Head of state on the slopes

I happened to be up at Chimbalak, our local ski resort, yesterday on quite the most glorious morning. There had been about 7 inches of snow over night, and because President Nazarbayev was evidently planning a visit (we worked this out from the solid presence of policemen and people scraping ice off the road all the way up there), the slopes had been pisted even before 10am when the lift opens.

Chimbalak, and Almaty in general, will host the 2011 Asian Winter Games if a certain development company gets its act together and manages to upgrade the infrastructure in time. The credit crisis has taken a serious toll on this much-leveraged firm, and while their vision and ideas for the city were obviously ground-breaking and impressive originally, their cash flow management leaves much to be desired. Having had an entire summer to work on putting in new lifts and upgrading the frankly rotten facilities at the top of the hill, there has been no change at Chimbalak except for the removal of the car park closest to the piste, and the installation of tons of plant which is now sitting in the snow mainly unused. The result is that skiers have to park on an unpaved area of mud half way up the side of the slope, pick their way through cables and past diggers and then slide down the slope to the ticket office (conveniently placed so you have to take off your skis to get to it!). At the end of a hard days skiing, you then have to clamber back up this slope, duck under the cables again to get back to your car. It is pretty basic, but at only 25 minutes from our front door, we don't actually care that much as long as some of the lifts are working.

From time to time the president likes to have a few runs, and Tuesday was one of these days. He will be 70 in a couple of weeks time, but President Nazarbayev is pretty spry for his age. He brought with him around 30 honchos and heavies, camera men and assorted hangers on. They then stopped the normal flow of skiers making their way down to the chair lift, and off he went.

The person on the chair lift with the red jacket is the President of Kazakhstan. 

It left me wondering how many current heads of state go for a quick ski during their working weeks!

Let it snow let it snow let it snow

We are still without a permanent home, and the weather is getting colder and colder, the snow getting closer and closer to the town, creeping down the mountain sides every day. Our container of possessions (and all the ski socks) is still somewhere in China, due to arrive next week. But without a home to unpack it into, we are a bit stuck. 

But with husband in the UK this weekend, empty suitcase in hand to collect my multiple internet shopping purchases, at least the kids will have winter wear when he gets back from his trip. And with this in mind, the girls and I drove up the hill to see what Chimbalak Ski Resort is like. 

It was raining all day in town, a really grey Sunday, and it was all I could do to muster the troops and get them dressed, wrapped and booted up and into the car. But at least, with Almaty being a small place and there being one road to the mountains, it is not hard to find your way around. We drove up Dostyk Avenue into the mist and rain that has been hanging around all weekend. The outside temperature dropped from 4 degrees at home to minus 2 when we stopped in falling snow, just past the ski lift start. It was so wet and cloudy that I couldn't really get a great idea about the place, but the kids were delighted to jump out of the car and cavort around in the white stuff for an hour or so. 

Then we went to the cafe (note the use of the singular) at the point where the piste ends and the lifts start for a cup of tea and to have a mooch around. There were people snow boarding and skiing and sledding, but it was such a wet day, it was not packed and the snow is still not deep - light enough for there to be the odd bush pocking out of the top of the snow at the bottom of the run! It was snowing steadily though, and in a couple of weeks there will be piles of it everywhere. Quite a contrast from desert-like Korea where the only snow is on man-made pistes, and the surrounding hills are tinder-dry with leaves and sticks of winter trees. 

We are all really looking forward to going back for some skiing action. 

Next weekend we are due to go back to Big Almaty Lake for a night at the astrological observatory and I think we will need the snow tires on the truck to get there. Today, I was turning on the road with not a big covering of snow, and the car started to slide sideways down the hill mid-turn which was a slightly unnerving moment. It is a very large car, and would definitely get up momentum pretty quickly if the gradient had been steeper. One of the advantages of having despatched Grannie back to Scotland last week - if she had been in the car she would have had a fit, but the kids didn't even notice that Mummy was slightly out of control, sliding down the mountain side, and were too busy tickling each other in the back.