Friday, February 18, 2011

How to have a ski trip: an experienced skier's guide the futile process of preparation and execution

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Something that I have learnt is that there are two types of people in this world... People who understand snowsports and people who don’t.
I fit into the former category and recently I went on a ski trip to Japan. Allow me to explain to you the process of going on an international ski trip.

Step one. Select your country (prey).
If a country wants the Newby family to come and give it a visit, one way of dramatically improving the likelihood of our tourist dollars being spent there is to have had the foresight of developing skiable terrain over the past tens of thousands of years. Like moths to a flame we are called to visit countries that we know nothing about, drawn to them by stories of fresh powder and six-seater chairlifts whose hideous metallic and noisy presence cuts through the beauty of the surrounding serenity much like the ski runs themselves that viciously scar the formerly pristine mountain below.
In December of this year, like a woman possessed I screamed at my mother and brother “JAPAN! JAPAN! JAPAN!”. Because my mother and brother are both skiers they knew perfectly well what was meant by this ancient call of the snow lover... It was a request. As you know I am unemployed, poor and have only my dreams to keep me warm at night and as such my life requires Mum to bank roll any good times. The Bank of Mum despite receiving no assistance from the US government during the great financial saving of arses of 2010 found courage from deep within and replied to the call and said “It shall be so.”

Step two. The preparation.

Country now selected via the rash decision making process as outlined above, step two can take place.
Firstly skiing is so exorbitantly expensive that you must work yourself half to death in order to get the funds for the holiday. Additionally because you must have full time work in order to pay for this outragely expensive activity you will have little to no annual leave for actually spending time of the slopes. There will be no visiting of culturally significant places, no time. There will be no learning of the language, no time. We come, we ski, we leave. It’s a transaction. A country whores its mountains for money and we on our end support this industry via supplying the demand.
When you are not working to raise the funds to ski, you spend your time attempting to get remotely fit enough to actually ski. Skiing involves a series of muscles that no other activity on Earth requires and it can be really difficult to find the time to work out your ankle muscles and such. You also have to be flexible because falling over results in you balancing your entire body weight, ski boots and skis on your spine whilst your limbs flail wildly around to test out the amount of centripetal force that your joints can endure before you snap into eight pieces. Like a butchered chicken.










Step three. The last minute disaster.
Having now spent one gillion dollars on the ski trip which is entirely unrefundable, disaster must ensure. Passports being lost, crises at work and so on (use your imagination, that’s the only limit when it comes to last minute disasters). This year it was of the “you must endure some sort of inexplicable and entirely unnecessary injury” variety of disaster which is a popular choice of the Newby family. This time it was me. I wasn’t looking where I was going and I smashed my foot on the edge of a chair during a conversation with my cat about the progress of her recently lodged complaint to the catering department. Toes broken. Toes that are required to be squished into a ski boot for hours on end every day for 8 days straight.
But the show must go on. You tend to underplay this injury so that your already stressed out mother doesn’t flip out at the prospect of having wasted so much money. Quietly your toe turns purple, hidden in a shoe awaiting the verdict from your brain on whether or not you will be able to amputate it on a flight that does not allow knives.










Step four. The departure/arrival

The majority of your time spent in the gym is actually to prepare you for the immensely uncomfortable chair that you must spend a minimum of 10 hours in whilst on the plane to your destination. As soon as your spine has finished becoming chair shaped you must then jump up, run to your connecting flight carrying a huge suitcase, 6kg bag containing ski boots and another bag containing skis that are both heavy and ingeniously designed such that when carried, your body contorts into a position as awkward as a conversation between Tony Abbott and a pro-union indigenous lesbian who manages an abortion clinic in Brunswick.
The result of the preparation process is that you have no time to do any research into the country you are visiting. You also barely have any time to pack. Thus upon arrival to this country of choice you make a series of cultural faux pas and realise that you forgot most of your stuff.
My brother told people at work that he was going skiing in Japan and people were saying “Hokkaido?” and he was amazed at the number of people who knew the finer details of Japanese geography. It was only when he got to Japan that he realised that Hokkaido was the entire Northern island of Japan and not some tiny ski resort town. Now this sounds stupid but in order to have the time and funds to go to Japan in the first place he had been working 10 hour days for the two weeks before trying to install an entire vision based quality insurance system in a factory before he had to jet off. Both my mother and brother went to the airport straight from work and went straight from the airport to work when we returned. Like I alluded to earlier, skiing is not for the faint hearted.



To find original pink map of Japan see http://www.japaneselifestyle.com.au/travel/map_of_japan.html
Day one of skiing you have to go and buy one of the crucial and hugely expensive pieces of equipment that you left behind. Fortunately this does not take much time because you are pretty used to shopping for this piece of equipment because you forget the exactly the same item every year. At home a huge pile of sunglasses awaits your return and the induction of a new member to their crew.











Step five. The actual skiing
And now we ski.
Riding in chairlifts and sitting in the hotel give us plenty of time to discuss the shear effort of getting the slopes, chaos at work, the progress of a series of injuries, equipment malfunctions, frozen bits destined to fall off at some point and the slightly haphazard design of the networks of chair lifts that service the mountain that could have been done better if it had been planned by people as intelligent as us. Whinging and bitching are interspersed with the occasional piece of skiing.
This conversation is; however, dotted with the occasional question... “So where to next year? Utah? Canada?”
The truth is that we love it. When you are freely riding down a tree lined, fresh snow covered run looking out over a view of Mt Yoti, a gorgeous volcano who is calmly (for the time being) overseeing the proceedings, you feel like you’ve really been given something wonderful and for free. You live in the knowledge that if the volcano becomes upset, she will spew lava all you. Suddenly the pettiness of your life gives way to the extraordinary sensation that nothing else matters. Work, boys, injuries, money can all forget themselves because right now, I am alive and there is a volcano who is allowing me to fly.









 Step six. The trip home.
Much like the trip there except with nothing to look forward to upon arrival except a tonne of work, poverty and the abuse of a hungry kitty.

THE END
Oh and yeah... As for my toes and back, they’re doing OK much like our dear friend Shelley.
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