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| La Plagne, FranceThis place is fairly high on my list of places not to go back to. In the middle of March, a supposed off peak period, the place was packed. In addition, the locals are content to let their dogs shit all over the place. The layout is strange to imagine, but think about a village set up in the mountains, now replace the roads with cat tracks... that's how many of the villages are laid out. Now consider riding down the cat track to get to your hotel and have to ride over dog shit. Nice. Not. Having off loaded that... I did enjoy a number of runs here. In between Belle Plagne / Plagne 2000 and the Bellcote glacier were a number of runs that were great fun after a dump of snow... although there was a lot of flat terrain that you could get caught in. The glacier itself seems to spend most of its time closed, and when it did open, despite the altitude the snow was crusted and crap. We basically rode back to the main area straight away. Now in France, you can generally go on a closed run if you want to, but when the slope is North facing, and there's been a large amount of snow, complete with a strong southerly wind, and then a sudden rise in temperature, you don't want to go ducking the rope... but people did. Madness. So yeah, reasonable place for a week, but not a repeat place, and in hindsight, I'd rather have done elsewhere. It's worth knowing how to ride drag lifts, because you can escape some of the lift lines sometimes (thankfully). One upside though is that this place is not laden with expert powder hounds, so when it dumps, you can usually get some damn fine runs. Yeah, now I think about it, some of them were epic... maybe the place isn't so bad after all! |