The Travelling Pixie in Austria

My First Snowboarding Experience Part II

– Stay tuned for the video at the end of the post x

Following My First Snowboarding Experience Part I, as I thought we all manned up, strapped on our bindings and went for it, we suddenly heard “NO WAY! I don’t wanna die!” We turned our heads towards the voice, and found ourselves staring at Kurtise.

There were about two seconds of awkward silence, then we found ourselves bursting out in laughter.  We thought Kurtise was kidding when he suddenly stood up, and walked back the way we came.  After a few steps, we finally figured, he was walking towards the flatter part of the slope where the little kids were learning how to ski.

Eventually, we decided to ignore Kurtise and get on with experimenting with our new-found interest – snowboarding down the slope.  Jeff got a Go-Pro camera for this ski trip, and asked us to go down the slope one by one so that he could film us.  I stood up and cautiously tipped my toes forward.  Like magic, our snowboard slid forward and I had my first taste of snowboarding.  When I felt I was going too fast (which it really wasn’t fast, I was just scared), I flatted my feet and stopped too abruptly, I ended up losing my balance and fell on my bum.

By trial and error, I’ve finally managed to get to the bottom of the first slope, but it was still a very long way to Base Camp (the bottom of the ski lift where we came up from).  We waited at the bottom of the first slope for Kurtise and Himmy, when they didn’t appear after a very long time, we got a bit worried.  Then we saw Jeffrey casually skiing down, he said both Kurtise and Himmy decided to ‘practice’ up there for a little longer.  So we decided to continue on our ‘journey’.

After the whole ‘Kurtise is a pussy’ incident, we came back to our senses and finally realised that we’re actually ‘stranded’ on a flat path at the bottom of the first slope.  A snowboarder’s biggest fear is to lose momentum on flat paths – we are stuck.  As first-timers, we tried several very lame ways simply trying to move forward.  We started jumping and hopping with the board still strapped to our feet, hoping that we’d move forward – which probably looked ridiculous to passersby.  When Jeff passed by us, he simply stated, ‘Dudes, just take off your board and walk to the next slope if you’re stuck!’  This idea shone upon us like a beacon of light, we gladly unstrapped our board and carried it to the next mini slope.

Eventually, after tons and tons of falls and bruises like that photo on left – yes I tripped again!  I’ve finally got the hang of snowboarding.  I kept slipping and falling and I couldn’t figure out the reason, when it finally hit us.  As we were snowboarding in April, the snow has melted slightly and had turned to ice.  Oh gosh, I hate snowboarding on icy paths, and moreso, falling on icy paths.  The ice is so hard that each tiny fall bruises me, it simply hurts so bad :( .

Luckily, only the first day was full of falls and bruises.  By the second day, I became an expert in ‘falling without injuring myself’ – WELL DONE ME!  Everything went well until Day 4 – when things got better!.

Day 4 was the highlight of the whole trip, the 9 of us had planned for this big climax of the trip weeks ago!  The morning of Day 4, we finished our breakfast, went back to our rooms and suited up as animals!  We transformed into 9 different snowboarding animals – a Lion, Panda, Tiger, Dragon, Bat, Bunny, Monkey, Frog & weird bat (yes thats you Kurtise!)  Could’ve imagined it must’ve been such a sight when 9 Chinese dressed as animals queued for the gondola going up the hills!

We went halfway up to Valluga – one of the mountains in St Anton where we split into two groups.  Advanced – the bat, the tiger and the monkey who took on the black slope, and Just Chilling – where the rest of us took two other gondola trips and travelled up to the peak of Valluga.  We agreed to meet at 1:00 at one of the canteens for lunch together before we parted our ways.

It was absolutely freezing when we got to the peak of Valluga, but the view was simply stunning.  As we looked around, we noticed that we were the only ones up there.  So the 6 of us starting taking photos in weird poses and filming a dance in the animal costumes.  Time ticked away as we were having fun on the peak, before we knew it, it was almost time to meet for lunch and we had to take the gondola back down to where we came from.

For the rest of the afternoon we skied and skied until the real highlight of the day approached.  Prior to the trip, we saw an event happening in a pub (which I’ve already forgotten the name of).  So we skied downhill to the pub and crashed the event as the only Chinese / Asians in the whole of St Anton, plus we were wearing animal costumes!

We instantly became the centre of attention in the pub and people just couldn’t stop taking photos and videos of us.  We started dancing – as you’ll see shortly in the video below – and it just got crazy.  Crowds and crowds of people wanted to dance with us, it was absolutely fantastic.  We even bumped into the family of 7 who were staying in the same chalet as us.  I bet we were captured in so many cameras and go-pro clips that we should be famous by now – but surprisingly we haven’t seen any clips on youtube yet – or more like we haven’t searched, but well, we had a great time!

 

Our wondrous day ended with us skiing back to Basecamp and building these teeny-tiny snowmen with this little kid.

 

Directed & Filmed by Leon Lee

Starring in the order of appearance:

Himmy Sin, Kurtise Ho, Anna Susanne, Taylor Leung, Tara Lee, Jeffrey Cheng, Natalie Lo, Philip Chu, Leon Lee