Word of advice: when holding your skis over your shoulder, don't turn around to look for something as you will more than likely knock someone unconscious with said skis as they whip around like helicopter blades. It's still okay if you knock a stranger unconscious... You just make a run for it (read as: awkward slow shuffle in ski boots) and hope the blow to the head has erased their memory by the time they come around, so they don't immediately come after you to give you a snotklap in return. But knocking your ski buddy unconscious is a no-no. You will need your wits about you during your lessons as you both suck equally, and are likely to do damage to each other as it is.
We finally found our ski pro, who enquired as to our level of expertise, to which we replied, "We are as skilled as two year olds". Lucky for us, a few two year olds chose that moment to go skiing past us at absolute pace while ramping a few hills, so we could change our answer. Otherwise the pro would have taken us to the highest mountain and pushed us off. Those bloody ankle-biters are ridiculously good! Really smug too, which is why we might have 'accidentally' tripped three of four of them...an hour... just to show them who's boss.
The pro taught us how to put our skis on and take them off (though we found that falling was a much quicker way of getting rid of the pesky things), how to get onto the magic carpet without blikseming over, how to turn and how to come to a stop. Then he pushed us off the bunny slope which is a lot more scary than it sounds (even though the previously mentioned two year olds kept making their fingers into L shapes and yelling "loser!" at us from more advanced slopes).
Of course, the slope was made a million times more treacherous by the fact that it was full of not only other students doing their lessons but even worse... GORBs who had no effing clue. That kind of extreme learning is not for sissies, I tell you.
We finally graduated from the bunny slope and headed for the undergraduate slope which is quite a bit steeper. On my first go, I discovered the method the pro had taught us of stopping (squeezing your knees together and forcing your toes inward like you desperately need to pee) only works on slopes that aren't that steep. Excellent. From my observations, most of the GORBs thought the best way to stop was to grab hold of the nearest person, but I refused to take any innocent people down with me. Except the smug two year olds who are too quick to grab hold of. So I had my first bad fall as I was heading for a row of pine trees at tremendous pace. It was either fall and stop or wrap myself around a tree. And though various members of my family have accused me of being a tree hugger at one point or another, I made an executive decision that the tree and I did not need to be surgically removed from one another.
As bad as that was, it wasn't as bad as Bron who went bombing down the hill, and without being able to stop, went sailing through the car park. A big SUV slammed on brakes a mere few inches from her, as I wondered how on earth I'd explain to people that Bron was hit by a car while skiing. You can imagine how much I confused the driver by banging on the hood and telling him to watch where the hell he was going!
After a lot more falling, starfishing, bombing and swearing, we finally made it to the graduate slope. Woo Hoo! Where we used the proper ski lifts for the first time and I was almost taken out at the starting line by moering off the thing, almost breaking a leg and causing a ten skiier pile-up while being heckled by more two year olds.
Eish. As I heard another South African mutter to his friend as he went limping off to the medics, "Hierdie fokken sneeu is vol kak".
Indeed it is, but there's nothing quite like the rush of barreling down a hill that's covered in ice with two planks strapped to your legs. You just gotta do it!
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Location:Blue Mountain Resort
