over. Where did it go? To match the speed of the month, I’m speed writing this entry as I have lots of observations to tell you about. So, first up, the Christmas tree. Not only did I kill it as I mentioned a few days ago, but then the snow dumped overnight (see photo) just to add insult to injury. It’s as if the mountains are laughing at it, rejecting it from the outside after I rejected it from indoors. I still feel a bit guilty.

Next up: today’s not-normal-ness. Today, I saw:

• not one, but two cars parked across different roads, blocking all traffic
• two women with prams walking side-by-side on a road with no footpath — and on the side where cars approached them closest from behind
• a man in a bright, almost neon purple one-piece who was not skiing and two monoskiers
• a Swiss-registered car going down a hill with its front wheels locked

Drivers, would you park across a busy street in your own city? No? Then don’t do it in mine! Parents, would you turn your back on traffic when in charge of a baby? No? Then don’t do it on slippery, snowy roads! Men in bright purple one-pieces, and monoskiers, just….why would you? Man in Swiss car, pump the brakes rather than keeping your foot on them, or better still, if you want to drive out of a ski resort when the roads are covered in snow, either have snow chains or snow tyres, or wait until the sun has melted the snow: it’s only a few hours!

Beginner style: both hands on handle.

More advanced: feet used for braking, steer with one hand, other hand out for balance.

It can hurt if you fall the wrong way...

In January, La Clusaz opens a piste by the ice rink on Thursday nights for night skiing. They switch on the flood lights and you can borrow a local sledge called a paret (pronounced “paa-ray in French”) as long as you have some identification. I’ve added some photos showing how it’s done. With friends visiting this week, we decided to have a go. We got to the ice rink but the flood lights weren’t on. The paret man wasn’t there, but plenty of people with their home-made parets were.
Eventually, we heard that the event had been cancelled “because of the storm”. As you can see from the photos, the few snowflakes that were falling were tiny. There was no wind. What storm? Well, apparently, the same storm that stopped La Clusaz from hosting moonlit skiing last night. If there are clouds hiding the moon, there’s no light, so that’s fair enough. I heard there wes going to be floodlit night skiing instead. So how can a storm stop the regular night skiing and not Saturday night skiing? My friends had unfortunately gone by Saturday night, so they didn’t have the chance to try a paret for themselves, but part of me wonders if the cancellation of the Thursday night skiing session had anything to do with the tourist office not wanting to run the same event twice in one week. Obviously, Saturday night is more profitable.

Finally, the snow. It snowed lots this week and I decided to head up for first lifts this morning with my snowboard. It was -15, not including the wind chill. Despite the snow being fluffy and powdery — and almost as knee-deep as it was yesterday, the extra-cold snow on my boots made my toes numb, and my nose was also numb, being the only exposed part of my body. I chickened out after one run and waited for a few hours at home before returning with the telemarks. Still cold, but not like 9am with its long shadows.

As I type this, I’m hearing cars toot their horns at midday on New Year’s Day. I guess they’re excited about 2010 because they’re tooting familiar chants. Perhaps they’re just on their way home from their night out, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were drunk. Like anywhere in the world, the French Alps has its fair share of idiot drivers who take to the roads and put other people’s lives at risk. When I lived in the Meribel valley many years ago, the local police would stop suspicious cars and tell the driver to get out and leave their car there. I never heard of anyone charged with drinking and driving, but I did hear of the ’second gear’ rule, where, if drunk, you simply stay in second gear, which slows the car down to be a bit more in sync with the drunk driver’s reflexes and according to those drivers, will prevent an accident or at least minimise any damage.

