Chatel – My Life in Bournemouth

The area called Portes du Soleil is literally translated as ‘The Doors of the Sun,’ and it’s the second-biggest skiing location in the world. It will stun you with breathtaking mountainous landscapes, plenty of ski slopes of different levels of difficulty, charming wooden chalets and fantastic regional food. In this blog post, I’ll describe my first skiing experience – a one-week stay in the beautiful village of Chatel, which is a part of Portes du Solei, and, next week, a post about the comforting food I tried after skiing.

Chatel, France, Portes du Soleil — Beautiful chalets in Chatel.

When choosing which part of Portes du Soleil you want to stay in, you should first consider your skiing experience. If you are a beginner, you should (or even must) look for an area with green slopes. It’s advisable to take lessons with a skiing instructor, but we didn’t. Instead, we watched a video explaining basic skiing skills and practiced for an hour on a little hill.

Piste de La Bellete, green slope, Chatel, France — Piste de La Bellete – an easy green slope where I practised my skiing skills on the first and second day.

Blue pistes are for more experienced skiers (don’t trust the maps saying they are easy as some of them are not!), red ones are inclined and challenging and the black ones are for…the suicidal. Just kidding, obviously, but you must have a lot of experience to approach red or black slopes, so take it slowly and sensibly.

Skiing in Portes du Soleil — I felt comfortable on Piste de la Bellete, but it was my comfort zone and I had to try other slopes as well in order to progress!

Piste du Loup - Portes du Soleil, red piste — Piste du Loup – The Wolf – is an example of a red piste. As a beginner skier I stayed away from the red slopes!

A very important thing to remember is not to be demotivated when seeing some 6-year-old kids overtaking you or skiing on the red and black slopes. They’re normally part of skiing schools and train every weekend from November to April. You also shouldn’t think, ‘Oh, if a child is going on this slope I can do it too!’ It’s misleading, because some of these children are real skiing masters!

Portes du Soleil, France, Abondance — Looking at experts skiing down the slopes is really inspiring.

Dreamy views of the mountains and enormous pine trees.

If you’re a skiing expert, you can ski from one area of Portes du Solei to another by using gondolas (télécabines) and slopes encoded in different colours. If you look at the map below, its way of getting you from one place to another reminds me a bit the Underground map, and that’s the way you should read it.

Map of the Portes du Soleil — If you enlarge the map you’ll see a spiderweb of slopes of different colours connected to each other.

The mastermind of our skiing adventure. Ben is planning the skiing route with the map.

Despite having little experience, this guy turned out to be the Wolf of the slopes!

Ben went everywhere on his skis, but because I was scared to use the blue and red slopes to get from Chatel to Morzine, we had to take our car to get to the green slopes in Super-Morzine, which took 45 minutes.

Tag: Chatel

Where to go skiing? Portes du Solei, France & Switzerland. A guide for beginners and others!