holiday

I wish we were there for another day. It takes a day to be reac­quain­ted with how everything works; then the second day whizzes past faster than the ski­ers com­ing off the top of the moun­tain. This time, how­ever, I did end up explor­ing more of Thredbo, hav­ing finally conquered the first-​​timers part of the ski field. It was dif­fi­cult, how­ever, to describe this explor­ing as being much of a success.

I now have rather fond memor­ies of our first attempt at the next level up (the so-​​called “easi­est” trails). Well, Zhiyan had the com­mon sense to pull out early, and soon after that, I real­ised Daniel – along with our only copy of the map – had van­ished too. So Tommy and I inched for­ward past the deathly-​​steep cliff face, and some­how the trail turned into this – what seemed to us – ridicu­lously steep path. (We worked out later that we meandered onto a more dif­fi­cult path. We should have read the map more care­fully.) The thing about ski­ing is that once you start, there’s no turn­ing back, so we gave it a go, but quite soon, both of us were down, skis off. Tak­ing our skis off was a mis­take, because there we couldn’t get the skis back on with the amount of ice that had formed on our boots. We then had fun stum­bling through quicksand-​​like snow, which was determ­ined to con­sume the two of us. (Hint: never walk through the parts between the trees.) We some­how stumbled back to a chair lift sta­tion, count­ing our bless­ings that we were able to extric­ate ourselves. To add to the exper­i­ence, the chair lift down was down­right scary – it was steep, windy and a long way down. By the time the chair lift dumped us back at the top of the Fri­day Flat area, I was stunned to the extent that I pretty much couldn’t ski at all. But we made it back. Alive.

Me in the hap­pier parts of the ski field

On the second day, I was up there again, this time to take pho­tos and play with the snow with Ru Jih. Wong, who was also with us, said he wanted to ski back down, and I fool­ishly agreed – I had stud­ied the map now and yes, I was able to identify the cor­rect path this time, but I still couldn’t ski down. The skis came off, wouldn’t go back on, and it was another walk back down to Mer­ritts. Tried twice, failed twice.

From Thredbo, we also brought back the find­ing that UAI is inversely related to com­mon sense. One of the chair lifts had a closed inter­me­di­ate sta­tion. The chair itself passes very close to the con­crete plat­form of the sta­tion. The res­ults: Daniel was the only one who com­pleted the oper­a­tion suc­cess­fully; Zhiyan didn’t get any­thing dam­aged but ended up being car­ried up to the top of the moun­tain; Tommy got one pole snapped in half and the other bent; and I got both my poles snapped. We had car­ried them between our legs.

Tommy and I with the out­come of our misadventure