|
|
|
After spending Christmas with our friends Ben and Isabelle we traveled to Livigno to meet up with my brother and his family who were there for a one week skiing holiday.
Livigno is in Italy but very close to the Swiss border and at around 1800m is one of the highest settlements in Europe. There are two ways to get there in winter - either from Switzerland near St Moritz or from Italy near Tirano. We decided to go through Switzerland as the distance was almost identical but it was significantly cheaper with tolls.
The pass from the Swiss side is very high, in fact we descended quite a long way to get back down to Livigno. It hadnt snowed in a while, but the roads werent that well cleared and were pretty icy making for VERY slow and stressful progress. Getting a 3.5 tonne, 3m high camping car sliding on ice near sheer drop offs is not my idea of fun... Anyways after the pass which may (or may not) be called Davos it was a simple run through to Livigno with a fairly short one way tunnel emerging next to a beautiful alpine lake. The toll booth and the border crossing are built on the dam wall.
We thought we might be a bit of a rarity as a winter camping car in the mountains... Wrong. Camping cars were absolutely everywhere and most of the people seemed to be staying in them. We, however, wimped out and stayed in the same hotel as my brother - Hotel Europa. The hotel is a little out of town (about 15 mins walk) but is fairly close to the Motellino (?) gondola. Its an old hotel and frankly has seen better days but the staff are amazingly friendly and the food was very good. In fact I dont think Ive ever stayed in a hotel where everyone was so nice!
We thought we did all the necessary with the camping car and drained the water from the taps and then turned the water pump off. Wrong again. We forgot to leave the taps open and now the kitchen tap is sitting in the top cupboard in bits :-( Not too surprising as it was -14 during the day at times.
Mostly though it was very nice and very sunny - although it hadnt snowed for about 2 weeks so the pistes were pretty icy even up at 3000m. I did some snowboarding (badly) and Claire took a few ski lessons and improved quite a lot. The ski instructor was a chap named Fausto who, conveniently, owned the bar at the bottom of the lift 23 - if you need lessons hes your man! We really needed a babysitter to get in some more practise but even doing a few hours a day I was knackered. I put this down to the altitude - not the fact I havent got my bike off the back of the truck for 2 months...
The week we were there is the busiest of the season and around the ski school was pretty hectic, but away from lift 23 it thinned out considerably with very little queuing for lifts. I guess with decent powder it would be busier all round. A snowboarding aside... why does the easiest piste always have the most difficult chairlift - grrr.
New Years Eve was spent in the hotel eating - the Italians use NYE as an excuse to extend dinner from 8 - 12. We arrived to a HUGE buffet meal with seafood as the big attraction. We didnt know how we would eat it all - then we found out the buffet was the entree! Several courses later it was time to bring in the new year, and of course let off the fireworks.
Livigno takes its fireworks seriously. From about 11:30 to 1:00 the fireworks were going non stop in all directions including big 'organised' ones from the pistes to lots of medium sized and smaller ones which you can buy (this is a novelty for an aussie). There was enough explosive power on the patio of our hotel to start a small avalanche and even Jay got bored of watching them, after an hour or so...
The next day was spent doing some duty free shopping (for some reason Livigno is duty free - diesel here is 0.68c/l instead of 1.12c/l in Italy!) and I managed to find 'Russian Standard' vodka at cheaper than Moscow prices! Jay also did some skiing and tobogganing and we sampled a little more apres ski in Faustos bar.
The day of departure it was snowing, of course! My knees really needed that powder as well. So we broke out the snow chains for our journey down the mountain. We went the other way out of Livigno this time through the pass beginning with F, towards Italy and this was MUCH easier, even with snow on the ground and with the chains on. Horrendous traffic jam on the way into Tirano though - 5kms took about 2 hours on perfectly clear roads :-(
Livigno is not the quaintest town in the alpes - and we didnt really see it at is best as it was covered in dirty ice - but even after living near the mountains for 18 months it is still spectacular being there in Winter. All in all a great week catching up with family and in the snow.
Dave.
previous travel blog entry
Would you like to comment or ask a question?
Sign up for a free account, or sign in (if you're already a member).