Meanwhile, in La Clusaz, word gets around in the pubs if the police are stopping cars leaving town. Those who have lost their license can still buy a little two-stroke car that sounds like a lawn mover and goes at about the same speed. These cars, an old but popular model here pictured, need no license to drive! When you see these cars on the road, you know you want to be as far away from the driver as possible. The drivers could be drunk and may have bought the car because they lost their license for that reason. On top of that, they’re likely to cause accidents when they’re pushing their car to the limit of 45km/h in a 90 zone. They certainly cause traffic build-ups. But I digress. Last winter, a drunk driver in La Clusaz stopped to pick up three hitchhikers. Hitching is common in all age groups here because the buses seem to stop as soon as the sun goes down. And so, these three hitchhikers were school kids. The guy driving didn’t notice a huge bend in the road and drove straight into a tree down an embankment at high speed. He survived. The three kids did not. The loss of three local kids spun the locals into action. There was talk of some sort of car pooling last summer, but I don’t know if that ever took off. I did notice, however, that St Jean De Sixt declared ‘Operation Red Nose’ on New Year’s Eve, offering a lift home to anyone who called the central number. Volunteers drove (hopefully not in the lawnmower cars), and hopefully made the roads a bit safer for everyone.

Happy New Year. May it safer than some of the roads around here.

Reputations. England has the reputation of simply closing down when snow settles on the roads. France somehow manages to keep on going. Certainly, here in the Alps, a typical local driver tackles snow as just another winter obstacle on the roads filled with the slow cars of tourists (why not overtake on a corner?), speed humps (who bothers slowing down?), late-night drunks (what alcohol limit?) and iced up windows (why drive with a fully defrosted windscreen when you can have the novelty of a peephole instead?). However, the Alps are equipped for snow: local council tractors and trucks scrape the snow off the road regularly; cars are required by law to be equipped with snow tyres and/or chains in many areas; the locals have lots of experience in driving in the snow, and the tow trucks are on standby for any accidents.

Meanwhile, in England, train networks, major roads and airports have closed for days because they can’t deal with the snow. Actually, the snow seems to turn to ice faster and for longer in England. Tragically, a bus hit some ice in the South of England and at least two people died and many more were injured. When the first emergency services car arrived, it too hit the ice and crashed into the overturned bus. While the European Alps benefit from all those services mentioned above, the average Brit is left skating on thin ice, literally. And even with all these services, I’ve seen some extremely bad driving in the past few days. I’ve lost count of the cars with snow chains on even though the roads are now totally clear of snow. A day earlier when the roads were snowy, a man shook his fist at me (leaving me bemused and amused rather than angry) after I didn’t just stop my car while he and his family walked up my side of the road (I drove beside them while no cars came from the other direction). Hello: when you’re driving up a hill on slippery snow and you stop, chances are you might not get going again. It’s a road: walk on the side of it and not in the middle, especially when the roads are slippery. I should have shaken my fist back at him. That same day, I drove along a road and there was a tow-truck winching up a smashed car. It had smashed into the side of the road. Three hours later,  the tow-truck was still there — winching a different car which had smashed into another car which was waiting for a tow truck.

After seeing all this, I can’t help but wonder if England has the right idea.

Driving along a back road toward Thônes one day, I discovered a roadside statue of Mary, protected by some lions and surrounded by candles, flowers (both real and plastic) rosary beads, statuettes and water features. Here’s a close-up of one of the two protective lions. It features a scary eye and an even scarier missing eye, some cob webs, and a rather big snarl.

Meanwhile, below is a photo showing just how close to the road this monument is (you can see a close-up of Mary and the trinkets that surround her in the top right corner, or click on the image to zoom in further). Yes, that’s a grotto on the left and Italian-style lions at the man-made gate right by the roadside.

The soft trickle of the water feature in front of Mary is drowned out every time a car zooms by on the country road, but it carries on regardless. Wax from melted candles forms stalactites near the statue of Mary alongside plaques draped with rosary beads. There is no graffiti and no signs of security against theft or vandalism. The marks on the grass by the roadside opposite suggest that many stop at the monument, but I’m unsure whether they’re here for religious reasons or, like me, out of curiosity. So many religious monuments exist by road sides here in France, but they’re normally much smaller and more secure from vandals.

