YOU!… I wanna take you on a T-bar

I wanna take you on a T-bar, I WANNA TAKE YOU ON A T-BAR, T-BAR, T-BAR. The Electric six appropriated anthem echoes triumphantly through the Fernie mountains, thundering off the snow capped Polar peak, and then dances verily through the five bowls of Siberia, Timber, Lizard, Cedar and Currie. In chairlift locomotion we soar high above the pristine white landscapes passing far beneath our feet (our tiny distant floor shadows wave back at us). We are lucky enough on a few occasions to enjoy the spectacle of cloud inversions in which we travel through the overcast murk at the base of the mountain and ascend to feel quite literally on top of the world. It’s nearly always dazzlingly sunny at the top of the Polar Peak mountain and the views to the base will remain perhaps the best ours eyes will ever witness (again). We continue to enjoy spikes of powdery snowfall and manage to snowboard perhaps the best and most varied landscapes you could ask for.

Whilst still on the mend from the Bolivian Death road, Lucy’s knees have to fight over which one gets to wear the solitary knee support in our possession. Have you ever seen kneecaps fighting? They’re known to be kneedlessly aggressive. There really is no kneed for it and frankly, I kneeded to intervene before it got too ugly. (Sorry) (I kneed to stop) (AND AGAIN! GAH!)

More on Lucy’s knees in a future instalment of this blog…

We cross paths with our kickass snowboarding mate Vish who coincidentally is working and living in Fernie as an artist/designer and we hook up with him and his lovely lady wife Claire a few times for a number of extrava-curry-ganzas. Vish and Claire have travelled to many of the places we’ve been and many of the places we are destined to go. Inside the very aptly titled Curry Bowl Indian restaurant, we share an affinity for Saags and sagas and hang out lots over the next few weeks. Vish and Claire join our snowboarding gang and we enjoy their inspiring semi-spiritual quotes, life lessons and motivational videos which make us want to perpetuate our own travelling mission. ONWAAAARDS!!

There is a Canadian law that states that cars must stop to give way if pedestrians are attempting to cross the road. What we weren’t expecting was for this to apply to Motorways. On one insane occasion, four lanes of traffic stop to let us cross. We lift our jaws off the floor and slip-slide across the icy asphalt. This feels wrong, it feels too polite, too nice. It’s actually lovely.

That same evening, we end up tagging along on an evening social event to watch the local ice hockey team, the Fernie Ghostriders. One of the skiers from the Non-stop course is getting progressively merrier and wider motioned with his flapping beer arms and ends up dropping half of his beer on my head. After my recoil and horror from the spilt beer (a tragedy in itself), a profuse apology materialises which extinguishes the soggifying situation. He then buys me a beer of which I spill absolutely none at all. Except for if you count inside my mouth.

The entire Non-stop gang are there to witness the locals take a bit of a pasting. The funniest and most aggressive-polite hockey heckler sits in our vicinity making it his mission to troll the opposing team’s goalie (Mouseau).

“MOUUSSEEAAAUUU… MOUUSSEEAAAUUU… I USED TO DELIVER YOUR POST”

“MOUUSSEEAAAUUU… MOUUSSEEAAAUUU… DOES YOUR MUM STILL CUT YOUR HAIR?”

The man is relentless for the duration of the game and provides some comedic solace to the home crowd who go away with a loss from the local team.

Later on, keen to make more Fernie friends, I demonstrate my “Put a pint on yer ‘ead” party trick and with the aid of James, my spotter, I balance a multitude of configurations of pints on my head. The pint glasses are arranged from rim to rim, to base to base and a number of variations between. I manage a scary number of heavy glass tankards and stop the rest of the pub in their tracks (all secretly hoping they see a British idiot receive a face full of glass when it comes cascading down to earth). Thankfully I escape injury and leave the pub unscathed, on this occasion knowing when to quit while I’m ahead. We take a walk to a quiz night run by Goff for the Non-stop gang.

In a plot similar to Slumdog Millionaire in which life events just happen to fall in such a way as the main character happens to know all the answers to all the quiz questions, simply by serendipity or fate, history or experience, Goff sets a quiz which is based upon “Guess the intros”. Every song seems to be lifted from my musical noggin-box collection as I proceed to destroy all challengers that dare to take me on. I lift my team to victory and we quaff a mighty volume of Jagermeister saluting, cheersing and thanking the quiz gods for tonights magical, mystical, quizzical knowledgey power up.

