THE VIEW from my bedroom window across the village to the mountains beyond can
hardly have changed for a hundred years, since Thomas Mann began The Magic
Mountain, set in Davos, the neighbouring commune.
All it needed was a train to bring the patients to the sanatorium… and, oh
yes, suddenly there was a train - a red one at that - going through the fir
trees. Here in Klosters, I looked over the lights of the distant church, the
houses and to the mountains behind and, above them, the stars of the cold,
clear night.
The outlook could not have been more promising. We had been warned that the
temperature might be as low as minus 15C , but if you keep moving and don’t
get left hanging on a chairlift, that’s quite tolerable, especially in
modern ski clothes. The heavy snowfalls of early December had given
Switzerland the best start to the season that anyone could remember and we
arranged to get started early in the morning.
The strange thing is that the British have fallen out of love with
Switzerland, and take only five per cent of their skiing holidays there. It
is hard to see why, when you consider that between them the two countries
pretty much invented modern skiing. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the first
Alpine ski tour from Davos in 1894; Sir Henry Lunn organised the first
package tours to Adelboden in 1903, and the modern slalom was invented by
his son Arnold in M%26uuml;rren in 1922.
Related Articles
No user responded in this post
Leave A Reply
Please Note: Comment moderation maybe active so there is no need to resubmit your comments