Man, Whistler sucks.

Okay, I exaggerate. Our experience of it mostly sucked.

The queue of cars and coaches backed up behind the accident started moving maybe three hours after it had ground to a halt, and we crawled past the rather disturbing wreckage of the crashed coach, pushed off to the side of the road. (I found out later that the driver had been badly hurt but not killed in the accident. It certainly looked pretty serious when we drove past it.)

We were booked into an HI hostel on the other side of Alta Lake and at 10 pm, an hour after the Greyhound had finally arrived, we dragged our gear wearily onto the local shuttle. The driver closed the door and dropped the hammer: we charged off into the snowy darkness, rounded blind bends with abandon and actually skidded to a halt at one point as he completely missed a turning. Fifteen minutes of vehicular lunacy later, the bus deposited us in the middle of frickin' nowhere. A signpost - I say signpost when really I mean postage stamp - pointed us down a set of stairs apparently chiselled out of the snowbank itself and into impenetrable blackness. Backpacks and boarding bags threatening to up-end us at every step, we slithered down the stairs, past a rickety barn, over a railway line and then a wooden bridge over a stream, and finally came upon the hostel. The place was dead; everyone was either partying until dawn or had already crashed out, so we picked up some sheets rudely woven from yak fur, huddled under them against the cold and passed out more or less instantly.

The next morning I wandered downstairs just after 8 am to find out about shuttles back to the village. The timetable wasn't so much regular as constipated. There were a scant five buses a day: 8 and 10 am, then 4, 6 and 10 pm, and the only other option was a four-kilometre hike up to the northern tip of the lake and then down into the village. While waiting for the 10 am bus we transferred our gear into the co-ed dorm (we were supposed to have had a private room two nights out of three, but Sunday's rockslide buggered up our timing), suited up and headed out. We traversed the stream, railway line and stairs up to the road and waited.

And waited, and waited. Some cars and trucks ambled by, the drivers looking curiously at us as if to say, "I didn't know we allowed carless hippies here." Eventually the bus turned up and took us into the village at a marvellously sedate pace. Ash had been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days before and decided to spend the day sorting out her ski rental and poking around for alternative accommodation, leaving me to charge off alone up the foggy hill.

Up the wrong foggy hill, as it turned out; I jumped on the nearest gondola and wound up halfway up Blackcomb Mountain instead of Whistler, but I made the best of it and spent the rest of the morning getting back into the swing of things. The conditions were oddly like the spring snow I've seen in France: frozen and treacherous in the morning, then thawing up towards the afternoon. Only this time the glorious spring sunshine was nowhere to be seen, and I boarded through a grey day livened up by the occasional zero-visibility fog bank.

In the evening, we picked up Ash's skis, picked the closest bar and reclined under the warm blast of a patio heater until dinner time rolled around. We spent a small fortune in an excellent tapas bar (my God, the butler steak was incredible) and decided, under the questionable influence of an equally nice bottle of wine, to walk back to the hostel. Our waiter gave us simple instructions to find the Valley Trail that would then take us "straight there, in about twenty minutes".

How we laughed, when we weren't listening for bears out there in the dark. Carrying a couple of boxes of still-warm, aromatic leftovers along a deserted forest trail for an hour with sub-zero temperatures rapidly sobering you up arguably isn't the best night out in Whistler. We eventually found the railway track and sleeper-hopped along it for the last hundred yards to the hostel. As we triumphantly emerged into the common room, one of the last poker-playing die-hards said incredulously, "You do know there are bobcats out there, right?"

Oops.

[To be continued.]