Le Franco Phoney

Someone very close to my heart participated in last weekend’s Defi Foly and he did his runs with his waterproof camera stuck to various places. The video from his snowboard is rather bumpy! This one, however, taken from a stick in his hand, proved quite stable, but unfortunately made it harder for him to balance once he was in the water (I think he was more concerned with keeping the camera balanced than himself!). So, if you want to experience the speed of the snow ramp at around 65km/h, click on the video below.

He left from the first height out of three. Imagine how much faster the speeds are from the top height without any turns. I guess the force of hitting the water from just the first ramp is enough for most contestants.

Okay, it’s time to come clean: I’ve been in Australia for the past few weeks, but I had plenty of blog topics to keep me writing about France. By the time you read this, I’ll be holidaying on an island on the Great Barrier Reef before heading to Brisbane for a family wedding, then back in France next week.

Until then, I want to write about how easy it is to idealise a home country when living abroad. It’s natural for anyone to compare countries, but I’m now comparing France to an Australia of ten years ago. In that time, a lot has changed: toll roads; skim-milk Big M flavoured milk; water restrictions from drought; new stadiums; and slower traffic just to name a few. Although I’m a fan of the low-fat flavoured milk, having to restrict showers to three minutes, using the government-provided egg-timer on a suction cup for the shower tiles is not as attractive. I guess I’ve used Australia as my normality guage for other countries I’ve lived in. I have idealised my country.

For example, I explained to my French travel partner that he wouldn’t need to pack a rain jacket because ‘Melbourne is having a drought and it only rains a few times a year so we’ll be fine.’ It rained two days after we arrived, then again the next day, and then again the following day. At least that might prevent shower times from dropping further. Then, after parking the car outside a shop advertised as ‘Open 24 hours a day’, we noticed, as we walked up to the door at 6.59am, that the staff were just unlocking the door after being closed overnight. I guess they just didn’t specify which days they’re open 24 hours.

When we spent a day snowboarding at Mt Buller, we hired equipment rather than lugging our own from France. Our first attempt to hire failed massively. We had our equipment fitted and had chatted to the ski technician about where we live in France and how pointless it would be to bring snowboards with us from there just for one day. His assistant then asked for a credit card. Apparently, my debit card isn’t good enough because there’s a risk that we’ll flee the country with, shock horror, very old ski hire crud including smelly boots, damaged snowboards and heavy bindings. I asked my partner if he had a credit card, but like me, he only had a debit card. They said if my driving license had been Australian and not British, it would have been okay. Errr, what? Common sense did not prevail and they said the risk of us not returning their old, worn out hire equipment was too great. We were stupidly honest with them about only having French debit cards, which are labelled only as ‘Carte Bleu, so on our way to the next shop, we agreed to give them a Carte Bleu debit card and not tell them it was a debit card. It worked and we hire some equipment.

Idealism shattered, I’m pleased to say that the positives have by far outweighed the negatives: friendly shop assistants; native birds tweeting outside my mum’s house; great food; a return to sunny weather; a fantastic city to explore, and so much more. I still call Australia ‘home’.

…but I’m still looking forward to winter in the French Alps.

The year of 2009 has so far been good, if not a little odd. For example, I saw this car wedged in some trees after it skidded off the road backwards. This happened in the afternoon when the roads were completely dry from sunshine all day. The car is from this area (the 74 in the number plate gives it away), as was the car in my front yard one morning last year and the one in the creek opposite at 2am one morning. Maybe they’re just bad drivers here.

Meanwhile, in the snow park on Monday, I saw a snowblader land in a heap after trying a small kicker. He didn’t move in time and the next jumping blader then landed on his mate. They were then landed on by a third blader. Where is their common sense? Most of us check that a mate has landed safely and cleared the area before we take the jump. A kid barely old enough to be on skis somehow dropped off the huge red kicker in the park, much to the disgust of some La Clusaz team dude who was training teenagers how to do big tricks off it. Everyone had to wait while this kid zigzag-snowploughed down the landing zone, while his mother apologised profusely to the La Clusaz team dude who just shook his head.

Over in La Balme, the cool kids were trying out next year’s snowboard range. Their presence meant that bling came to La Clusaz. I missed the public testing day without realising, and was told I could not enter or try any boards. However, I know a ski technician who was allowed in, so together, we shared inverted camber snowboards, double inverted camber snowboards, and a few other boards too. While I waited for him at the gate with my own snowboard, a man asked me if I liked my board. I said I wasn’t sure as I had just bought it off a friend, and he said “Oh, it’s just that I’m the head of Rome snowboards in France, so I always like to ask people if they like their Rome boards.” Actually, I wish I could now tell him that I do quite like the board.

At the end of the day when the testing was over, the man at the gate let me in. However, my snowboard—a 2007/08 model—was not allowed. I had to leave it at the gate. Did he think I was planning on dumping it? What on earth was that about?

La Clusaz is now returning to normal with the bling snowboard tests over and this week’s bladers all too tired to keep going or injured from doing stupid things. This means I can write part two of my thoughts on French bakeries very soon. Tasty.

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.

With even more snow falling in La Clusaz, my mountain-biking buddy from a few weeks ago and I took the opportunity to visit a friend in Tignes and hit the piste for a pre-season slide.
Although the wind prevented the telepherique on the glacier from opening, all the t-bars were open, and as the only snowboarder out with four skiers, I’m currently sporting a bruised behind from the t-bar…erm…bar. In case you don’t know, skiers rest the bar at the very top of their legs where their legs meet their cheeks. Snowboarders, however, have to go up sideways and take all their weight on their inner thigh and the cheek nearby. It also works your muscles a bit more when riding a t-bar on a snowboard and after the fourth journey up, I was wishing I had skied instead. My forward leg was like jelly.

The snow was fresh and powdery, but visibility higher up was not so good. So we stayed lower down and I played on a friend’s 2006 Nidecker Diablo (pictured) which was lots of fun. It’s much softer than my Burton Custom, but it felt just as hardy when going at speed. This board didn’t flap, yet the extra softness provided great suspension over the few small bumps that I could find on the well-flattened piste. I managed to find some powder that had blown into a gully the whole way down one side of the t-bar and that’s where I noticed that the board had that sinking feeling. Just one centimetre shorter than my Custom, I expected it to float just as well. It did float, but it felt like the back end was sinking - a feeling I haven’t experienced on a board before.

We ended the day in Tignes with a hot chocolate and drove back to La Clusaz, satisfied that the first day of the 2008/09 season was a good one. Meanwhile, more snow is due to fall this week. Winter is coming!