Skiing at Perisher

I'm just back from a weekend of skiing in Perisher, Australia's largest ski resort in the Snowy Mountains.

We travelled up in the early hours of Friday, in order to make it onto the slopes by mid-morning. I was excited about going skiing in Australia despite the best efforts of Penne and Clint to to curb my enthusiasm.

Perisher is a compact resort, the majority of lifts are my least favourite T-bars, but there are also a number of chair lifts to get you up the slopes. We had a fantastic day on the Friday with the sun out and a decent covering of snow on the pistes. Although check out the background of the photo above, there wasn't much excess snow around!

Sadly Saturday was a completely different story. There was thunder, lightening, hail and rain! I've never experienced rain on the ski fields before. White outs and blizzards yes, but rain no. It was a uniquely horrible experience in my make shift ski gear. The lightening also caused them to close the lifts which meant we had a long trudge home from the base of one lift.

We were staying the nearby town of Jindabyne and had one of the best ski apartments I have stayed in. It was a modern and well equipped holiday home with a roaring fire to warm up next to at the end of the day. There was a water born disease in Jindabyne while we were there and they had increased the chlorine level in the water to, I am guessing, the legal maximum. After taking a shower it smelt like you had just come out of a swimming pool. I risked a couple of glasses of tap water before switching to the bottled variety.

It was a good weekend, but next year I think I'll be heading to New Zealand for my skiing fix.