Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. Instead of the Southern Ocean, Coleridge could’ve been writing about the slush that was plaguing the piste a couple of weeks ago and is bound to return before the season’s out.
Water out here has a bad rap – it’s the most commonly cited cause of Val Disease, Meribelly and feeling-not-very-good-in-Tignes. But as you know, we don’t listen to gossip and hearsay – here at TME we care about science. We want proof whether or not water is to blame for so many saisonnaire sick-days and tourist tummy-aches. To this end, we’ve dispatched some samples back to the UK for Dr. Wong’s expert analysis.
Smell Test
Be it from the volcanic aquifer high in the Auvergne or the alligator-filled sewers of Paris, every glass of water has it’s own distinctive aroma. Taking a tip from the art of fine wine appreciation, we gave our subject a blindfold and asked him to have a really good sniff:
“This stuff smells a bit like a French toilet. Not good. It reminds me of taking a leak in a public lavatory.”
Taste Test
Everyone knows that different parts of the tongue are sensitive to the five different tastes: sweet, bitter, salty, sour and umami. However, that’s complete bollocks due to a Harvard professor mistranslating a German paper from 1901. We’ve always thought that a university education was overrated. So we’re keeping our taste test simple – a blindfold and a big gulp:
“Doesn’t really taste of anything at all. Boring and bland. Like water. Or skiing in Meribel.”
Smear Test
We’re not talking about “women’s things” here (although doctors do recommend that sexually-active girls should go for a pap smear annually). Our smear test is borrowed from the world of Whisky: simply put a small amount of water in a tall glass, swirl it around for a few seconds and examine the “tears” that run down the sides of the glass. A few long tears are a sign of quality and high alcohol content in whisky but we’ve no idea what they might mean when it comes to water:
“Okay, that drop is stuck to the side of the glass – it’s not moving at all. That can’t be a good sign. And are those brown bits from the water or did you just give me a dirty glass? And you made me drink this stuff?”
Pasta Test
Boiling water kills germs, but for every 1000ft above sea-level the temperature at which water boils decreases by 1°C. This means that the higher up the mountain you are, the more likely that poison is lurking in the pasta pot. Remember to add plenty of salt to your water as this will raise the temperature at which it boils, counteracting the effects of altitude. Also it’ll make it taste better.
Not being at 6000ft we had to come up with our own way to simulate the effects of cooking in the Alps, so we gave our scientist a not-very-steaming bowl of undercooked pasta:
“This is disgusting – you haven’t even cooked it! It’s like eating rubber. I’ve tasted better from the pavement outside Tocard.”
Hangover Test
Alcohol causes dehydration, most notably in the brain which is 75% water (or 99.7% in the case of some French ski instructors). A hangover is actually your dehydrated brain shrinking inside your head, so what better test for our water than as the most sought-out of mountain remedies: the hangover cure.
But first, we needed to get drunk. No matter which bar you’re in, you’ll always meet someone who has discovered the ‘perfect drink’ that you can ‘drink all night’ and, they insist, ‘never get a hangover’. There’s about as much truth in that as there is about salt raising the boiling temperature of water enough to make a blind bit of difference, but even if there was a drink that leaves no hangover it would be useless for this test. We needed to find a concoction that would guarantee a sore head the next morning, so we heeded the unofficial saisonnaire rule: drink cheap, drink lots. The cheaper the better. Preferrably free.
Chalet wine; restaurant rosé; cider; any beer on 2 for 1; and those disgusting shots that the bar-staff are suspiciously keen to get rid of: Suze and Fernet Branca.
Under the strict experimental conditions of eating-is-cheating, our scientist spent an evening imbibing before he was forcibly put to bed so that he could deliver his verdict in the morning:
“Piss off. Just leave me alone, that’s enough, I can’t take this anymore. I’m gonna go and throw up… I’ve gotta go to work in half-an-hour you bastards.”
The Verdict
So there you have it, inconclusive proof that the local water is definitely responsible for your sudden bought of gastroenteritis. There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.
One thing’s for certain though: if you want to stay healthy in the mountains then make sure you stay away from the water in the hot-tub on the balcony of apartment 102. Heaven only knows what you’ll catch if you go near that.
