Boxing Day

The snow didn't last long but it was enough to provide a fresh dusting on the rooftops and ice up the roads. The clouds were long gone and the sun was just starting to touch the mountain tops when we had breakfast so we decided to use our three-day lift passes to head up to the top of Mt Titlis (a most excellent and sniggerworthy name), the highest peak around here. It took the best part of an hour to travel up the three cable cars to the top. The last one is called the Rotair and the floor slowly spins passengers through 360 degrees on the way between stations. The Rotair goes over a glacier and we could see walls of yellowish ice beneath the snow with a few intrepid skiers and snowboarders coming down a black run on top of them. We emerged at a blood-thinning 10 000 feet into bright sunshine and a refreshing temperature of about -10. From the top of Titlis there is a stunning view across the Alps and with the aid of a guide, we picked out the Eiger and Jungfrau peaks.

They have what they call a Fun Lift which basically consists of a drag lift which tows you up a slope as you sit on an inflated inner tube. It disconnects itself at the top and you slide down the slope, spinning randomly, legs and arms waving helplessly, until you slither to a stop at the bottom. Great fun! We had a couple of goes on that then took to the start of a red run with the skiers to walk along the ridge to another viewpoint from where we could see more of Engelberg and the valley that leads to Furenalp. Low cloud had started to fill the valleys behind Titlis when we got back and it blew in waves like dry ice over the lower peaks. It didn't come up over us and the sun stayed clear and bright until it disappeared mid-afternoon behind the crags.

We rode the Rotair back down to Rotegg station for a hearty lunch of rosti and bratwurst. As we ate, the alpine choughs wheeled around outside, their shadows making them seem eagle-like as they passed over the blinds keeping the sun out of our eyes. Down another level, we arrived at Trubsee, a frozen and snow-covered lake with a chairlift connecting the Titlis and Jochpass ski areas. There was a langlauf / walking trail all round the lake and we set off along it. It was hard to tell where the lake began and ended as it was a smooth, continuous blanket of snow, half in shadow from the sheer rock walls around it. A few langlaufers were out but it must have been hard going on the parts churned up by walking feet. The new snow made that lovely squeaking-crunching sound under our boots. Once we'd completed the circuit, the sun had gone and the skiers were starting to make their way back down to Engelberg so we joined them.

We had an hour or so to kill until our scheduled sleigh ride so we bought postcards and I wrote mine while having tea at the tourist centre after checking my email and buying a sew-on patch from a very cheery and helpful man in the souvenir shop.

At 4.30 we rendezvoused with the rest of the Edelweiss party for the sleigh ride (actually horse and cart) through the village and up to a summer recreation area on the edge of town. We felt very regal perched in our two-horse open sleigh with a large furry rug over our knees and a little dog riding pillion next to the driver.

Suzanne had gone on ahead to arrange gluhwein and cookies at the park area and we clopped up to it as darkness was falling. On the return journey we gradually fell silent and were slowly mesmerised by the clopping of hooves, rhythmic jangling of the bells and occasional monosyllabic commands from the driver to his team. The soft yellow lights from the chalets with their simple Christmas decorations filled the darkening streets and the mountain tops gradually faded into the night sky, with Venus winking above Mt Hahnen through a halo of mist.

Dismal European TV, four-course dinner with ostrich as the main course, conversation, another impromptu piano recital and drinks in the lounge rounded off our Boxing Day.

Wednesday 27th

Graham's back was better but he didn't feel up to the red runs yet so Mum and I hired boots and snowblades for the day. I'd been toying with the idea of hitting the slopes in one way or another but didn't want to fork out for lessons and all the gear just for two or three days. Today was ideal as Graham gave us a bit of blading tuition and I found it very easy to get on with the blades. By lunchtime I'd got the hang of parallel turns and, while it didn't look very elegant, I was negotiating the blue runs at some speed without falling over by the time we left the mountain around 3 p.m.

The nursery slopes at Gerschnialp got pretty busy today with significant queues at each of the three lifts. There was a nice winding path through the trees to get to them which was silent except for the electric droning of the cable car and the odd shriek from the slopes.

We had lunch goulash soup for lunch with Dave and Mary who we'd met, also clutching skis, on the nursery slopes. It's about 40% snowboarders and 60% skiers mostly on long skis with a few blades and big feet as well. They're a pushy lot and getting on to the lifts was a bit of a bunfight at times but I suppose everyone is just eager to get on the snow. The slopes are still pretty bare but we've been told by more than one source that it's due to snow again tomorrow. It was sunny today although we didn't get much of it at Gerschnialp which faces north.

