- Even for an unlikely pilgrim to Europe’s most expensive ski resort, there is plenty to appreciate in the picturesque town
- To reach St Moritz, you take a five-hour train from Zurich – a journey so beautiful, it’s a Unesco Globe Heritage Site
- The famed Cresta Run was constructed in 1885, yet the town’s glamour reached its zenith between 1928 and 1948
Philip Norman For The Mail On Sunday
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Winter sports have actually always left me cold – in every sense.
I’m immune to the joy of speed, terrified of heights, and allergic to games.
My one attempt at skiing – in the US in the 1980s – was a week of slithering, sprawling humiliation along with an instructor named Ziggy Grottendorfer.
Peak condition: The view towards St Moritz from Piz Nair, which is portion of the Corviglia ski area can’t be beat
‘Attack the mountain, Philip!’ he kept yelling through exactly what seemed a perpetual blizzard. In the end, all I wanted to attack was Ziggy Grottendorfer.
So I’m an unlikely pilgrim to St Moritz, Europe’s most glamorous ski resort, the place forever enshrined by Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 single Where Do You Go To My Lovely?
‘As soon as the snow falls you’re found in St Moritz along with the others of the jet set/And you sip your Napoleon brandy yet you never get hold of your lips wet.’
However, my wife Sue and I are spending our brief break on a special winter wimp’s schedule: no skiing, no skating and surely no attempting the Cresta Run.
Instead, we’re taking leisurely walks in the Alpine air and relaxing along with the strange spa treatment.
Although we’re only heading to south-eastern Switzerland, the overall time it takes to reach our destination is about the same as it takes to fly to Brand-new York.
Luxurious: The terrace at the Carlton Hotel is merely one of numerous beautiful touches added to the opulent Russian-inspired property
Despite having checked in online, at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 we’re made to join an enormous queue which doubles spine on itself. Harassed staff distribute baggage-tags which we have actually to tie on ourselves prior to being allowed to join the equally as shambolic bag drop queue.
The flight to Zurich takes one hour and 35 minutes, and then we ought to keep on by train to St Moritz, which takes 5 hours and involves two changes.
Swiss trains deserve their reputation for efficiency yet the system takes some getting used to.
When you buy a ticket, you ought to sign it or it isn’t valid. The guard on our very first train hands ours back, telling us sternly that it requires ‘a little homework’. We were supposed to have actually put the date on it too
Long journey: Getting to St Moritz is no easy task and includes a five-hour train ride through some of the country’s most stunning scenery (left). Philip and his wife, pictured right, in the resort
At the town of Chur, we modification from a double-decked streamliner to the narrow-gauge Albula Railway,whose route through crags and vertical fir forests is so beautiful it has actually been designated a Unesco Globe Heritage Site.
Suddenly, the slog becomes worthwhile.
To reach St Moritz’s altitude of 5,320ft, the train switches the sides of a excellent valley four times, crosses 55 bridges, climbs through 39 spiral tunnels and curves around the 210ft higher Landwasser Viaduct at an unhurried pace that allows everyone on board a splendid view.
Finally, we arrive at the fabled resort whose name suggests both ice and diamonds.
It’s surprisingly modest in scale, and its main landmark – apart from huge old hotels – is a 12th Century church tower, leaning at an angle as drunken as Pisa’s.
Beside it stretches a lake whose frozen surface provides a natural venue for horseracing (known here as ‘white turf’), polo, horse-drawn skiing, skating, ice-hockey and – I’m not joking – cricket.
The town owes its name to St Mauritius, or Maurice, an early Christian martyr that started out as a Roman military leader and is believed to have actually been the first-ever black saint.
As well as German and Italian, the local people speak Romansch, a language descended from ancient vernacular Latin.
Until the mid-19th Century, the British visited St Moritz only in summer, for its spa waters and the highest sunshine quotient in the Alps.
Then in 1864, an enterprising hotelier named Caspar Badrutt invited four of his regular guests to return during winter, promising to reimburse their expenses if their stay proved a disappointment.
So it came about that winter sports were invented by Victorian Englishmen along with more compared to a touch of lunacy.
Not for the faint of heart: The Cresta Run caters to daredevils that want to slide down an ice channel on undersized sleds, called skeletons
Not content along with Switzerland’s long-held tradition of skiing, guests took to hurtling down icy escarpments on undersized sleds called skeletons, initially lying prone, then head-first, along with only soft Alpine hats protecting their skulls.
For some years, this demented practice went on in the town’s streets, to the peril of traffic and pedestrians.
In 1885, the Cresta Run was constructed – a twisting, ice-walled chute in which skeletons could reach speeds of up to 80mph. And in 1904, the world’s very first bobsleigh run was added for slightly lesser lunatics – they ride inside pencil-shaped projectiles in crews of two or four.
