Snowlines: As as easy as falling off a ...

By COLIN MOORE

The couple looking into Happy Valley from behind the safety fence at the Whakapapa ski area on Mt Ruapehu were in their 70s.

"Is that the beginners' area?" asked the lady, dressed for the snow in plaid skirt and matching beret.

"Yes, you should go down and have a go," I replied, and was only half joking. I had just spent the weekend watching three novices ski in less than a day and I have no doubt that these sprightly senior citizens could have done the same.

Kisato Fukui, Haruka Kitagawa and Kumiko Hagiwara are three 14-year-old Japanese girls from junior high schools in Ichikawa, Chiba, a region near Tokyo. They are in New Zealand with the annual two-week visit of the Ichikawa schools hosted by Glenfield College and Westlake Girls High School.

Language is never a problem when you are having fun, so a couple of host families decided to take their billets skiing. The visitors had never skied but it has to be better than a day in a strange classroom.

Right? Right, because learning to ski has never been easier.

I spent weeks on the beginner slopes with my children. My wife finally abandoned her considerable efforts to ski with a declaration, and a few expletives deleted, that she was never going to ski again.

I wish she had seen the Japanese trio. The discover-skiing and discover-snowboarding packages are the next best thing to snow.

Between the girls and ourselves we found enough warm clothes to hit the learner slopes. And that is all we had to worry about.

If you had to design a beginners' ski area from scratch, you would probably come up with something resembling Happy Valley at Whakapapa.

High cliffs keep the wind, and better skiers and boarders, away from its gentle slopes. It is an ideal location for snow-making so has an adequate cover for much of the winter.

It also has its own cafeteria, equipment rental and ski instructors. And the area is accessed by probably the shortest chairlift in the world and possibly the only one designed to take people down, rather than up.

All this means that to discover skiing or boarding you don't need to queue for lift tickets at the Top o' the Bruce or to worry about skis, boots or boards until your feet touch the snow at the bottom of the mini chairlift.

The discover-skiing or boarding package costs $35 for people under 17 years and $55 for adults. That includes all rental equipment, a lift pass for the beginners' area and a 90-minute lesson.

First task is to have rental boots fitted. I leave the girls and the staff to the job and they work it out fine. Skis are fitted according to the girls' height and weight. The girls know the statistics precisely and the bindings are adjusted according to numbers stamped on their boots. It all happens quickly.

Their gear is scanned as they leave and they are ready to take their huge grins out to the snow.

Their grins grow bigger, or perhaps it is a grimace, as they try to stand on their skis for the first time. These are short, modern skis but, as always with the first clumsy attempt at standing on skis, the sensation is like being strapped into a couple of sizeable pieces of four-by-two on a sloping bed of ball bearings.

They stumble and keel over and laugh when I make them. There is an hour before their lesson time so I encourage them to get used to their skis by following me walking around the ski racks, jumping up and down and generally being silly.

But they want to "ski", so I tell them to. The least athletic-looking of the trio skis off, confidently in balance and comes to a controlled stop. The other two fall. They look neither comfortable, nor happy.

I instruct them to keep smiling when they fall, point to the cafeteria and retreat to go skiing higher up the mountain.

When we meet for lunch they seem happy. When we leave in the afternoon they are ecstatic and claim to have "skied from the top" and instantly nod off on some "Japanese sightseeing" which is what all Japanese tourists do the minute they get in a car, bus or train.

I put the boast down to difficulties with language. No one learns to ski that quickly, I reason. So next day I buy another discover-ski package instead of a lower mountain lift ticket and rental equipment which would have cost $39.

When I tell them the lesson time they seemed reluctant. When I ask them to ski so I can take a photograph I realise why. All three could indeed ski in control from the top to the bottom and no longer need instructions on how to use a rope tow or a platter lift.

They make basic turns in either direction and stop at will. And they are grinning not grimacing.

The lift ticket with the discover-ski or boarding package allows a sightseeing trip on the chairlifts to the top of the mountain. Our young guests ride the chairs to the Knoll Ridge cafe and photograph Mt Taranaki poking through the clouds.

And that afternoon, after more hours skiing from the top to the bottom of Happy Valley, they begin Japanese sightseeing even before we reach the end of the Iwikau loop road.

Was it fun? You don't need to understand Japanese to know that. Just say "ski" and look at the grins.

It works too if you say "Huka Jet," but that's another story.

Mt Ruapehu's new ski school director Louisa Muir is not surprised at how quickly our Japanese guests learned rudimentary skiing without the pain and frustration of old.

She says Mt Ruapehu is looking to introduce a discover-skiing day two with a more advanced lesson.

Muir, a snowboarder, has raced in New Zealand colours on the overseas race circuit and had her eyes on a Winter Olympics berth.

But the 30-year-old, wooed from her position as the chief snowboard examiner for the New Zealand Ski Instructors Alliance to Mt Ruapehu, is retiring from competition to concentrate on teaching.

She is a Whakapapa veteran, having worked in the field's ski school from 1990 to 1995. She has also taught skiing in Queenstown and in the New Zealand off-season works at Aspen in Colorado where she shares a flat with the NZSIA president, Bridget Rayward, ski school director at the Cardrona field, near Wanaka.

Muir is brimming with ideas, including a children's centre, similar to those at top overseas resorts where facilities include dining and play areas.