Nathan’s ski skool

We'd wanted to ski since seeing the mountains around Bariloche and finding out our trip coincided with the ski season (well kinda, if we put or flights back a few months!) was all the convincing we needed. So imagine our disappointment when we found out that the snowfall so far this year has been very sparse – dam global warming! Bariloche in particular was suffering it had hardly had any snow so we hot footed it from there up to Las Lenas just outside Mendoza – South America's premier ski resort, well we stayed in a town called Malargue about 70km away as we couldn't afford their prices! The hostal sorted out our transfer to the slopes each day, we hired some rather attractive ski gear in town and the following day we were off to the slopes. Shona had never skied before and I'd never taught anyone (I can get up and down a slope ok but teaching?!…me and my big mouth!) this could go one of 2 ways!! So after hiring ski's and buying our lift pass it was straight to the training slope and our first lesson: don't eat yellow snow! Second lesson: putting ski's on, stopping, starting, turning etc. To be honest I didn't actually have to do much she found it far too easy – didn't even fall off the drag lift the first time she used it! Where's the fun in that?! I want to teach her but have a few laughs at her expense along the way! Anyway by the end of the first day it was time to put all that hard training into practise and hit a bigger slope to show how well she was doing. This rapid progress carried on all week and finally a few comedy moments and good stacks, the best being a lift incident when Shona helping a small child off a chair lift ended up on flat on her face while the kid just skied off, plus I was sitting on the lift behind with an Argentinian kid who found the whole thing hilarious, when I then said it was my girlfriend the cheeky little sod laughed more… ok I admit I was laughing too! By day 4 we were covering lots of ground each day and Shona was improving and getting more and more confident. The chairlift up to the top run was finally open having been closed for the last 2 days because of high winds at the top so after a little bit of encouragement we headed up to 3,450m and the 7km's worth of slope back down to the bottom – it didn't start too well though with Shona falling off the lift at the top! The ski marshal kindly (and a little sarcastically) pointed us to the easier piste out of the 2 but she made it down without any real problems, must be my instructing! By the end of the week, despite her aching legs, I think Shona really enjoyed her first skiing experience and hopefully it won't take any encouragement to get her doing it again. As for Nathan's ski skool, it might have only lasted one week but it was a thoroughly enjoyable and successful week at that – although my first pupil made it so :o)