Why is it here, right next to a road? When was it created? Who commissioned it? Who goes there? So many questions, and no answers at all. The only clue: some Latin inscribed below one of the lions with a passage from the bible, but I’ve no idea what it means, nor which part of the bible it’s from. I waited for a local to appear, but nobody arrived in the half an hour that I explored. It remains a mystery.

On my last road trip, I came across this signpost in a lovely little village called Aignay-le-Duc. As you can see from the big photo, that’s actually three layers of sign posts, plus a couple facing a different direction. Want to get to Echalot? If you’re approaching from the road in front of these signs, you’re going to struggle: the close-up, side-on photo below shows how well it’s hidden in the main photo. The village has, perhaps, decided that placing directions to their own local shop signs might distract tourists. I can see it now:

Driver: “Hmm, which way to Echalot?”

Passenger: “Oh who knows, but look, there’s a patisserie to the left!”

…and then they’d be heading in the wrong direction. But at least they’d have happy bellies and the locals would be a bit richer.

Something else you might notice in the close-up photo is that one place is listed twice, but written differently. Not only is there an accent on the newer sign for Etalente, but an ‘e’ has been replaced with an ‘a’, making the place Étalante.

As for those villages listed below Etalante and Echalot on the old sign (somewhere ending in ‘Les Juifs’ and somewhere else on the Seine), I can only presume that at least some tourists have put their faith in the ‘Autres Directions’ (other directions) sign pointing left — and ended up in entirely the wrong place. Not to worry: they can always find the patisserie and stop in for a snack while they try to figure out where they are.

The off-season in the Alps means the road workers are busy resurfacing roads before winter hits. For the past four off-seasons here (that’s two years), the road workers have been changing the layout of the roads and car parks and updating the drains underneath at the same time. It’s involved a lot of work, so I’m not surprised it’s taken this long.

However, there’s a road that joins Thônes, ten minutes from here, to Annecy-le-Vieux which has not been so lucky. When I first moved to La Clusaz exactly three years ago, this road was only open on one side, forcing traffic through single file. Then winter came and the roadwork signs and lower speed limits stayed in force but the workers were never there. Finally, by June 2007, the road was fixed! It was lovely to drive on, and cyclists were happy that they had a bike lane.

Then disaster struck in August 2007 — just two months after the road was finished. A dam on the hill above burst and caused a flash flood on the road. People had to dump their sodden cars and save themselves from the flow of water, but no lives were lost. The road was, of course, closed. Within a few days, it was re-opened, but roadwork signs reappeared and the cyclists’ lane was once again closed. The road workers never appeared, but the lower speed limit — to protect the absent workers — is still in place to this day. This week, the workers turned up! In three years, the road has been fully functioning for two months, yet trucks use it every day.

Meanwhile, the private driveway to my apartment was also fixed up this week. There had been huge pot-holes at the bottom of the driveway, plus a concrete drain with pointy corners that jutted out about 20cm near my garage. The entire driveway has a kind of wave system in its unevenness which acts as a rollercoaster ride. So, the lovely owners of the apartments resurfaced the driveway, but I think they must have run out of money. The potholes at the bottom are gone, but the drain is still jutting out, with the roadwork only covering the first half of the driveway. In addition, they’ve left the stones loose, so the sun warms the tar underneath each day, leaving splattered tar marks on the side of cars driving on the driveway, along with chip marks from the stones. The loose stones have started to diminish and the waves are coming back. Before,  I just avoided the potholes. Now I can’t avoid the stones or the tar, while most other obstacles remain. Still, it could be worse. I could have had roadwork signs and speed limit restrictions for the past three years.

