We’ve found a couple of good deals for Avoriaz ski holidays this January.

Manchester to Avoriaz
A week at Pierre and Vacances Residence Quartier de la Falaise in Avoriaz with flights from Manchester is available for just £271 per person. This is based on four people sharing and includes flights with Jet2.

London to Avoriaz
A week at the same hotel as above between Saturday 16th January and Saturday 23rd January is available from London for £256 per person, this time with flights from British Airways. Pierre and Vacances Residence Les Balcons du Soleil is also available for £268 per person on the same basis.

Birmingham to Avoriaz
ski holiday packages from Birmingham are slightly harder to come by. Nevertheless, the same ski holiday as from Manchester between Saturday 9th January and Saturday 16th January is currently available for £314 per person with Swiss Air flights.

All the above deals are available through Expedia’s Avoriaz page.

The problem with ski holidays is all the additional expense. cheap flights to ski destinations are easy enough to find. Cheap accommodation’s pretty easy to find. Cheap package deals are easy to find. It’s at that point it gets difficult.

The ski pass
There’s no way round this one. Ski passes are expensive and you’ve got to get one. What else are you going to do?

Ski and boot hire
Again, unavoidable, unless you’ve got your own stuff, which is an expense in itself. The better you get, the more expensive it’ll be as well.

Food and booze
Ski resorts are famously expensive, with prices seemingly bearing no relationship to the rest of the world. £10 a pint? Why not? Now, with the strength of the Euro, it’s dangerous to pretend that it’s all just Monopoly money, which had previously been the best way of coping.

One thing you can do, is pick your destination carefully. Ski resorts in Eastern Europe, outside the Eurozone are likely to be a lot cheaper. Similarly, there are a handful of resorts, like Livigno in Italy, which are tax free. This can add up to a substantial difference over the course of a holiday.

Alternatively, why not try and become an upper middle-class person with no concept of the value of money. If you can achieve this, you can throw your money about with abandon, driving up the prices for everyone else, thus assuring yourself of quieter slopes next year.

I’ve been skiing three times. I’ve been to Chamonix, Livigno and Les Deux Alpes.

Chamonix
I couldn’t ski at all. It was hard. It was dispiriting. There was a lot of fear at the top of slopes, because I tended to visualise losing control and it was a bit embarrassing falling down so much. That said, falling over is far and away the most fun element of the actual skiing. More fun than watching other people fall over, even.

Livigno
This was a bit better. I could ski semi-competently and could experience far more of the mountains as a result. There were no lessons – which was good – and food and drink in Livigno is cheap, so that was good too. There was still a good deal of fear, but satisfaction at overcoming it.

Les Deux Alpes
I don’t know what’s the next step up from ’semi-competent’ – ‘competent’ seems a bit of a generous assessment – but whatever it is, that’s what I was for this ski holiday. There was lots to explore, but there was disappointingly little falling over. In the end, it felt like repeatedly turning left then right and going down a hill. That’s basically what skiing is, but it doesn’t feel too exciting.

I’m still quite tempted to go again this year though. Why? I’ve boiled the ski holiday experience down to the two main plus points:

• Apres ski – There is no better feeling than being a bit knackered and settling down somewhere comfortable with a beer
• Food - If you’re out doing activity all day, you can justify eating a ridiculous amount of food

We’ve has another letter from Brian. He feels he’s been duped again and would like to warn our readership.

Dear Weak Holidays,

It’s Brian. Please allow me to share a recent holiday nightmare experienced by myself and my good wife, Doreen. We decided to holiday in a cottage by the side of Loch Ness in Scotland. There was one reason for this trip and one reason alone. Doreen is a massive fan of the 1980s BBC cartoon series ‘Family Ness’. In fact she won’t mind me saying, she is nuts for Nessy. Of course, she was excited at the chance to view the green monster for herself.

Despite the twelve hour car journey we were excited to arrive at Loch Ness and were happy with the cottage on the shore, aptly named ‘Loch Ness Cottage’. The proprietor had kindly baked us a cake and left a note of welcome, signing off with, ‘Happy Nessy spotting!’ All boded well. Doreen could barely contain herself. She hardly slept a wink.

The next morning we set up our deck chairs at 6am and despite the sheeting rain, we were happy to be there, waiting for our first sighting of Nessy. Now, by midday we were starting to get a little restless. But we told ourselves to be patient; maybe, we thought, Nessy is just a late riser, surely he will swing by this afternoon.

Nothing.

And the next day.

And the next day.

And the next day.

And so on.

To the last day of our holiday. We are still sat in our deck chairs, same spot, rain still sheeting down, still waiting for Nessy. A local fisherman walks past and I ask how we could have been here for seven days and not seen the monster once. He looks at me like I’m an imbecile and stalks off, muttering obscenities about tourist w*?*?s in his thick Scottish brogue.

I went to investigate. I visited the nearby village of Drumnadroicht and asked a few questions. What I ascertained still rocks me to the core today.

THE LOCH NESS MONSTER, MORE LIKELY THAN NOT, HAS NEVER EXISTED. IT WOULD BE ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE FOR A CREATURE BIGGER THAN A LARGE FISH TO SURVIVE IN LOCH NESS BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF FOOD AND THE TEMPERATURE OF THE WATERS.

