A few trips into the Highlands are clearly not a sufficient road test for a new vehicle. The news that Bids, Mike et Al had booked a chalet at La Tania in the French Alps’ Trois Vallees resort for a week generated the attractive idea of AlpineBongo. An 8-day epic involving an unsuitably small campervan, 8 days, and a 1200-mile trip. The trip would have been expensive on my own, and although Duncan wanted to come he was representing the environmental consultants he works for at a public enquiry. Luckily, Dunc saw sense and when his turn came for the stand, he got naked and decried his employers as baby-eating drug dealers hell-bent on turning the World’s rainforests into vast oil refineries. Enquiry successfully thrown, we left Edinburgh well-prepared for the enormous journey to, er, Rosyth, some 15 miles distant. A knocking sound from the rear of the van caused worry as we approached the Forth Bridge; luckily further investigation found the cause to be Jon, who had cable-tied himself to the van roof in order to get a free trip across. We threw him into the Firth and made tracks for the ferry terminal.
The Superfast Ferries-branding of the Rosyth to Zeebrugge boat is a bit of a misleading moniker given the ship takes 18 hours to cross the North Sea. Nevertheless, this left plenty of time to get supersloshed and sober up before committing ourselves to wrong-side-of-road driving and avoidance of beret-wearing peasants tangled in long strings of onions.
We had elected to travel via Luxembourg in search of cheap diesel, and tried and arrive there with as much space in the tank as possible. Mission accomplished, we freewheeled into the filling station on a favourable tailwind, with a spluttering van running on vapours.
The satnav took us South through France on a series of comical peage-avoiding diversions, including a lengthy trek up to the Swiss Alps via a sheep-herders track. As a whiteout descended, so did we. The short section of peage near Geneva was avoided by adopting a confused expression, keeping the foot to the floor, and firing shots at the tollbooths from a rocket launcher fashioned from a spare set of telemarks.
After an overnight break in a commodious recycling centre near Albertville (with en-suite lake), we headed up into the Alps for the first day’s shredding. The poshski chalet boys were located bathing in Caviar at a slopeside caviar-bathing facility near Courcheval, and we spent the rest of the afternoon together falling over as the whiteout conditions we had experienced crossing the Swiss Alps arrived in their French counterparts.
Most chalets are run by young hip dudes on a career break, whereas the poshski boys’ one was run by Arthur Hetler and his wife Eva Brown, both pensioners with a deep distrust of van-dwelling pikies. Hopes of free showers and the odd bit of cast-off caviar in a doggy bag were shattered, and we commiserated by taking a sauna in a local hotel and unsuccessfully persuading the Swedish Women’s Naked Volleyball team to come back to the van for a party.
The next day brought blue skies and pretty damn amazing powder skiing. Fresh tracks across the three valleys, and plenty of safe off-piste. Duncan – with relatively few boarding hours under his belt – took to the fresh like a Peruvian oil worker to a whorehouse.
My friend Alex is working as a chalet host in Reberty near Les Menuires, so we decided to head over there for the night. The sat-nav once again took us on a phenomenally dangerous route via several black runs and a short section of Via Ferrate, but the Bongo took it in its stride and we found Alex at another Silverski chalet. This one differed from the La Tania premises by being on the piste, having a Jacuzzi, sauna and log fire, and not being run by the Stazi.
The welcome we experienced was rather different to La Tania, where knocking on the door had resulted in the owner looking at me like I was Gary Glitter asking to sit for a while in the ballpool at the local McDonalds. Beers were thrust into out hands and we ate dinner alongside the guests, and were introduced to the local manager. After heading to the pub, Alex, his girlfriend Lynn, and a couple of other Chalet hosts headed back to the Bongo for a van party on the driveway of an adjacent chalet. The 3.30am party closedown was sufficient to generate reprimands from the chalet occupiers, distressed at a vanload of pikies swigging stolen wine a few feet from their balcony.
This was distressing. Only a few days of living in the van and everyone thought we were gypos. We headed back to La Tania (via signposts rather than satnavs) to meet up with the others.
Van safely parked up, it began to snow – and then snow some more. I woke up and tried to leave the van for a piss; no such luck, a drift had piled up against the door. I climbed out of a window and disappeared into the snow.
The resultant conditions were astonishing; as the snow continued to fall we were forced to more or less stick to the same low-level run. Not that it mattered, the chest-deep snow meant for some hilarious skiing. The next day’s skiing was considerably brighter, and Al and I ventured to the top of Courcheval’s Suisse run, a black of some repute. Gnarly local snowboarders were gingerly testing the virgin snow and looking worried. Al and I noted their concern and decided this was no reason for two unfit lardy amateurs not to have a go. Quelle horreur!
I was on a set of old skis I’d borrowed from Al, far too short and with the DIN settings torqued up for an 8-year old ballet dancer. Needless to say, several faceplants were made and several hours spent poling around for skis scattered in the powder as a result of collisions. We made it down, but with my skiing ability resembling those of a one-legged blind hippo.
By the end of the week, the van smelled worse than Bernard Manning’s jockstrap, and had more disgarded gear strewn about it than 70 Strathearn Road, Marchmont. Time to go home.
Having had a trouble free drive down from the Mountains, we stopped in the extremely picturesque setting of Annency to watch Man U thump Liverpool, at a handy pub. Then the snow started, and followed us! The nice warm night at low levels we had hoped for evaporated and an overnight stop somewhere near Paris resulted in snow in the car park which would (semi-accurately) have been described as “day of the season” if it fell on Glenshee.
Bits of the drive back to the ferry were rather worrying; we wondered if we had been premature in not taking snowchains. I took half an hour off driving to look at some steam trains in Belgium, and this restored my confidence.
Superfast Ferries generated more ammunition for a complaint to trade descriptions by arriving in Rosyth 2.5 hours late. I generated further grounds for dismissal by arriving at my desk 3 hours late with Russell Brand’s hair and the smell of a dead rat. Or someone who’d lived in a van for 9 days.