Sunday was a very windy day in La Clusaz. Outside my window, I could see the snow being picked up in mini-tornado fashion and taken away to somewhere else. So what do you do when it’s so windy? Well, if you’re the La Clusaz ticket office, you keep selling lift passes while closing most of the lifts. The day started with four out of the five peaks open, but by midday, only one was open. I chatted later that night with an angered friend: she had bought an afternoon pass, only to discover that the few lifts open in La Clusaz were drag lifts for beginners. She demanded a refund, but she said the ticket office told her that Croix Fry/Merdassier was still open so they could still sell the tickets. That’s right: no way of getting there without a car, but they can still sell the tickets without actually mentioning that fact. My angered friend should have looked at the piste report online like my other friends and I did. We jumped in my car to get to the only open area, inaccessible on skis from La Clusaz village, dodging branches that littered the road and driving over snow drifts that had built into mini snow dunes.

With a layer of snow in my car just from the time it took to put on my ski boots, we ventured into the storm. Unsurprisingly, few people were on the windy pistes, but we found some sheltered areas with plenty of trees to dampen the wind. Shouting on the chairlifts was the only option to be heard. One panicked guy and his family came over to a drag lift worker at the end of the day after realising the lifts to get back to La Clusaz were all closed. How would he get back? Luckily, an extremely flat piste could take them back, and the road it crosses (requiring skis and snowboards to be removed for a whole five metres) was probably covered with snow from the wind. A bonus: they’d save a few minutes in the half-hour or so it would take them to get back, presuming the dad helped the kids climb the uphill sections of the supposedly downhill piste. Fortunately, we had the car. Next time, I’m staying in.

The great thing about visiting a ski resort that one of your friends lives in is that you get to be a complete tourist without having to worry about people knowing you. Of course, this isn’t so good for the friend in the resort, but when the group consists of four girls — two of them single, you can get away with quite a lot. Our first night in Tignes started off innocently enough, patting Oscar the giant dog (just 3cm shorter than the world’s tallest dog) at the Alpaka before having a few drinks at my friend’s place. We headed back out and were told off for leaving the door open at La Grotte du Yeti before deciding it smelt too much like a toilet to stay, deciding instead to chat up the barman at the Jam Bar who put up with us until we thought we should try to get some sleep before catching first lifts in the morning.

After a full day of snowboarding the next day, you’d expect us to be somewhat subdued the following night. Two girls went back to the Jam Bar and continued to chat up the barman, and by the time the other two arrived a few hours later, the first two were beyond tipsy — one becoming very giggly while the other one spoke loudly over a pizza dinner about all sorts of odd, but entertaining, dinner topics, such as squat toilets. Before we had paid the bill, we were asked not to come back to the pizzeria, but that wasn’t even related to the drunken girls.

Add into the mix a boyfriend of one of the girls, who arrived in Tignes just in time to take us away from the pizzeria of our disgrace, and who was happy to ferry the girls around while doing handbrake turns in his van even though he only has one passenger seat, and you’ve got a party in a van right there. More like a fun-park ride than a drive to Val Claret, we eventually arrived with three girls splattered in the back of the van, giggling after their joyride. We stuck our necks into Daffy’s, but continued onto a bar that has an @ symbol in its name (which I’ve forgotten) while our bloke driver faffed around at his car for another few minutes.

It was in this particular bar that a French man came over to take our order. He didn’t work there: he just wanted to chat us up, and it worked. With our driver finally finding us seated in a corner, he explained to this guy at the bar that two of us were single and two were not, and that it was up to this guy to figure it out. He chatted up one of the non-single girls first before moving onto a single one. He told her he had not had a girlfriend for four months, yet he had told our bloke mate that his current girlfriend had cheated on him. Was this payback? Who knows. He didn’t get the opportunity despite some great efforts.

My Tignes friend wanted to check out another bar, le Couloir, so she and I ducked out for five minutes to find it and see what it was like. We didn’t make it through the door for two reasons:

1. some posh kid who had just arrived in the resort kept trying to talk to us; and,
2. a dog came and sat on my foot.

