Two years ago, on my son's first ski holiday, we tried a top-end family resort
in the French Alps with round-the-clock creche facilities, mortgage-level
ski lessons and a hotel that was the teeniest chauffer-drive away from the
slopes.
On day two, his French-speaking instructor somehow failed to explain to him
that he had to let go of a button lift before he could get off it. He ended
up hanging in the trees, where he was rescued by a passing English couple
going off piste near the nursery slopes.
Half an hour later, when I returned from a thrilling black, Arthur was still
sobbing, and the instructor's face was greyer than the grey-white snow, from
the heart attack he nearly suffered.
If he was ever to ski again, his confidence had to be restored. Andorra, the
only country in the world where the official language is Catalan, seemed the
perfect place to try.
If Monaco is the rich man's paradaisacal, summer castle, Andorra is winter for
the poor man at his gate. They are both tiny, mountainous, tax haven
principalities but there the similarity ends.
As travellers worldwide are discovering, the old cliches no longer fit a
recession-hit Europe. Once wealthy institutions are snowed under an
avalanche of debt, while resorts such as the endearingly pretty Andorran
villages, clinging to the sides of Pyrenees, are on the up as never before.
No longer are Arinsal, Soldeu and Pas de la Casa refuges of last resort for
poor skiiers - poor in both its material and athletic senses. You can still
do a five-star spa resort hotel in Soldeu on the kind of budget that might
get you a one-man bedsit a mile from the bottom of the ski lift in Val
d'Isere. If you choose your time and season well, the snow is great, the
instruction superb and the new lifts, like the modern ski technique,
unparalleled.
A Milk Tray man looking for off-piste helicopter ski thrills would be best
advised to try elsewhere. Andorra scores high for those of us, in the
majority, who are middle-aged, ski middling-to-well or even advanced on a
good snow day, and who have children who want to follow in our ski tracks.
From the hotels with their lobbies full of children playing across language
barriers on the Nintendo DS - the apres-ski for children - to the nursery
slopes with Disney characters to ski under and around, this country could
have been designed for young families.
There were instructors fluent in English who knew just what to tell little
infants to get their confidence back, to little baby skiparks complete with
slides, climbing frames and easy-to-use conveyor belt baby lifts, and
outdoor bubbling hot spa pools to ease the muscle ache of a hard day on the
slopes.
This is a place where families that combine both young children and
experienced skiiers can go and relax to a greater degree than is often
possible on a family ski holiday.
Internet sites regularly place them near the top in their best resort lists.
And after a week sampling the snow in Arinsal and La Massana, I could see
why. Not for nothing do more than ten million skiiers a year come here, many
of them from the UK.
