The Alpine Edition
Join us as we visit a host of resorts across Europe, Japan, the US and New Zealand. Jesse Van Rheenen meets up with Freeride World Tour champion Markus Eder to talk about The Ultimate Run and his partnership with Alpina.
Travel
Japan – Hokkaido & Hakuba
In the Nagano prefecture, Hakuba is one of Japan’s top winter resorts stretching over the three municipalities of Omachi city, Hakuba Village and Otari village. With Olympic hosting heritage comes investment and footfall and so Hakuba comprises 10 ski resorts that run north to south entrenched in the foothills of the Hida Mountains.
Hurawalhi
Seaplane is one of the most spectacular ways to arrive at Hurawalhi. The de Havilland Twin Otter is unpressurised and a rite of passage for anyone travelling to the 1190-island archipelago of the Maldives. The journey to the Lhaviyani Atoll takes around 40 minutes – enough time to either power-nap or stare intently out of the window at the blueprint of the original 90s desktop background.
Cortina d’Ampezzo
Deep in the Veneto valleys of Northern Italy sits The Queen of the Dolomites, Cortina d’Ampezzo. There’s no angle of approach to the region that won’t leave you overwhelmed by the colossal mountains fortifying this beautiful region.
Fingal
Edinburgh has many fine and illustrious luxury hotels, but none with the heritage and timeless elegance of Fingal. So, when the conversation about a Scotland fly drive was raised by the assistant motoring editor, Aaron Edgeworth, my deck shoes were already packed.
Wanderlust – Spring
I’ve managed to undertake a whole lot of travelling through the various lockdowns. The problem? Aside from a couple of brief working jaunts to the Baltic states, it’s happened almost entirely within my imagination.
Elysium: Kudadoo
Was it all a dream? Some sort of abstraction from consciousness? Had delirium set in? It seemed so real. The colours so incredibly vivid, the sealife so lustrous. I felt incredibly lucid sojourning under the luminous morning sun, deep in the heart of the Indian Ocean. The heat instantly envelopes you when you’re a mere 380 miles from the equator. It was a stark contrast from the ashen winter morning that now sat before me. I needed to find the red pill and somehow get back – back to the pure shores of Kudadoo.
Alpine Escapes
When I started 2020, I was almost mountain fit. Not rock-climbing fit, you understand, but skiing down. I spent the last six months of 2019 working on a fitness routine to kick start myself into a 2020 season of incredible heli skiing in New Zealand, British Columbia and Japan.