Now, let me be clear, I have no complaints with the loch itself. That is a fine example of a large, deep, freshwater loch. I do however have a problem with the LIES.

What upsets me immeasurably is the fact that the BBC peddled these lies to our children throughout the 1980s and continue to do so today in DVD format. And Doreen still hasn’t recovered fully from the pneumonia. Imagine the shock of the locals when a distraught Doreen, on hearing the news, stripped herself naked and, with a mighty roar that reverberated around the loch, charged head first into the freezing grey waters. As for the the locals joking that the lake really did have a monster now, well, I’ll let your good readers decide if that is funny or not. We shall not be returning. And I urge your readers to boycott Loch Ness along with us. For it is a lake built on lies and trickery.

Brian Winstanley
Name and address supplied

We’ve had a letter we feel we should share with you so you don’t end up feeling as short changed as this particular reader.

Dear Weak Holidays.

Last week me and my wife, Doreen, decided to go for a weekend break to Oxford. There was a reason for this and one reason alone: Morse. She won’t mind me saying this: Doreen is Morse Mental. She has the box sets, she has the board game (yes there is one) and she has the t shirt (she made this herself, because although there are official ones out there Doreen felt they didn’t do justice to the Inspector, so she hand stitched his craggy face to within a needle point of perfection herself). Now, we booked into the guest house no problem and it’s a lovely place, can’t fault it at all – Parklands Guest House, Banbury Road. We asked about Morse at said guest house and a lovely young man said ‘You must mean the Morse tour,’ and gave us a leaflet with all the details we would need. Now, you can imagine Doreen’s excitement. She barely slept a wink.

The next day we were there, a good half an hour before the tour started, the pouring rain not dampening Doreen’s excitement one jot. Two hours we walked, two hours, in the rain, looking for Morse on every street corner and in every college quad. And did we ever see him? Did we ever get the big reveal? No. We didn’t. And do you know why? He’s dead! Dead! So whilst ITV 3 are cashing in showing non-stop repeats, the box sets are flying out of the shops and Oxford is doing a Morse Tour, it’s all one big lie. Please print this letter as a warning to your non-suspecting readers who may be duped as we so cruelly were. Imagine the shock of the young man when we returned to the guest house, me propping up a sobbing Doreen, having to reveal to him the death of the great Inspector and Oxford’s big lie. Let me be clear. MORSE IS DEAD.

Brian Winstanley
Name and address supplied

If you’re considering taking a holiday on Culatra, you’re probably wondering what you can do while you’re there.

As you’re no doubt aware, Culatra is a fantastically lively place and its leisure activities reflect this.

One of the most popular things to do is to go joyriding on the beach:

From Flickr.

You can also indulge in the Culatrans favourite pastime of ‘inappropriate canine positioning’:

From Flickr.

If I could give you one simple piece of advice, it would be: ‘fly to somewhere else’.

Geneva Airport theoretically has a Swiss side and a French side. In reality, both are in Switzerland, so I don’t really know what the significance of the French side is. I think it’s there to function as the world’s biggest ball-ache.

We fluked our way to the car hire desk. Signs inside the airport dry up at crucial points – this is good preparation for when you get the car. Having got the car, we then had to get to France. The guy told us to follow blue signs to France once we got out of the airport. Upon exiting the airport, there was a blue sign to places we’d never heard of and a green sign to France. We went with the green sign. This was not the right thing to do.

The green sign leads to the Swiss motorway, which does admittedly lead to France, but because it’s in Switzerland, they don’t signpost a single French road on it, even though they’re probably only a mile away.

We went up the road. We didn’t know where we were. We turned round and came back.

At least we tried to come back.

The problem is, the French side of the airport is not signed ‘airport’. The Swiss side is, but you can’t get to the French side from there. It’s impossible.

I think you need to follow ‘Ferney’ or something like that. Even if we’d known that, we’d still have been too tempted when we saw a sign saying ‘airport’. I’m sure of this, because we almost were on the way back and we sort of knew what we were doing by then.

Trevi Fountain is a 25m high scene incorporating a fountain. It was begun by Bernini in 1629, but is largely the work of Nicola Salvi. It was finished in 1762 by Giuseppe Pannini. It’s all arches and columns and gods and symbolism. If it isn’t the most spectacular fountain in the world, I don’t know what is.

Trip Advisor reviewer, kizzibee, says:

“It’s just a fountain really.”

Kizzibee tells us that it’s not worth spending more than 15 minutes at it.

That’s a maximum of 15 minutes. How many fountains are there in the world that incorporate over a hundred years’ work? How many fountains have had three different architects?

Is there any fountain anywhere in the world that’s worth looking at for longer than it takes to have a shit?

A Trip Advisor member from Minnesota has spared us all a horrendous in-room experience at the Shangri La Hotel in Sydney. They’ve shared their bad experience with the world so that everyone else is safe.

If I go on holiday to Sydney, I won’t be staying in the Shangri La, that’s for certain.

“There were not rats in my room, but there were Asian Beatles.”

Just how offputting would it be to roll over in the middle of the night in your five star hotel room and catch sight of Jeetan Lennon or Ringo Singh?