So, we eventually slipped away, with one very warm foot, and a posh kid imploring us to stay for a chat. Meanwhile, back in the bar, a guy attempted to drunkenly ballroom dance with one of the others, which proves that no matter where you go in the world, alcohol makes men believe they are Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. They never are, but they’ll never learn.

We demanded that the DJ play some 80s music for us, then left, as you do when drunk, just a few minutes later. We did some more handbrake turns on the way back to Tignes le Lac before finally piling into my friend’s very small bedsit (around 20m² including spacious bathroom) in the early hours of the morning, ready to attack the mountain in daylight the following morning. Luckily, the subsequent snowstorm kept us in bed long enough the next morning to fully recover first.

Well, what a start to winter: La Balme here in La Clusaz opened last weekend, providing an entire area of untracked powder — and a few rocks underneath. With my snowboard relatively unscathed, I popped over to Tignes with some friends for Sunday and Monday. Despite the sunny weather on Sunday, the wind was strong, causing the fresh snow to feel like pellets of rice hitting us in the face at times. The glacier was mostly closed, again, like last time, due to high winds. The run down from the glacier was still rocky, presumably due to the high winds stealing all the snow.

Meanwhile, Monday was even worse. A friend in Val d’Isere texted me in the morning to say she was looking at a blizzard, while the rest of us chickened out of the 9.30 start we had planned. The fog and snow stayed, so we ventured out after a long breakfast and played on a free piste (thanks Tignes!) at Val Claret that was pretty much untracked until we arrived. That would be because there were only a few other suckers out there, but it was fun to try to see the kicker before actually hitting (or missing) it.

One of my friends chickened out of skiing, opting for ‘defrosting the car’ instead. This involved sitting in her car with the engine running and her feet over the heater vents on the console until she thawed out. By the time she was warm, the centimetres of snow on her windscreen had melted away. Meanwhile, just up the road from her, my handbrake-turn-loving friend had put on his snow chains and was happily pulling on his handbrake all around the ever-white roads of the resort.

So, two days of cold fingers on this visit, plus the day of boarding on the glacier in antarctic-style conditions in November, added to all my previous visits which mostly involved snow or high winds has led me to believe that Tignes actually means “bloody freezing” in French.

I woke up a few mornings ago to discover that the green grass was covered with a blanket of white, sparkling snow. Across the road from my place, a group of friends were having a snowball fight and one wandered further away to kick snow for the dogs to play with. See? Even the dogs love the snow, although Bruno, my cat, is less than happy about it.

Anyway, what really makes it officially winter is what happened on Saturday night. We ventured up to the carpark at La Balme, which is normally empty after dark in November. That all changes when there’s fresh snow in the vast open space. We made it up the slippery, snowy road that leads to the car park and discovered another car was already there. We saw its headlights go from side to side: its driver had the same thing in mind — handbrake turns! It’s been years since I’ve been in a car skidding sideways in the snow, and I was a little apprehensive, but it was great fun. We took it in turns with the other car to slide from one end of the car park to the other, fishtailing all the way, and ending with a 180-degree slide to go back again for more.

After three circuits, four more cars arrived. Now, the car park is big, but it’s not really big enough for six cars. No worries, the delivery van (!) driver took his van to the lower, smaller car park and went crazy there, leaving five of us all trying to hog the car park’s remaining untouched snow. After many more slides, we left the others to it: it was just too crowded, and I think we both felt a bit too old in such a young crowd. It was definitely one of those great relive-a-teenage-pastime moments, but better than that, I felt really local, with the others waving to us and smiles all around. It’s rare that the carpark is completely free of cars in winter, and even rarer for so much snow to fall to cause a spray of snow over the entire car when sliding sideways. This must earmark the start of winter.

Tomorrow, I will be snowboarding down one of the closed runs and catching freshies all day. Another sure sign that it’s winter! Bring on the snow.