Once back down at base level, I took my boots and blades back to the hire shop and asked how much extra it would be to keep them till tomorrow. It was SFr 36 for today and an extra SFr 23 for tomorrow and I don't have to pay up till I finally return them.

Somewhere on the way back I managed to lose my gloves so I went back out after returning to the hotel to buy a new pair. I got a decent pair of skiing gloves for SFr 45 which was relatively cheap. Switzerland has certainly been living up to its reputation for being expensive, although we were fully prepared for it before we came.

I needed the gloves as tonight's hotel entertainment was dinner halfway up the nearest cable car run at Fluematt. About 45 of us dined in a 300-year-old alpine house on the side of the mountain. We sat with a Dutch family who have been here as long as we have and they, like many of their countrymen, spoke excellent English so we chatted happily with them through locally-grown green salad, macaroni cheese with apple sauce (odd combo but it works) and apple tart with cream. We paid for drinks but the rest was substitute for dinner in the hotel.

After dinner we took up flaming torches again and walked for an hour back down the winding road to the hotel. We were near the front and the torchlit procession spreading out behind us was quite a sight to see. Back at the hotel, the local fire brigade were on practice drill, driving backwards up the road with snowchains on, and plenty of jokes went round about us setting fire to the mountain.

Now we're back in the lounge of the hotel with books and postcards. I've lost the urge to check out Engelberg's potentially deficient nightlife; the lounge is soporifically warm and it's too cold outside to trade one for the other.

Thursday 28th

The folk round here certainly know their weather. I was told by two people yesterday that we'd have snow today and this morning it was coming down as promised. During breakfast it started to clear so Graham and I decided to go up the mountain as planned for some more skiing. We caught the hotel shuttle bus to Titlis station at 9 a.m. and I was back at Gerschnialp at 9.30 via the 1 SFr bus from the top of the cable car/funicular to the Ritz Restaurant which serves that ski area. The lifts had just got going and only three or four people were using the T-bar at the time. I went up there straight away but the fresh snow made progress quite difficult. I just sunk in and kept squeaking to a halt. Once I got going it was great to have the slope to myself. After two runs down, the ski school classes started to arrive and a queue built up. I took my turn with them for a couple more goes and felt quite smug weaving between the snowploughing students and showing off with my parallel turns.

I checked out the button lift but it was only going up about 50 yards so wasn't worth the effort and stuck to the T-bar run. I could see cloud building up above and it was still snowing intermittently so chose to make the most of the slope before it got too cloudy to see. As I was waiting in the queue for the lift, I couldn't help but listen to the country music that was wafting incongruously out of the ticket booth. As I listened to 'It's a fine time to leave me, Lucille...' I started to make up my own ski-related permutations along the lines of 'It's a fine time to leave me, left ski...' while imagining some hapless anonymous skier wiping out on the slope and flinging poles and skis to all points of the compass.

The weather suddenly closed in and the clod base dropped such that it was only possible to see from one lift stanchion to the next. Everyone carried on regardless so I queued up again and joined them in driving snow and little visibility. It made my next run down from the top more interesting though. I was sandwiched between two ski classes and followed a bunch of snowboarders down and kept the lift in view to my right. The weather improved soon after but the new covering of snow hid the ice patches on the tow path and I got thrown off half way up, rapidly followed by the Englishman behind me. It was lucky he chose the left half of the T-bar otherwise he'd have landed on top of me. This was just short of midday, my scheduled wrapping-up time anyway, so I decided to call it a day as my legs had had enough and I was white all down my front from the accumulated snow that had been blasting at me for the best part of an hour.

I paid up my 1 SFr to get back to the cable car and had a gondola all to myself for the ride down, not that I could see much as all the windows had steamed up. I handed back my boots and skis, paid up for today and walked the 10 mins back to the Edelweiss. Graham had seen me going up for my last descent from the gondola on his way down and was with Mum in the lounge when I got back to the hotel. We lunched at a stube in town and watched as a car careered round a bend in the road, the driver completely misjudging it and going into a skid which resulted in him missing the side of the restaurant where were sitting by inches. It seems to be my day for near misses.

After lunch we shopped a bit then headed up to the monastery intending to take a tour of their cheese-making facility but the builders were in so there will be no cheese-viewing till mid-January. Instead we wandered the short distance to the sports centre to watch the start of the World Cup cross-country skiing championships. The qualifying heats were being held and we saw competitors from Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Spain, Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Russia, and a seemingly token Australian. There didn't appear to be any Brits, not surprisingly, but I was surprised that there were no Americans or Canadians. They get everywhere else.

