Every year I face the same dilemma: how much holiday do I save for ski trips, and how much do I spend going to new places? Head for the Alps every winter and it can feel like you're on one, long ski holiday (if only!), albeit one interspersed annually with 11-and-three-quarter months of real life. The point is, they can get a bit samey. But then few other parts of the world (except the US and Canada and the odd bit of down under) are rich in heated chairlifts, perfectly groomed slopes and constellation-sized networks of pistes. Is seeking out a new sort of ski adventure worth the risk?
And so to Turkey. Uzbekistan, Antarctica and Kashmir were options too, but Turkey offers an ideal compromise: modern, well set up for tourism, cheap and easy to get to, yet most definitely not the Alps.
There are several ski areas in Turkey, and world-class heli-skiing in the Kachar mountains in the north-east, but with only a week we decided on two very interesting but very different options: Palandoken, way, way out east in the farthest corner of Anatolia; and Uludag, just a short ferry ride from Istanbul, a winter playground for the city's glitterati.
To fly into Istanbul and not stop to see the sights and wander about would be rude, so my friend and I decided to lug our bags into Beyoglu, the trendy district of Istanbul, and hole up for one night in a hotel, the new Witt Suites. It was at the top of a hill and the taxi skidded and slipped all the way up, dropping us off so we could slither and slip back down in our moonboots.
A wild whipping blizzard made crossing the Galata bridge across the Golden Horn like an attempt on the North Pole. Head down, keep shuffling, tell yourself it will be over soon.
The fishing boats with their red and blue neon lights were bobbing in the harbour as they do all summer, selling their famous fried fish in buns to tourists. We ate ours sitting on stools under a wet tarpaulin tent on the seafront, clasping hot little cups of mint tea with our frozen fingers like they contained the elixir of life. It was almost too painful to be outside, and even in the depths of the spice-smelling, gold-filled bazaars, where earmuffs were the big seller of the day, it was too cold to hang around.
But the way the Blue Mosque looked in the snow was astonishing. Weak sunlight made the globes and minarets glow gingery-gold; the palm trees lining the walkways drooped like broken umbrellas, strings of red flags hanging between them like gaudy washing lines. Istanbul in winter suddenly made sense.
That night, we went to one of Beyoglu's hippest bars, 5 Kat. It was empty. Is it always this quiet in winter, we asked the barman. "No, but this is the coldest winter for 20 years," he said. Magic words to skiers.
A ski resort-bound flight that, for once, didn't contain any Brits or, seemingly, any skiers, was a novelty. No Crystal luggage tags, no reps in logo-ed fleeces waiting to meet us, just a look of surprise in the taxi driver's eye when we said we were "English, here for ski".
A two-hour flight and 1,229km east of Istanbul, Eastern Anatolia looked like Siberia. A wasteland of white stretched in every direction; if there was a road heading out of town it was invisible, and empty. We drove past Soviet looking apartment blocks painted dull shades of off-pink, beige and khaki; billboards; and in the centre a big gold statue of Kemal Ataturk, and another of a skier – the only real clue that there might be a ski resort round here somewhere.
Erzurum's ski area, Palandoken, is, at 3,125m, Turkey's highest, with the longest, steepest runs, and a season that lasts from October until May. The resort base, 2km out of town, consisted of several hotels owned by the Dedeman group, a gondola and a chairlift accessing 22 runs. More are on their way, as in 2011 an offshoot of the Winter Olympics – university students only, and called the Universiade (universiadeerzurum.org), comes to town. Typically the resort attracts Turkish, Russian and Ukrainian skiers, and some from Iran, but the officials I met hoped the event might attract more Europeans.
With plenty of time until the lifts closed at 4pm we headed straight out. Turkish pop blared from speakers as we queued, and a little boy aged about nine worked the line, selling packets of tissues. At the top of the gondola, the slopes were nearly deserted, but there was stacks of accessible powder easily accessed off the first run. Deep, steep-enough off-piste powder with only five lines cut through it – and it was 2pm!
Spotting an even longer section on the way down I took the lift again and ducked under a safety tape right at the top to access it from a higher point. Suddenly a guy from the lift started chasing me shouting: "Hey! Problem! Problem problem!" I could see the area was fine, safe, so tried to argue "No problem! No problem!" But he wouldn't relent. He also had the power of lift-pass-confiscation, so I gave in, climbed back up, rode along the official piste for a short way, then looked back, at which point he just shrugged, signalling that dipping under the rope to go off piste in this (almost identical) spot would be "no problem problem". But it was worth tussling with a bit of hands-on bureaucracy for that powder, still fresh at the end of the day.
On the final run a pack of dogs ran out across the piste ahead of me and started terrorising a boy, barking and jumping up at him, until a pack of skiers skidded up and started terrorising the dogs, hitting at them with their ski poles to drive them away.
Apres ski time, so we headed for the nearest mountain bar, promisingly leaking loud dance music onto the slopes. In any Alpine resort this would be Jagermeister time, chalet-girls-stomping-on-the-bar time, but here, a few murmuring families sipped hot chocolate under Turkish wall hangings and signs warning skiers that it was "forbidden and dangerous to ski off prepared areas".
