Earlier this year, I travelled 28 hours to get to a ski resort in Austria. I took just about every mode of transport imaginable along the way (plane, train, automobile, bus, skyrail thingy in an airport).
Upon arrival, it was like I couldn’t have been further from home. The enormous mountains of the Arlberg towering over my quaint, wooden-panelled hotel with the floral curtains were a far cry from the beaches and new-build houses I’d left behind on the Gold Coast.
And then I heard the Australian accent. A group of Brisbanites playing cards, enjoying a tipple before their dinner, asking me where I was from.
Even the owner of the quaint wooden-panelled hotel was Australian, which I discovered quickly when she switched from perfect German back to English. She’d married an Austrian, it turned out, and stayed. A tale as old as time, or at least when it comes to ski towns across the world; where there’s snow, there’s just as likely to be a fellow Australian.
The Canadian and Japanese resorts are packed with our kind, hello Whistralia, but no destinations seem immune. I’ve overheard our dulcet fair-dinkum tones everywhere from catching the chairlifts of Grindelwald, Switzerland to ordering slopeside rice krispy treats in Lake Tahoe, USA.
So here are my extremely well-researched, well-thought-out (cough guesses only cough) as to why Aussies just can’t get enough of ski towns abroad.
We’d rather go overseas than skiing in our own country
Did you know Queenslanders are actually the most likely to travel out of their own country to go skiing? This surprises people when you tell them, because they assume that Queenslanders are more likely to prioritise heat over snow, etc.
But as a Queenslander, it’s just too bloody far to get to an Australian ski resort. By the time I’ve packed the car and driven down, or flown part of the way and driven the rest, I could be in Queenstown. Or Madarao. Or halfway to Revelstoke. And, quite possibly, having spent less money (just( than I would’ve paid to ski in Australia.
Skiing in our own country is great, of course (I even wrote an article in defence of it here) and most of us do both but when you want more – more powder, more terrain, bigger and better and all the rest – you generally have to leave the country and head north.
We’re wired for this kind of thing
For ALL OF IT. The longhaul travel? No worries, we’re used to it, doesn’t phase us. The physically demanding side of it? Still no worries, because skiing fits nicely into the mix with the other adventure sports we love as Aussies.
And of course there’s the social side. We’re made for joining in on the après fun, the camaraderie that comes with a big group of people dancing in ski boots on tops of tables. Sign us up for a trivia night, or a wine tasting night, or anything where we get to shout the lyrics to Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again.
And because we’ve had to work hard to get to the slopes (through flights, visas, etc etc), that effort equals a deeper level of commitment. If you’ve flown 15 hours to chase powder, you’re not wasting a powder day. Even if your head is a little dusty from the night of wine tasting.
That’s why Aussies have a reputation in ski towns: fun, up for just about anything, slightly chaotic. Probably wearing shorts even when it’s minus eighteen degrees.
It’s also why you sometimes see Aussies in ski resort towns making absolute arses of themselves and not always in a good way, but that’s something for another day…
Ski towns are just the best – and we can recognise a good thing
A good ski town feels like coming home, even when you’ve never been there before. They’ve mastered the ultimate mix of anticipation (that feeling you get when you look up at the mountains around you), fun (bars, anyone?), cosiness (also bars, anyone?) and adrenaline (when you first walk into a rental shop, or the ticket office, to get geared up for your first day skiing/boarding).
So many Aussies sign up for a gap year involving some kind of woefully-low-paid job in a ski town when they’re young… and find themselves hooked. Hooked on the built-in social scene, of the fun to be had on and off the slopes, of the hard work that goes into it yet the benefits you reap of living where your favourite hobby happens to be had.
It goes beyond a thing you do when you’re young, and becomes a lifestyle with a start date and no fixed end. It’s why, despite being old and boring with a mortgage and a child and commitments in a city etc, I go back to a ski resort every year and think… could I live here again, and do something like this all over again?
Plus everything’s more fun with friends. Which is why you’ll meet every Aussie snow-goer back here in the off-season, recruiting everyone they know to go back the following year. Before you know it, there’s a micro-community of families traipsing around, all hailing from one grammar school in one nice suburb. (I met a lady the other day who told me she’d recruited twenty people to go to Big White next year. TWENTY! And here I am struggling to convince my friend group to go camping three suburbs away.)
Timing is bloody good
The last and the simplest. Our winter runs opposite from the northern hemisphere ski season, so for the true snow lovers, you can double your season. Ski at home, then jump on a plane and do it all again overseas. It quickly becomes a year-round pursuit, especially if you have a pass that you need to make the most of.
So tell me… why do you think our ski towns full of Australians? What’s driving us all to chase winter across the globe? And where have you skied, if anywhere, that there was no trace of an Aussie accent within earshot?
