Americans for Bansko?
Americans for Bansko?
I just read a very interesting article in the New York Times on one of it’s reporters recent visits to Bansko Ski Resort.
Ok, the article in not all positive but gives an objective view of Bansko - a warts and all view.
It’s a quite long article and here’s a short sampling:
Is Bulgaria Really Skiing’s Next Hot Spot?
THE morning sky outside my window was gray with rain — the last thing I wanted to see at Bansko, the biggest ski resort in Bulgaria. A dispiriting mist hid the half-built hotels and condos that lay beyond the ugly Glazne River, and the Pirin Mountains were all but invisible. The town had been warm and wet the past two days, and conditions up on the slopes below the roughly 9,000-foot Todorka peak hadn’t been much better. I closed the curtains with a sigh and gave myself the day off.
Over breakfast, I planned an alternative schedule: first, I’d wander the cobblestone lanes of Bansko’s picturesque old town, then head up Pirin Street to check out my shopping options. By early afternoon, I’d be back here at my hotel, the boutiquey Villa Roka, for a swim in the pool, a shvitz in the sauna and perhaps a hot-stone massage in the spa. I was trying to decide how to test the mixological skills of the bartenders in the sleek, minimalist lounge, when my cellphone buzzed with a text message:
“Get up here now.â€
It was from Luke, one of five Australians and New Zealanders I’d befriended the day before, and it launched me into action. I downed my espresso and raced upstairs to change into my snowboarding gear, and 15 minutes later I was climbing into a bright-blue gondola bubble. Over the next half-hour, as the gondola zipped me through thick pine forests, I fidgeted nervously — the trees had only a light dusting of white.
It was only when I reached base camp that I understood Luke’s message: a few inches of powder had fallen overnight, just the sight to cheer this despairing snowboarder. I jogged to a lift, and soon was cruising the easy trails, slaloming around beginners and pulling tiny airs off tiny bumps. It was bliss, but only for a couple of hours.
Before long, every last flake of powder was tracked out, and the lifts to higher altitudes — and virgin snow — were mysteriously closed. I was, I realized, done for the day. There would still be time for that shvitz.
As my friends and I rode the eight-seat gondola back down, however, I was confused. Over the past few years, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment had flowed into Bansko, a little town bordering Pirin National Park, about 100 miles south of Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia, itself a semifinalist for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The mountain boasted shiny new gondolas and detachable chairlifts built by Doppelmayr, an Austrian company, while in town dozens — if not hundreds — of vacation homes and hotels had gone up, including the five-star Kempinski Hotel Grand Arena, the surest sign that this formerly off-the-beaten-path destination had gone mainstream. The typical Bansko vista was now of construction cranes first, then the mountains.
Get the rest of the article here.
So will there be a deluge of U.S skiers to the nether regions of Eastern Europe? Not likely unless global warming completely obliterates the yearly snowfall in Aspen.
It’s good though to see that Bansko is getting more exposure. When the New York Times sends a reporter then things must be looking up. If I’d known he was coming I’d have offered an apartment on the cheap.:wink:
Tags: bansko, new york times, ski bansko, bulgaria skiing, bansko ski resort
July 21st, 2008 at 4:26 pm
If it can get people onto the slopes earlier and at a reasonable fee I think it really could be the next big hotspot, allot of Americans are passing up some of the older more traditional hot spots cause of the weaker dollar and increased cost of travel.