This was positively jolly compared with the atmosphere in the hotel that night, where a limp buffet of cabbage, salmon, soup and a dessert of bright pink and green globs was laid out as a grim feast for an almost empty, silent room. Finding any sort of evening entertainment was going to be problem problem in this town. We settled for slightly weird massages in the spa and spent the evening watching an old black-and-white variety show on an Azerbaijani TV channel (woman in long robes dancing with glasses of tea, you're going through to the next round!!). But hey, no one had promised us St Anton.
Erzurum had more to offer during the day. Once a Silk Road city and established in Roman times, it has a handful of interesting mosques and madrasas to poke around, including the 13th-century Cifte Minareli Medrese (the Twin Minaret madrasa), with a stunning courtyard and painted dome ceilings, and the beautiful Ulu Cami mosque, where the walls are covered in looping Arabic calligraphy.
It was bitterly cold. We were spasming with shivers despite our Michelin-man layers, so it was heartbreaking to be constantly trailed around town by a group of little boys, dressed only in only thin shirts, light trousers and suit jackets, selling tissues from their frozen bare hands. Occasionally they took turns to run inside and warm their fingers on the mosques' radiators. If you visit, please take them some gloves.
Back on the slopes, we found the pistes were pretty limited, but no worse than some small European resorts, and from the highest chair lift, at the top of Mount Palondoken, I found masses of steep off-piste powder, untouched, and rode alone down a vast empty powder field, with a full moon rising on one side of the sky and the sun setting on the other. For the last run, my mate, who had been skiing the pistes, convinced me to sacrifice the deep snow to take a long flat, icy path that would take us back down the mountain. "Honestly, it's really beautiful!"
Brutal wind swirled the snow into dry ice, backlit by an ultra-violet sky and an immense panorama of other-worldly desolation unfolded; deathly white peaks and Toblerone-perfect pyramids spread around the compass to the horizon. OK, it was worth it.
The second resort of our trip, Uludag, couldn't have been more different. Returning to Istanbul, we lugged our skis onto a ferry across the Sea of Marmara to Bursa, a gorgeous Ottoman city that feels like a mini Istanbul. From there it was a winding two-hour drive up into the mountains through pine forests to the resort. While Erzurum felt wild and remote, Uludag is a handy add-on for anyone visiting Istanbul in the winter, and has a few luxury hotels that attract a wealthy crowd of Istanbulis, as well as visitors, including many families, from Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and India.
The Baia, a big but stylish (and very expensive) spa hotel was the in place to stay, but we were next door in the Alkoclar, owned by a high-profile and rather arrogant man involved in the Turkish film industry. "My mother-in-law is Turkey's most famous actress," he boasted in the bar over cocktails. "I have made over 400 films."
I asked him whether he owned the ski hill next to the hotel, which is quite separate from the main Uludag area, a 30-minute shuttle bus ride away, but also linked by a piste. "Of course!" he almost spat. It was comical, then, to see him that night, hanging out in the hotel's "disco", where kids ran about and cocktails came accompanied by a bowl of peanuts and some chunks of sour cheese. Even in this glitzier resort the nightlife left a lot to be desired.
Waking the fist morning I opened the curtains, and couldn't believe our luck – a foot of fresh snow was piled against the window. Perfect conditions. We hurried to the slope, right outside the hotel, but because it was foggy, all the lifts bar three beginners' draglifts, were closed. "It is in case people ski into the lake," explained the hotel staff. Even more frustrating was the backward lift system. Different lift companies own different lifts, and we had to buy separate passes for each one at the start of the day. Thankfully that will change this season and one pass covering all will be available.
Despite the over-precaution and fuss, the mountain was good fun, though a bit too easy for anyone above intermediate level. The runs near our hotel were very gentle, but on one we came upon a great bar, the Kardanadam (snowman) Apres-ski Cafe, a sleek place with curvy white furniture and open fires, showing snowboarding on big screens. On the other side of the resort, I had some fun riding through the trees, and jumping off the roof of a hut next to the draglift, before lunch at a cutesy mountain cabin with colourful glass lanterns illuminating the cosy corners, and a man grilling kebabs outside.
Bursa's fabulous silk bazaar, huge mosque and kebab shop (home of the original kebab!) entertained us one afternoon, and we had an incredible experience in the hotel's luxurious hammam, where after we'd been soaked, scrubbed and massaged, the female assistant stayed in the steamy room and sang beautiful haunting melodies while we lay on the hot marble slab with our eyes closed.
Enjoying this sort of ski trip requires a different attitude: you have to tolerate things being a bit crap at times, but then you take disproportionate pleasure in the good bits. It can't beat Cham for skiiing, but if you want a cultural adventure with skiing thrown in, it works. Skiing down in the dark and the fog on our last night, we could hear the call to prayer echoing across the snow, and I thought, sometimes being different is enough.
