It’s February and the skiers are in short supply (it’s the end of the season), although you wouldn’t realise unless you visited the upper slopes.
Chamonix town and its local environs are packed with people that look like skiers but seem suspiciously like they’ve never been anywhere near a pair of skies. Not that you have to look like a skier to strap on a pair of skis, but this is Chamonix in the French Alps, home of the super skier and I wasn’t expecting there to be this many ski groupies.
Ray-Ban Aviators, Rolex GMT’s, Omega Speedmaster’s and men with streaked hair are the badges they wear, the men anyway, because there are also suspiciously few women ski groupies roaming downtown Chamonix in February. Are they at home or just not invited? I suspect the latter, having had some first hand experience: several sets of acquaintances from former lives do what I can only call ‘ski pilgrimages’; men only trip’s back in time to revisit their youth, often on motorcycles or in vintage cars.
I think the women will have more fun at home.
Our visit to Chamonix was part of a plan to spice up a usually very bland February half term holiday; we thought of the Pyrenees or the Alps. What finally swung it for the Alps was a trip we’d made to Slovenia a couple of years earlier; we flew over the Alps just as it was getting dark and the flickering, icy lights of the towns and villages below had stayed with us all that time.
The Alps it was.
We were staying a little bit out of town (we always do this because we really like exploring the periphery of places) and arrived a little late for our Airbnb check-in at a little place called Les Tines, a couple of kilometres outside Chamonix centre.
The owner was very grumpy, we never found out why, but she arrived, driven by her boyfriend very fast, screeched to a halt and told us it would be unacceptable to move any furniture. Of course we concurred, out of fear more than anything else because we had nowhere else to stay, and it was a really sweet little apartment. She never calmed down, in fact we never saw her again, even though, as we discovered later, she lived in the apartment below us. We now had a little empathy as maybe she’d had a Feng Shui inspired guest pulling furniture around in the middle of the night, poor woman.
Our apartment was next door to Les Tines train station and because we’d decided not to drive anywhere during our short stay (4 nights/5 days) this became the focus of our local travel arrangements. When we got to the station we discovered that local trains were free for tourists on production of a pass you could get at the station itself.
The snow was still quite deep so we decided to go on a mystery train journey further up into the alps towards Italy on the Mont Blanc Express from Les Tines. The train was, how can I say, utilitarian? Designed specifically for taking people places with no luxury accoutrements; this suited us (we’ve been on Indian trains). But there was plenty of space, enormous windows and a multitude of hanging straps, which were needed because the train suspension was also pretty utilitarian.
From Les Tines we went to Argentiere, quite a large town, and then onto Montroc, Le Buets and finally Le Tour. We got off at Le Tour, which is home to the cable car (the Charamillon Gondola) up to Domaine de Balme, a ski resort at the top of the Chamonix valley near the Swiss border. We’re not skiers so we wandered around Les Tines looking in people’s windows (we’re so nosy but you can learn so much about a culture with a quick peek in a kitchen or living room window), had a cup of coffee in what I can only describe as an Alpine Coffee shack, (I can’t remember the name but it’s the only one in Les Tines) and decided to walk back to the next station at Le Buets.
There was a path, but only so far. It ended at a tobogganing slope where we found a few other hardy holidaymakers. We didn’t have a toboggan but somebody lent us a plastic sledge to use, which was much more fun. When we decided to leave we noticed on our right a row of houses that we’d seen alongside the train tracks on the way up so we started to walk through the snow to get to the path that ran along the back of the houses. The snow was quite deep and our daughter was only ten at the time so it was waist high, which was ok, but suddenly it got much deeper and she found herself up to her neck, but she’s a trooper and ploughed on until she got to higher ground, we did laugh though.
We finally got to Le Buet station and headed home on the still free train.
Next day we decided to go to the famous glacier ‘Mer de Glace’, the sea of ice. You get there by taking the Montenvers railway train from downtown Chamonix up the side of the Aiguilles de Chamonix. The track is so steep that the train is a rack and pinion design otherwise you’d probably slip off the side of the mountain. The guidebooks say the 5km journey takes around 20 minutes, but this wasn’t so on the day we went, it was more like 45 minutes with the train (another utilitarian model) clanking and grinding along; but you’ll be glad because the views are spectacular as Chamonix disappears below and you finally see what you came for, the Alps in all their glory. I’d never seen anything so massive: the mountains, the valleys, the trees, even the empty space was massive. I think the diminutive size of the towns, cars and people below also amplified this feeling.
At the top, well at the top there’s an alpine playground, with restaurants, the 19th century hotel ‘Refuge du Montenvers’, The Ice Cave and views, what views they are as well; The glacier stretches out before you reaching back up into the mountain 7km (it’s 200 metres deep and covers an area of 42 square kilometres) and is surrounded by the Drus and Grandes Jorasses mountains. What we didn’t realise is that the glacier is also used as a ski slope; we stood and watched literally hundreds of skiers come hurtling down the glacier; I’ve never been skiing but it looked very, very exhilarating.
My wife and daughter took the near vertical gondola down to the surface of the glacier and the ice cave whilst I stayed at the top doing essential photographic work; this is where I found the skiers and ski groupies. The skiers looked cool in their Ray Bans, whilst the ski groupies looked decidedly uncool in their Ray Bans. It’s a bit like boats, a lot of people buy boats, moor them somewhere fancy and just sit on them trying to get noticed, not realising most people are thinking bad things about them. But the empathy I had found earlier for my grumpy Airbnb host was still hanging around so my thoughts were less harsh than they might have been another day, I felt decidedly sorry for them.
On our last day we went to Chamonix town to have a look around, but because of our no driving plan we walked. We were at the bottom of the Chamonix valley so we walked along the L’Arve river that runs into the town.
We walked through Les Tines stopping at the small church, which I think was called ‘Chappelle St Theodule’, to look at the stained glass and very old altar piece, crossed the river and walked along a track with wooden cottages on either side; very alpine, fairytale and lived in.
We walked across a small park with the cable car overhead then crossed back when we got to Chamonix centre. It’s not a picture book ski resort, rather an ordinary French town going about its wealthy tourist business. This may seem like a contradiction but the French always seem to be able to make the extraordinary look ordinary: fancy hotels with rubbish bins at the front, large luxurious houses on snarly main roads: the lack of status grabbing is so refreshing after the UK’s endless avarice and selfishness.
Chamonix town is pretty drab. This was February but I can imagine it’s still uninspiring in the summer, but, and it’s a big but, who needs a pristine fairyland town centre when you’re surrounded by the Alps. Mind you, as a keen Tennis player, there’s a massive tennis centre right in the middle of Chamonix with, and I counted, 14 clay courts. The French really know how to look after themselves.
Our walk through the woods, train ride to Le Tour, visit to the glacier and visit to Chamonix town really were a wonderland in the real world: Rolex boutiques next to McDonalds and crass tourist booths next to the three star Michelin restaurant, it’s full frontal reality, not something manicured.
I haven’t mentioned Mont Blanc yet, one of the area’s most outstanding sites; we didn’t see it, it was shrouded in cloud the whole time we were there.
C’est la Vie.
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