As I stated, I am not a natural skier. And that makes me an oddity in Wanaka, which is a town built on snow. Not literally, in a three-little-pigs sense, but a white-gold rush is driving the population boom of both permanent residents and the vast transitory population of international snow bums who stop off in Wanaka as part of their quest to live in some perpetual winter.
Every morning the roads up to the skifields are lined with European nationals, hitching a ride with their skis over their shoulders or (more commonly) their boards on their backs. I thought it was a glamorous existence, until we give a lift to one, an Austrian woman, who says she's on a minimum wage and has to live all winter in a hostel because the influx of new residents has meant a shortage of rental accommodation.
I managed OK on my first day at Cardrona - possibly the best intermediate field in the South Island, with long, gentle, groomed runs. Tim Dennis (a rarity in the Wanaka skiing world because he's actually a New Zealander) takes me for a lesson, and the long forgotten techniques start to come back. I only fall down maybe one million times. But I am still slightly apprehensive about the next day at Treble Cone, because Treble Cone has long been the preserve of real skiing extremists, the that's-nothing-I-once-skied-all-day-on-a-broken-leg-with-bare-feet-and-no-skies type of hard men who seem to relish the most difficult and uncomfortable skiing. However, the mountain's marketing manager Anna Yeates is very keen to assure me that Treble Cone has loads more intermediate skiing than it used to.
In the past three years, she says, it's invested $12 million in making the mountain more approachable for beginner and intermediate skiers. She sets me up for a lesson with a Canadian called Ian Morrison, who says he was born wearing skis, which sound wince-making in the extreme. He tries to teach me to stand properly. "Pull your bum in," he says to me, again and again, "watch me." Treble Cone has one of the most spectacular views in the country, looking over Lake Wanaka, and yet I spend all morning watching Ian's bum, trying to get my stance right, muttering "Watch me, watch me" childishly under my breath.
Nevertheless, I progress so well that Ian decides we should go off piste and "ski powder", since the mountain was lucky enough to get a heavy fall of snow the night before.
There are a lot of skiers who relish the thrill of skiing fresh powder. I wish them well. In vain, I point out to Ian that skiing powder is just making things unnecessarily difficult for ourselves. It's like walking through a swamp when there's a perfectly good path, I say. But Ian is resolute that I'm ready for the challenge.
We start down the powder-lined natural half pipe. I fall down. Ian helps me up. I fall down again. This continues for so long that I feel like we're in some sort of Marx brothers skit. Eventually, with infinite patience, Ian coaxes me down the mountain, by which stage quite a lot of the new snow everyone was so excited about is secreted about my person. I have to have two glasses of mulled wine before I can contemplate skiing again.
Anyway, Wanaka. Great fun, lots of lovely places to eat and go out. And skiing, which even if you are not very good at it is a great excuse for all sorts of wonderful things such as mulled wine, open fires, winter accessories and potatoes. And the snow is great this year. I know most of it personally.