Every morning we hit the slopes and shake off mammothian hangovers straight from the ice age. The base of Fernie mountain greets us with a 80s RAWK/hair metal soundtrack which gets the group motivated and ready to throw our mittened devil horns in the air. The tunes play over the Tannoy speaker system and we look forward to hearing Van Halen’s Jump and Kiss’s I was made for for lovin’ you every single morning. For four weeks we feel like we are living the Hot Tub time machine lifestyle and it feels like a bit of a dream really.

To the hilarity of her group, the only injury Lucy is afflicted by is one of groin strain. I offer to kiss it better, but of course Lucy declines. We spend nearly every day on the slopes and find ourselves improving a lot. I start to become attuned to my snowboard and we get on a lot better after our initial bust-up.

The instructor exams loom and as a group, we get through the slight monotony of the extreme repetition of the teaching sessions. The wear and tear of snowboarding everyday takes its toll and I start to develop something that matches the symptoms of tendonitis. The pain increases and by the time exam day rolls around, I am taking four ibuprofen every two hours to get through the day. I know this is a very bad thing and begin to feel empathy for sporty, athletic types that trash themselves in the name of their profession. My injury is slight in comparison to the stories you hear of fellow boarders/skiers knocking themselves out, breaking wrists, and of course stretching their groins. I soldier on and manage to get through the two days of exams with a certification of instructoryness at the end of the day. I celebrate by balancing a four pint pitcher on my head.

The weeks get boozier as the Non-stop numbers dwindle. People complete their courses and make the inevitable journey back to their homesteads. We hang on tooth and nail for another week of boarding and subject ourselves to the debacle of a Goff led Australia Day party night at The Royal in the centre of Fernie. By the end of the night my face has been the canvas for an abhorrent aboriginal/Vegemite finger painted mess. Lucy takes a bullet by volunteering to lick it off my visage. Ever had somebody treat your face like a gravy lollipop? It’s truly not as good as it sounds. We argued that we both individually had the worse deal in that competition but we won our round anyway.

Our time in Fernie comes to a close and we say goodbye to the jolly nice skiers and snowboarders left on the course. It’s sad to say goodbye, but we feel ready to leave as our stay in Fernie is the longest we’ve stayed rooted in one spot since the beginning of our trip. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah and Sarah (might have missed a sarah or two), Gav, Del, Josh, Matt, Zac, Michael, Rob, Steff, Bronte, Natalie, John, Rachel, we’ll miss you all. Our lovely new boarder mate James offers to take our new snowboards home and we wave at him, promising to meet him and all our new snowy mates next season.

Our shuttle bus driver to Calgary mumbles a number of stories at a volume which are only just audible and I am the one who unfortunately gets the shotgun passenger seat. To exacerbate things, a French Canadian lady talks endlessly into her phone in a callused tongue. This makes it a very difficult ear straining stretch to connect with the driver for the next five hours …

The house we stay in is eerily silent and empty with no other guests to be seen, heard or detected. Nobody meets us and we’re not even sure we are in the right house for the first couple of days. There is a weird lack of anyone about. Signs of life are present inside a fully stocked fridge situated in a swanky homely, slightly cluttered open plan kitchen/diner, but we still doubt wether we should be here. The view overlooks the centre of Calgary and we are pretty certain the four story house is worth some big Canadian Canuck bucks given its location and niceties. Yorkshire Tea and Scottish Shortbread offer themselves to us as treats placed invisibly. Ooh and theres’ a brilliant outdoor hot tub which unfortunately doesn’t double up as a an actual time machine to take us back to our brilliant time in Fernie.

Calgary looks like a cuter version of America. For a major city, it feels widely placed with so much space on offer (it has skyscrapers but really doesn’t need them). A tunnel connects all the adjacent shopping centers so the weather doesn’t affect spending in the city. As the weather turns bitterly cold and for the last time on this trip, we dig the thermals back out.

Our stay sees us witnessing snow leopards gnaw on rabbit skulls and female Gorillas puking up their lunch and then eating it.

We send our snowboarding gear home in perhaps the worlds tightest packed case (we both have to stand on the case which feels so heavy and dense, I wonder if it may actually be closer in physical characteristics to a black hole) and wonder if we’ll see it again. Our time in the snow comes to an end and we look forward to the actual near polar extremes of the Cook Islands, and the insanity of a temperature switcheroo of nearly fifty degrees…