Imagine a raw and underdeveloped Austria, like Austria itself was about 50 years ago—poorer, cheaper and with only a few-odd ski lifts to dot the landscape here and there. Picture it with pristine lakes and jagged mountains, but the peaks are not quite as high. The country is smaller—one-fourth the size with one-fourth the population. There is little infrastructure in place for mass tourism, most of the skiers are local weekenders from the surrounding towns, and the friendliness of the people is genuine and unrelated to their quest for tourist dollars.
Wave the magic wand...abracadabra...poof...Slovenia! This tiny nation is proof that good things do come in small packages. To begin with, it is the only part of former Yugoslavia to break away from the federation with almost no violence. A country of about 20,000 square kilometers, Slovenia is home to about two million people, and the Slovenians have a skiing tradition every bit as rich as that of their neighbors to the north, without all the hoopla, fanfare and media hype. The people here have been skiing for over 300 years, and there are around 50 ski areas in the country. They too are small, as only a few have more than ten lifts and more than half of them have only three lifts or fewer.
Slovenia is perhaps too small to put together a full-fledged Olympic bid by herself, but together with Italy and the Austrian province of Carinthia, Slovenia was part of the first multi-nation bid for the Winter Games, an event they had offered to host jointly in 2006. That fact alone was enough to intrigue my friend Jonas Nilsson and me into visiting this rugged little land to see what it had to offer skiers.
Two Italian border guards, who were apparently frontal-lobotomy victims, thumbed inexplicably through our passports, cross-checking the numbers against a moth-eaten, multi-thousand-page document, that might have been anything from a list of World War I casualties to a telephone directory of Tokyo. They checked the passport photos against our faces a dozen times. Then they stared at our credentials for a while, as if they had never seen a passport before. After 20 minutes of this tedium, they waved us on. The Slovenian border attendant, by contrast, shined us a friendly smile, did not even look in our little blue books, and said simply, “Welcome to Slovenia.”...
The complete story is in the coffee table book Skiing Around the World by Jimmy Petterson.
