We are currently stuck in the UK banging our heads against a continuously changing, bureaucratic wall. Doing a huge amount of things to officially make no progress in what we are trying to achieve!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yip, that’s right, we are trying to get British government departments to do their job.
Well we finished up in Austria with a couple of great weeks of warm sunny weather and soft slushy snow. The odd game of touch rugby and beers in the sun all done in shorts and a T-shirt. Then the big clean down of the chalet (which seemed to take weeks but was only three days), followed by a week in resort were we moved into another chalet and pretended that we were the guests! All in all it was a fantastic season. We had a great group of staff to work with, who all became good friends. The company was the best! The complete opposite of the company we worked for in France, years ago. If anyone is ever interested in doing a ski season in the Alps like this then we can definitely recommend Ski Val as an employer. Cheers Sarah and crew you were great!!!!! We also managed to turn the old pizza wedge skiing technique into some charging free riding and had the pleasure of some of the best snow anyone could imagine or wish for. St Anton am Alberg gets the big Two Thumbs up from thekarenandbenshow!
Sarah (our resort manager and all round legend) managed to hook us up with a ride from St Anton to Chamonix valley, France. Door to door service on top of a great season… What a girl!
So we found ourselves in Argentiere, a small village up valley from the town of Chamonix, all nestled below the huge massif of the Mt Blanc range. We were based at the Gite Le Belvedere. An old run down guesthouse run as a mountain hut in the valley bottom. Rooms were basic bunks with four beds a room, five rooms to a floor (one toilet and two showers per floor), and three floors. A communal kitchen and dinning room too. This was a great, cheap place to stay. Full of climbers and backcountry skiers and with a great atmosphere. There were always people coming and going who had skied or climbed a route to give advice, and the owners were French-Canadian so were even friendly to the English! The sad thing is that they have had their lease cancelled and the whole place is going to be gutted and turned into luxury apartments for the rich! A sad state of affairs for a village like Argentiere, it has for the most part avoided the commercialism of the larger town of Chamonix down valley. I guess it’s the same as the way Wanaka has gone down the Queenstown path over recent years. So anyway, we were in the area for ten days and had a perfect forecast. The winter season has warmed up pretty fast over the last month and France seems to have had it worse since the snow line was now up at about 2000m, much higher than it had been in Austria. But that’s not all doom and gloom in Cham’ as there is another two km of altitude to play with in these mountains and being glaciated has plenty of snow. We were hoping to get in a bunch of ski mountaineering and maybe some easier ice climbs. Unfortunately there was a severe lack of ice except on really long (800+m), steep mixed (rock and ice) routes that scared us looking at them (grade 5 and 6 for those who know). And it was very warm. Ben is still missing part of his nose from climbing brittle ice in warm conditions and is not that keen on repeating the experience. However the skiing was on. Over ten days we skied numerous lines down the Glacier des Rognons into the Glacier d’ Argentiere. Spent a couple of days in the Argentiere hut (2771m) touring up to the head of the valley with runs back including from the Col de Argentiere (3549m) and the Col du Tor Noir (3534m). Climbed and skied off the Petite Aiguille Verte and climbed a snow gully up to Pointe de Gigord, both about 3500m high. We also skied the famous Vallee Blanche a couple of times. The hardest day we did was an accent of MT Blanc du Tacal (4248m), the third highest peak of Mt Blanc. This climb allows a ski decent of 2500m down the 13 kms of the Glacier du Tacul and the Mer de Glace. We did this early on in our stay as a day trip from the valley floor. Catching the Aig. du Midi cable car from the Chamonix town centre at 1000m to 3700m in just a few minutes. The cable car system here is amazing for mountaineering. Like having all weather helicopters at a fraction of the price. Not what the purest would call the best form, but definitely the European way and ‘when in Rome’…. Interestingly the altitude was not a problem until we crossed the 4000m mark when the nausea and headaches hit us. But as soon as we descended it cleared up pretty quick. We did only just make the last train down (yes train, lets just say the infrastructure for skiing here is pretty bloody good for a backcountry area). Our final mission was to climb Mt Blanc proper. And as you know our Mt trips are never totally perfect, we’ll tell you now that we did not make it. We were turned back at 4362m, 500m from the top due to a storm rolling in. Again the 2000m ski decent was pretty good though. Oh well next time…
So then we went back to Liverpool with one task to do before going to Iceland. We need to exchange our NZ passenger licences for UK ones so we would actually be driving legally in Iceland. Now this is a simple task, all you need to do is get a medical, send it in with a application form, when this is accepted you then do a written test and once you pass this you can do a driving test and hey presto we would have a UK bus licence. Sounds simple eh! We had six weeks to get this done before we were needed in Iceland but if we could get there sooner it would be appreciated. So the faster we could get this done the faster we could be earning some cold hard cash. We got the needed forms from the local post office and called up the local doctor to get the medical done. But they would not do it because we were not registered with them. We called other doctors, ten in fact, but got the same answer. We called the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority and were told that it had to be done by our registered GP. We phoned the local doctor again asked to be registered and were told they were full! We phoned the NHS and requested they appoint a GP for us and a few days later were given the contact details of the local doctor. We visited the local GP and were given a stack of forms to fill in and told to come back next week to see them. We went back the next week to find that the paper work had yet to be done and to return a few days later. We did this and were ask to make an appointment with the practise nurse for a medical with her before we could make an appointment with the GP. The next available appointment was the following week. We made this appointment but were getting concerned with the amount of time this was taking. So we phoned the DVLA again and were then told that the doctor had to be a registered GP but not necessarily ours. We then called a private doctors clinic and were a given an appointment with the doctor for the following week. We showed up for that to be told that the price had been misquoted and it would cost us £180 each and that although the doctor would do it he did not believe that the DVLA would accept it has he has no medical records to work with and that we should wait the couple of days for our new GP to do it. Who by the way would not have medical records for us either. So the next day we went to the local GP to have a medical with the nurse, which was more or less exactly the same as the one required by the DVLA but not done by a GP. So this was all done and good and we could finally make an appointment with OUR GP for a DVLA medical. Two days later the clinic receptionist called us to say that DR Greg did not do those medicals!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So this has taken a few days short of three weeks and we have spent a whole lot of time getting absolutely nowhere! But today after hours on the internet banging different combinations of things in to google, a website was found that list the medical clinics nation wide that specialise in doing the DVLA form D4 medical examinations for about £35. These are the very type of clinics that the DVLA specifically told us did not exist! Of course it’s the weekend and we will have to wait another two days to see if any more progress can be made. WE LOVE THE UK!!!!!
Although we don’t condone it, we are starting to see why the UK has a problem of violence directed towards its civil servants from the general public. The overwhelming attitude of everyone we have dealt with has been one of “I don’t know the answer to this so I’ll give a vague answer, and my opinion on what the answer should be and palm this off with the details of who might know the answer for sure (maybe) and get back to my cup of tea”. Maybe its rose tinted glasses but we miss Kiwiland.
Oh, and on a different note, we have achieved the next big thing we wanted to do after getting married. No not that, the dogs are still in the distant future, let alone parasitic sprogs. We have either become saddled with a lifetime of toil and debt or the proud owners of a piece of native bush in Peel Forest, Mid Canterbury, New Zealand! Yippy! 2700m2 of virgin forest on the slopes of little Mt Peel. How did this happen…well we’re a bit fuzzy on that ourselves, since we have never been to Peel Forest and never seen the land. But the joys of the internet and the thoughts and comments of those we love, trust (and know where they live) have helped us into this situation. Thanks you people, love you all heaps, especially Jim and Gabrielle.