We watched them speed round the short course that's been created over the last few days, all skin-tight ski suits and rippling muscles, before deciding that it was too cold (well below 0) and retreating to the hotel.

Before dinner I did another flick through the TV channels. There is an interesting collection of channels available here ranging from ultra-local (Engelberg has its own promotional station) to Rai Uno in Italy, a selection of universally bad German stations, TVE from Spain and some French offerings. My favourite has to be channel 33 which is the wonderfully-named Pink Plus broadcast from Zagreb. It never fails to deliver surreal TV and tonight was no exception. Last night it was a strange fusion of oompah folk music and Europop, but this evening was a very odd drama with random subtitles, 60s decor, inappropriately-used Eurovision soundtrack, 70s direction and really bad 80s hair. It had no end credits and was immediately followed by a sitcom with 'Top of the Pops' style computer graphics c. 1978 and the Monty Python theme as its opening music. No wonder there's civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Dinner tonight was the usual four-course foodfest but this evening it was traditional Swiss - raclette (basically alcoholic cheese on toast), followed by apple flavoured soup then 'Sliced meat Zurich style' - we decided the 'meat' was veal, hence the coyness - and finally a yummy chestnut mousse with kirsch and honey sauce. The raclette was made to order by a chef with the biggest jowls I've ever seen on a man and we were entertained as we dined by a three-piece yodelling band of two accordions and a double bass to provide the oompah accompaniment.

In the lounge afterwards a local man who I guess is a friend of Peter and Suzanne's brought his collection of gramophones in. It was nice to hear such grandiose machines in use but after over an hour of scratchy jazz, marching bands and yodelling it got a bit much and we all retired to our bedrooms to save our eardrums for further abuse.

Friday 29th

After a lie-in, I struggled out of bed with straining muscles and creaking bones. Despite all the other sport I do, there are obviously forgotten bits of my body that I've rediscovered by skiing and I joined the hobbling ranks of other show-happy guests in the dining room for breakfast.

We'd left the plans for today open depending upon the weather, which turned out to be overcast with low cloud hanging over the tops of the mountains. That ruled out going up the sunny side of Engelberg, Brunni, as there would be nothing to see so we decided to take one of the longer walking paths out of the village to a nearby hamlet, Horbis. A hard climb up the steps by the monastery took us to a level path across the monastery meadow, past tobogganing families with shrieking kids tumbling in the fresh snow, and through trees round the ridge to Horbis. The paths are well surfaced here and make for good walking.

We came out into the hamlet just as the post van was doing its rounds. Horbis consists of about eight houses, the ever-present church and a restaurant called Ende der Welt, End of the World, which is what it must feel like living in Horbis as it's tucked into a sunless, bare scree-sloped valley at the end of a single road from Engelberg, hardly a burgeoning metropolis itself. At least the residents have a sense of humour about it!

After refuelling on coffee and hot chocolate we returned to Engelberg via the road and cut through a very des res set of apartments on the edge of town. They have their own communal swimming pool and sauna, underground parking and giant chess set, and look lavishly decorated from the photos of the interiors. We also passed by the sprint langlauf track again but the World Cup action all seems to be over. Kids were tobogganing by the track and the inflatable start gate had blown down but the team buses were still in the car park so they haven't left town yet. I couldn't find any TV coverage last night, not even on Eurosport which was still showing what looked like over-35s international five-a-side football so I don't know who won the skiing in the end. A particularly muscle-bound Finn looked like he was in with a good chance after qualifying.

We went back to the same place we had lunch in yesterday as it was good and we knew we'd get a substantial meal there to keep us going on the way to the airport. There was a brown-clad monk writing postcards at a nearby table, presumably visiting the local Benedictines from another monastery.

It was snowing again in earnest after lunch, having made fitful efforts in the morning, so we went back to the hotel to dry off and warm up for the last couple of hours before going to the station. We said good-byes to Dave and Mary and the father of the Dutch family before Suzanne took us to the train. The carriages soon filled up with kids from Stans and Luzern who had been up to Engelberg skiing for the day. We waved a sad good-bye to Engelberg as the train crept back down the steep track out of the valley.

A paltry 13 of us boarded the Jumbolino (still a great name for a plane!) back to London. The stewardess doing the safety demo in the front half of the plane had the giggles throughout as she was showing how to wear an oxygen mask and inflate a life jacket to precisely one person, a rebellious man who had shunned the rest of us and taken to the forward section on his own. The other dozen passengers spread out in the squishy leather seats, read our free papers and hoped that the snow that's apparently fallen on England wouldn't be too poor a substitute for the glory of the wintry peaks of Switzerland.