Before the skiing segment of the
Austrailia trip, my mom, dad and I spent a few days in Melbourne. Australia is
in the UTC+10 timezone, which is 16 hours ahead of Colorado. However, we viewed
our day as being six hours behind that of MST, just on the next day. I
personally have a harder time travelling West than East, and had trouble
staying awake past 7:30 on our first night.
The next day, we rode the public tram
through Melbourne just to get a feel for the city. We walked by the Yarra River,
stopped in a vintage clothing shop and visited the Australian Centre for the
Moving Image - a free interactive film museum. ACMI had the history of
televisions and movies along with many exhibits, including one for virtual
reality. I was glad to have been in South Africa a week before, as both
locations had cold winter conditions.
After a jetlag induced nap in our hotel
room, my family went to the Queen Victoria Night Market. We talked to some of
the locals at the event, who explained some differences between the day and
night market. Generally, the day market had more retail shopping booths
scattered with some restaurant locations, but the entire area was far more
spread out. The night market was more of a social gathering crowded with other people.
All of the booths were under a massive pavilion area. One side of the pavilion
had live music while the other had a fire eating performer. The majority of the
stands sold food with a few retail shops scattered throughout the area. These
sold more unique products, like lighted balloons, wood carvings and dream
catchers, whereas the day market sold every day items like towels or grocery
fruit and vegetables. During our stay we made a visit to the day market as
well.
My family and I also travelled to an
interactive Australian wild life preserve. Australia has an extremely unique
ecosystem containing marsupial species found only on its island so most of the
animals at the preserve I had never seen before. That night we visited the
Chinatown segment of Melbourne and the next day we met the rest of the ski
group, consisting of five boys, four girls (myself included) and two coaches.
Our first ski resort destination was
Falls Creek. We drove for six hours mainly uphill, and it was as if we travelled
through several continents. The first segment of the drive was in an empty arid
desert that was fairly warm. Next, we passed through eucalyptus forests that
were humid and remnant of a rainforest. Finally, we reached the snowy roads
leading up to the mountain. We checked into our apartment- which was
conveniently located on the mountain for skiing in and out.
There isn’t much of a town surrounding
Falls Creek, mainly hotels and restaurants. I was therefore surprised to learn
that my dad has a friend who lives at the resort year round- Steve Lee- another
ex racer, who is one of two Australian men to ever win a skiing world cup race.
Steve picked my dad and I up for dinner at his house one night, on a snowmobile
towing a bench behind him. This was the most efficient way to travel across the
resort as all the roads were below the town, and the paths between the
buildings were under 3-4 feet of snow.
The weather was variable in Falls
Creek, it sometimes got very foggy, but we had five solid days of training with
two slalom races. At these races, we had one personal best score, which means
that one of our athletes scored their lowest FIS point result ever (counter-intuitively,
the lower points the better).
The next race series was at Mount
Hotham, also in Australia. This time our group stayed off the mountain, in a
town called Dinner Plain, about a 20 minute drive away. The races at Hotham
were part of the Australia New Zealand Cup, a continental cup, and were
therefore quite high level. There were skiers from Germany, Switzerland,
Austria, the USA, Slovakia, Norway and Italy. Some of them had competed in
World Cups or the Olympics.
Of all the places I have skied this
summer, (Les Deux Alpes, Tiffindell SA, Falls Creek AUS, Coronet Peak NZL)
Mount Hotham’s snow conditions were the most familiar to me as they reminded me
of a Colorado winter. The series consisted of four races- two slalom and two
GS. From those races, five BSA athletes scored personal bests and lowered their
points. There was one scheduled day where it was too foggy to hold a race, so
we had to take a weather day, and leave Australia a day later than
expected.
Skiing in Australia was almost as odd
as skiing in South Africa. In most other ski resorts, the main divider
between two ski runs are pine trees. Occasionally, there are patches of spaced
out aspen trees that you can ski through but of course in the winter they have
lost all their leaves. In Falls Creek and Hotham, the only trees present were
eucalyptus. In some areas they were dense enough to create separate trails like
pine trees. But certain in areas where the trees were small and spaced out, you
could ski around them and under them, as if it were a wooden obstacle course.
Additionally, even though it been winter for months, none of the trees had lost
their leaves resulting in a beautiful, if not confusing winter scene.
After ten days of skiing, six races and
four travel days we were packed to leave Australia. The next destination would
be New Zealand for another series of four races. I am actually in New Zealand
now, and will let everyone know how the trip goes soon!
Reece
