Chocolate and Cuckoos: Chalets

The chalet opposite my house is being pulled down to make way for a posh development of very, very, very expensive flats. Actually, 'pulled down' isn't the right word, it is being dismantled to be re-erected somewhere else. From the road one could just see the entrance as the garden boardering the road was full of enormous fir trees. The view from the chalet is on the other side of the house, overlooking Verbier, and the ski resort on the other side of the mountain, Bruson.

It's a shame that the individual chalets are disappearing, making way for large and luxurious flats that are occupied for a couple of weeks in the year but I suppose this is the problem of ski resorts that are in high demand for four or five months of the year and then die quietly during the remaining months. Verbier of course is a well-known resort and the skiing is excellent - 40% of foreign investors here are English, and one supposes that a high percentage of those are the hated City Bonus benificiaries. However...

I love Verbier once the season ends as everything is shut and no one is around apart from the locals who come out of hiding! The negative side is that as soon as the season is at an end, the building work starts again in ernest. No lorries, cranes, Manitous and dynamite during the winter as there is too much traffic already in the village, it isn't good publicity, and I suppose there are the technical problems with the snow, the cold etc. reacting with concrete ... the work stops again during July and August during the Festival, so in fact if you decide to come here in the winter or the summer, you would never know any building work went on at all. Last summer high up on the mountainside looking down over Verbier, I counted 33 cranes!

Anway back to the chalet over the road. Here are a series of photos that I took, starting on Monday...

MONDAY MORNING - FIR TREES IN THE GARDEN LINING THE ROAD