Après Ski

I spent last week with my family skiing in Pamporovo in Bulgaria. Pamporovo is the southern-most ski resort in mainland Europe, but its snowfall is on a par with the other Bulgarian ski resorts (Bansko & Borovets). I'm not an experienced skier, so I need coaching, and one of the good things about Bulgaria is that the ski instructors are very good but very reasonably priced. An experienced English-speaking private instructor for the day (4 hours) cost us 120 leva, about £42 or US$73, from the Steve ski school.

A lot of people go to Bulgaria to learn to ski on package tours (particularly Brits at the moment). The packages often include ski instruction and a ski kindergarten/school for children. While the travel and accommodation parts of the packages can be worthwhile, I recommend you think hard about whether to pay a bit extra for private instruction and a private ski kindergarten/school for your children. The problem with what the packages provide is overcrowding. In a group of 10-20 people with just one ski instructor, you learn very slowly. You would be lucky to learn more than how to ski the green (easy) pistes. By comparison, the first time I skied, with private coaching for a week, I finished the week having skied green, blue (harder) and red (intermediate) pistes.

The difference is even more profound for the ski kindergartens/schools for your children. We talked to people who were on package tours, and they told us stories of 2 instructors caring for around 20 children, far too many for the instructors to cope with safely. On top of that were inadequate toilet (bathroom) facilities for the children. We were lucky that we found the family-run skielite ski school in Pamporovo, and their ski kindergarten was just ideal. Our 5-year-old learned to be comfortable on skis in a group of 2 children, and one of his coaches was a member of the Bulgarian snowboarding team. You can't ask for much better than that. It wasn't particularly expensive either.

The good news for us was that we had snow! We haven't had much luck with snow in the past, but this time it was good. However, on our last day, the temperature went up to about 15 celcius (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit), so I'm so glad we aren't skiing this week. Anyway, it was a great break, all in all.