Petty minded moves

Monetier's dead pool

As you may know the “Bains” in Monetier les Bains refers to the baths made possible by the hot springs that burst through the area freely as God intended and have now been housed in a massive, on the outside, building in the village.

Well I gots to be honest up front, I’ve never liked this new building, it’s a reverse Tardis, as this monstrosity is confusingly huge outside and tiny in the inside, it’s a strange puce colour and is just plain ugly.

I can’t stand the idea of paying Eur17 for a two hour dip, which I must take in pair of budgie-smugglers, and pay another Eur3 for a towel. Sitting in a soup of arse-sweat and skin the perfect temperature for new life to spring forth, doesn’t fill me with excitement either, but that is the idea.

Oh yes I find the Eur17 million build price tag, which the commune picked up, somewhat extortionate – mm, massive publically funded project, that seems madly expensive – can you say backhander? To continue, the reason you have to pay a Eur3 towel charge is, despite spending Eur17m, they didn’t build a laundry and the towels have to be shipped down to Briancon.

To recap a place designed for people to go and get wet in on an industrial scale, does not have the capability to do it’s own laundry.

Anyway, that’s just so you know what I think up front, although it is one of the draws to Serre Chevalier as it is quite nice to sit in a bath after a ski looking at the mountains, I will give them that.

So that’s the scene set. Well there always used to be a sort of outfall of a stream of hot water into the river, in the old days of the tiny little veruca-shack that preceded the current building it was up by the baths themselves, but since their construction it was nearer the Grand Pont, which most skiers crossed to get to the pistes.

At these points some industrious locals would construct a stone walled shelter which would contain, or at least pool, the hot flow, and these little rock formations would allow three people at most to enjoy a dip in hot water as the freezing Guisane rushed past, mere inches away.

It was quite nice to sit there in a raging river and not freeze.

Of course these little spots were free and maybe 10 people a week would enjoy the free dip – it wasn’t as if it posed a great threat to the income stream of the baths – the original site was destroyed when the new baths were made and just the other day a bulldozer pushed a load of dirt into the other one, burrying it and the outfall.

This got me thinking that this is just how polititians at any scale operate, if they can’t tax it they ban or destroy it. It’s not as if I have lost anything, I have sat in the river once, three years ago, but it’s just this vicious attitude that bmp (boils my piss – a very local saying).

Not certain if it was the local government or the baths who agitated to get the pool destroyed, but it’s not right I tell you, it’s wrong. What’s worse is they don’t even advertise on Serrechevalier.Org.

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