Day 36 – Maligned

Our names have once more been sullied, dragged through the quagmire of lies and deceit pedaled by lesser men and women. This blog, ladies and gents, is a carriage for only those things true and good in the world. We did indeed see Llama (or Llamas – not sure on the collective), and we include further testament to this fact below.

After much umming and ahhing today we decide to do the Sella Rhonda. It’s a tour really, with more on-slope bars and restaurants than lifts, the sort of place you might do a bucks or a hens weekend. The vistas, as ever, are stunning. The tour takes you around this ‘massif’ the Sella, a huge up-thrust of rock surrounded by myriad villages and ski resorts, some you ski right through the middle of. It’s a circa 50km round trip roughly half of which you cover on lifts (at least that’s what the nice young Welshman in our hotel told us who’s now done it in both directions – and recorded the km on ski-tracker of course). He smashed it in 3 hours but it took us five with a half hour for lunch.

The Sella Rhonda trip is a wonderful way to experience more of the rock formations the area is renowned for, and to get a sense of just how extensive the the skiing area is. We saw ice climbers up in the Sella’s many ice flows, skiied on the dark side where the cliffs’ looming shadows seem to press their massive bulk upon you, and the bright side where they tower up into the sky, vast walls of browns, pinks and orange in the afternoon sun.

We stop at a sunny restaurant for lunch, it’s hard to find one without a view but many only have sun for a short time. As an aside, Scotini, the Llama camp place, with real Llamas, just so we’re clear, got 10 minutes of sun at 1pm for three weeks. For the rest of winter it got none. Hot pizza and soup (GF everywhere here) and a couple of wines – though not too many as we were only half way round. The Italian girl serving outside had learnt just the words she needed to serve. ‘Yes?’ and ‘You pay now!’ Pit-stop over and we were off.

After lunch the moguls formed in the morning sun, ice up and our afternoon legs are feeling it. I like to press on, follow the signs, guess if there aren’t any, Di likes to check the map and know where we are. So with the couple of wines, the jelly legs, the ice moguls, the impending last bus, zero local knowledge and frequent map stops – things may have got a little testy in the rapidly cooling afternoon.

But we pushed-on. I confess (in line with our determined drive for truth), I may have doubted Di’s navigation skills, just for a moment, when the course we’d set lead us to the bottom of a T-bar, on a dirt cul-de-sac, in the middle of nowhere, thighs burning from the pock-marked ice shelf we’d just descended. It was one of those moments when the wisdom of keeping your mouth tightly shut reaps its rewards. A stiff, silent, (brooding?) stomp across the road had us back on the map, on the Prolongia chair, and up to the long searched for ‘9a’ route that would see us home.

As we summited the Prolongia (and subsequently Prolongia II – something in the name should’ve had us guess there’d be a Prolongia II), rising up out of the valley-shadows on the last chair, a golden light spread out across the undulating snow fields, illuminating 9a like a beacon in the darkness.

A beautiful, long (thigh burner) run through the conifer forest returned us to our start point, Arematola for the second to last shuttle, thence to the last bus at Lagazuoi and home.

The shuttle operators require a minimum of 30 euro to go. So if there’s five to seven people – no problem. If there’s only two suckers on a deadline for the last bus – problem. I made some remonstrations about ‘paying through the nose’. Apparently I must say this a lot as Di replied, ‘with so much paying through the nose you must be suffering from some serious nasal damage. by now.’ Nasal damage aside, we arrive home safely, in time for a hot shower and tea.

To dinner at the 1861 place from the other night. This evening the young waiter said, ‘I have some friends in Australia, my brothers’, and proceeded to roll off the names of all the ACDC band members. Something of a metal head it seems, and he poured us some complimentary grappas whilst listing his other international ‘friends’; Def Leopard, Iron Maiden and Guns and Roses. Nice young fella.

We had a final night cap in the Alaska common area listening to our piano man bash out; Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Fly Me to the Moon and Girl From Impenema, a great day to finish our stay in Cortina.