St Moritz’s glamour reached its zenith in the years between the two Winter Olympics it has actually hosted – 1928 and 1948 – As soon as only the rich and savvy travelled abroad, sport was still amateur (ie, for love) and winter sportsmen represented the last word in chic, along with a fluorescent flash or a sponsor’s name nowhere to be seen.
The Maharajah of Hyderabad would certainly arrive along with 500 suitcases and 300 pieces of hand-luggage (try making him or her queue for baggage-tags at Heathrow).
Other regulars included Egypt’s King Farouk, the Shah of Iran, the Aga Khan and Eva Peron.
Nowadays, there’s a definite feel of living off those past glories. Younger people have actually increasingly preferred trendier, more accessible resorts such as Klosters and Verbier.
Vladimir Putin’s recent ‘suggestion’ that wealthy Russians shouldn’t holiday abroad has actually eroded exactly what was an expanding, highly lucrative Brand-new market.
The worst enemy of all is global warming, which causes the snow to arrive later each year, keeping St Moritz’s slopes still brown well in to the essential Christmas season, causing a major loss of business.
Pumping out artificial snow only partially blots out the disfiguring grass and rock, and scientists are now looking at others remedies, such as insulating pistes along with protective plastic. That’s exactly what I call a freezer-bag.
Nonetheless, the champagne air still has actually its old tang of money.
Staff at the Palace Hotel, the lakeside giant built by Caspar Badrutt in 1895, meet their guests at the station in a Rolls-Royce.
Gorgeous: At dusk, the winter scene is picture-perfect in St Moritz, which has actually more designer shops per square inch compared to anywhere else in the world
The town could be small and folksy-looking, yet it has actually more designer clothes shops per square inch compared to anywhere in the world. And those barmy Englishmen that very first put the place on the map have actually never left it.
The St Moritz Toboggan Club, which operates the Cresta Run, is a British institution as exclusive and antediluvian as any along London’s Pall Mall.
Women are banned from competing – except for one scaled-down ‘ladies event’ per year – on the basis of a longdiscredited theory that sledding can easily cause breast cancer.
At the SMTC’s Art Deco clubhouse, young Brits that have actually paid about £200 to experience the run are warned by elderly veterans that the smallest loss of concentration will certainly result in a crash and maybe a ‘Cresta Kiss’ (‘that’s exactly what we call it As soon as a bit of your face is taken away’).
Other long-time survivors proudly hand around X-rays showing how, over the decades, the run has actually broken almost every bone in their bodies.
If anything, the British influence has actually grown stronger along with the introduction of ‘snow cricket’ on Lake St Moritz.
When former England leader David Gower came to play in a match, he parked his rental car on the frozen lake and the next morning it had disappeared through the ice.
We stayed at the five-star Carlton Hotel, built in 1913 reputedly as a palace for Russian Tsar Nicholas II, that sadly never got to use it thanks to the winter sports of a much less agreeable kind made by the Bolshevik Revolution four years later.
The hotel has actually recently undergone a major refurbishment, adding a three-storey spa and a two-star Michelin Italian restaurant, and granting all 60 suites and junior suites their own sumptuous lake-and-mountain view.
Carlo Rampazzi, a top Italian designer, keeps alive the Imperial Russian theme, notably in the glittering Romanoff Restaurant, where even breakfast coffee and croissants arrive along with a ceremony worthy of old St Petersburg.
In a surreal touch, some chairs have actually cut-out wooden people attached to them, presumably so that nobody ever has actually to consume alone.
Sky high: Philip and his wife ventured to Corviglia, the resort directly above St Moritz, in a cable-car alongside others glamorous guests
We venture from the Carlton’s velvety womb only for a brief trip to Corviglia, the resort directly above St Moritz, ascending in a cable-car shaped like a short flight of steps, in whose enclosed, insulated interior even I feel not the slightest twinge of vertigo.
Sharing our pod is a beautiful woman in a black designer skisuit, that could have actually stepped straight from Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To My Lovely?
‘You sip your Napoleon brandy,’ I murmur to myself, ‘yet you never get hold of your lips wet…’
This is as close to skiing as I ever want to get: looking through the panoramic window of Corviglia’s mountain-top La Marmite restaurant as the multi-coloured figures swoosh past far below and snow-making machines spew out frost in an effort to keep everything seamlessly white.
La Marmite’s speciality is thin crust pizza studded along with white truffles, washed down along with a wonderful Swiss red wine named Ambrosie and an almost as wonderful white named St Saphorin.
They may not be Napoleon brandy, yet I surely intend to get hold of my lips wet.
TRAVEL FACTS
The Carlton Hotel offers junior suites for two from £900 per night on a B&B basis. The price includes a credit of 100 Swiss francs (about £70) for meals and drink per adult per day. Visit carlton-stmoritz.ch.
Swiss (swiss.com) offers return flights from Heathrow to Zurich from £121pp.
Swiss Transfer tickets from Zurich airport to St Moritz are available from 141 Swiss francs (£100) and can easily be purchased at sbb.ch/en.
from Golden Land Travel http://ift.tt/21t0twJ
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