Skiing and winter sports > Articles > Ski Ischgl

Note to self: always bring own skis, even when early-season conditions (i.e. no snow) could mean wrecking them. The Austrians have finally followed the Americans into computerised rentals, which means entering your vital statistics (including country of origin) into a computer. But will said electronic device allow you to choose the correct country? And does it matter? During an early season visit to the party-town of Ischgl, in Tyrol's Paznaun valley, one of my skiing companions got so fed up with trying unsuccessfully to register his British birthright and repeatedly having to start the process again each time he failed, that in the end he settled for the Lesser Islands of the USA as his homeland. Me? I ended up as a Saudi Arabian citizen.

One must not be too hard on such ski shops. Like the rest of us, they are slaves to modern technology, and at least my rented skis had good enough edges to have been able to grip sand from Rub' Al Khali (the Empty Quarter) had that been required.

Bearing in mind that much of the Alps in early December was struggling, to put it mildly, for snow, Ischgl turned out to be remarkably well-endowed - just like the rather tacky American group the Pussycat Dolls who launched a new winter with a concert at the bottom of the gleaming Silvrettabahn gondola. (Personally I found the go-go dancers at the slopeside Hotel Elisabeth bar much more discreet and easy on the eye.) So while the neighbouring resort of St Anton, the shop window of Austrian skiing, and its stablemates Lech and Zürs were unable to open in early December, Ischgl was thriving. As sometimes happens during dud early Decembers, what snow there was had come in from the south, giving Ischgl a distinct advantage over its more famous neighbours. Much of Ischgl's skiing flows across the Swiss border into Samnaun, and visitors were able to ski at will deep into Swiss territory too.

Among our party was the former British World Cup downhill skier Konrad Bartelski (still the only British male to have climbed onto a World Cup rostrum when he famously came second in Val Gardena in 1981) and the TV chef Heston Blumenthal, the "culinary alchemist" proprietor of the celebrated Fat Duck restaurant at Bray, Berkshire, named "Best Restaurant in the World" for his quirkily scientific recipes in 2005. Busy building up his restaurant and raising a family, Blumenthal had not skied for 15 years, but his skills had scarcely rusted. With almost 40 years on the clock, and in spite of an earlier collision with a young snowboarder which robbed him of his glasses, he made short work of the steep, long run down from Idalp to the half-way stage of the Pardatschgratbahn gondola. Most skiers were unaware that this run was even open, so we had a blissful vertical drop of more than 2,000 feet almost to ourselves. As we climbed back into the gondola, Bartelski was rather more complimentary about the restaurateur's technique than he was about mine. I consoled myself with the churlish thought that perhaps Konrad might be angling for some complimentary snail porridge.

In general, the standard of food on the mountain was poor, and the service worse - but then it was the start of the season, so one must perhaps be charitable. Blumenthal certainly was, and did not complain once. He got his reward on the last night in the Paznaunstube at the Trofana Royal, the only five-star hotel in town, where the celebrated Austrian chef Martin Sieberer laid on a sumptuous six-course "Surprise" degustation menu in his honour - opening with goose liver, seafood with pumpkin and curry, and Dorade lasagne with ceps, moving on through caipirinha of plums, cappuccino of quail and venison with saffron apples and curd gnocchis to the piece de resistance: not smoked bacon and egg ice cream, A la Fat Duck, but cream souffle, bitter chocolate with raspberries and balsamic vinegar.

Although there was no sign of the chariot-sized cheese trolley, docking at a table, showcasing its wares or the lobster sauce poured into souffles and baby legs of lamb carved at tableside which Blumenthal says "inspired the realisation that there was no other career in the world that I wanted to pursue," he was duly impressed with his first decent meal of the weekend. As for the skiing "I'll definitely be back" he said. "But this time I won't leave it another 15 years."

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Arnie Wilson was a guest of Inghams. www.inghams.co.uk

It's well worth skiing down to the duty-free Swiss resort of Samnaun for lunch - or just for the fun of it - and perhaps picking up a few souvenirs, which can be packed into your rucksack. It's an old smuggling area, and technically you should take your passport, but it is extremely rare for customs officials to ask to see your documents. Ischgl is also close to Galtur, famous not just for the devastating avalanche in 1999 which killed 31 people, but as one of the main winter playgrounds of Ernest Hemingway. Inevitably, there's a bar named after him at the Hotel Toni (+43 5443 8282) close to the runs on the Gorfenspitze. Hemingway's Bar claims to be a "meeting point for gourmets, epicures, barflies and cigar lovers". The American author, a keen alpinist and ski tourer, spent the winter of 1925 in Galtur, when he wrote his novella Alpine Idyll - hardly idyllic in fact, as it tells the story of two young men, just returned from a ski-touring expedition, listening to the chilling story of a peasant who, instead of burying his dead wife, keeps her upright in a barn, where her body freezes, and then proceeds to hang his lantern from her frozen jaw while he works in the barn at night.

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