Could Uzbekistan be skiing’s next big thing?

At the end of a long descent through trees, I stop in a clearing to catch my breath. The cold afternoon sun hangs low above Uzbekistan’s Chirchiq valley. But for the smokestacks that stud the valley floor, I could be in remote British Columbia or an Alaskan range.

As I shrug my pack from my shoulders, a man appears out of the stillness on horseback. We don’t share a language but establish that he is called Aklam, a hunter taking his dogs for a walk.

Only weeks earlier, Aklam would have been as surprised to bump into me as I am to see him. Skiers with garish plumages are a new species in this corner of the Chatkal mountains, at the western reaches of the Tian Shan.

I’ve flown way east from London — further east than Kabul or Karachi and on a plane old enough that the armrest ashtrays were still open — in search of a new frontier in skiing. Amirsoy Mountain Resort, the off-piste boundaries of which I’m exploring, opened in late 2019, a €100m symbol of a rush to tourism riches in a nation trying, falteringly, to shed its reputation as a cold dictatorship. It also represents a radical upgrade for a region of small, Soviet-era resorts where, for now at least, it’s still possible to ski back in time.

After a firm handshake, I watch as Aklam moseys over the ridge. Then it’s my turn to move. After a 20-minute hike, I’m back at the base of Amirsoy, where the sparkling gondola lift, imported from Austria, is winding down for the night. Families throw snowballs while they wait for a bus back to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, less than two hours down the valley.

Amirsoy had been due to open a winter earlier. But construction wasn’t just about installing the lift, or building the village of luxury chalets, which are due to be joined by two hotels and four restaurants. There was nothing here — no roads or electricity. Just apple trees, pine forest and hunters on horseback.

On the gondola the next day, I meet Lucas Tuni, Amirsoy’s “slopes manager”, who moved here from a job in New Zealand. He works for PGI Management, which runs Andorra’s ski resorts, as well as mountains in Azerbaijan, India and Turkey. Ecosign, a Canadian mountain resort specialist, designed Amirsoy. Its own client list, including Georgia, South Korea and Serbia, reflects the spread of the industry beyond the familiar ranges of Europe and North America.

“It’s an amazing challenge to build a ski resort from nothing,” Tuni says above Amirsoy’s five main pistes, which are as immaculate as any I’ve seen. Every piste marker and metre of safety netting has been shipped from Andorra. “They have absolutely nothing here,” adds Tuni, whose own big adjustment has been to the increased coriander in his diet (he’s not a fan).

I leave Tuni at the top, where he is overseeing preparations for Uzbekistan’s junior national ski championships. He has no idea what standard to expect. For the time being, most of his customers are curious pedestrians. On a busy day last year, 6,000 people were coming to Amirsoy. Only about 1,000 had skis or snowboards.

That might be about to change, pandemic restrictions permitting. Since the death of the authoritarian and isolationist president Islam Karimov in 2016, economic and political reforms in Uzbekistan have given the green light to foreign investment, although observers report human rights abuses persist. The country has moved from ranking 141st in the World Bank’s index on ease of doing business in 2015 to 69th last year; tourist arrivals grew threefold between 2016 and 2019, in part thanks to an easing of the need for visas.

I meet one local novice back at the bottom of the gondola. Ravshan Ubaidullaev is a Tashkent oil and gas magnate who got his first taste of skiing at the resorts built for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

“I loved it so much but when I checked on YouTube what we had in Uzbekistan it was nothing,” he says. “I was so upset with this I started thinking, what can I do?” Amirsoy, which has government backing but is privately financed by Ubaidullaev and his co-investors, is his bid to outdo Russia.

Lift tickets are cheap by industry standards, at about £17 for a day pass, but Amirsoy is also trying to appeal to a luxury market. At Le Chalet by Amirsoy, 40 well-appointed, if slightly cheaply constructed, cabins are spread out just beyond the base station, each with its own kitchen and faux-marble bathrooms. At one of the resort’s restaurants, housed under a huge and sleekly decorated geodesic dome, the steaming Uzbek manti dumplings and fluffy plov (a kind of pilau) are by orders of magnitude the best food I’ll eat in the country.

There are plans to expand the resort as well as the hotels and restaurants in the coming summers. It was Tuni who directed me to the ridge west of the top station, to a point where a second gondola is due to deliver skiers. After a short hike, I skied roughly the line of the future lift.

Yet Amirsoy will soon have competition itself, as a government-funded, $500m plan takes shape to build three more modern resorts in the range. Before my brief stay at Amirsoy, I spend three days at Beldersay, which is only eight miles down the road — and about 40 years away in terms of ski evolution.

The Soviet-era, one-lift ski hill may struggle in the shadow of the new resort due to be built next door. French companies are due to provide the infrastructure, with almost €48m in foreign government loans.

Uzbekistan is traditionally a place only the most intrepid skiers would venture in search of untouched snow and affordable heli-skiing

Until the millions roll in, Beldersay offers a glimpse of Uzbekistan’s old mountain culture. The short, winding road to our hotel isn’t ploughed so a convoy of tiny off-road Ladas — “Russian Jeeps”, as they’re known — completes the journey through snow.

Hotel Beldersay is a summer resort perched on a hillside part way up the ski resort’s rickety chairlift. With its concrete and chrome, and unyielding mattresses, it has the look and feel of a Soviet holiday camp. I’m amazed to learn later that it was built this century.

Dinner soon disintegrates into an east-meets-west bacchanal. The unlikely instigators: an all-male gathering of Uzbekistan’s meteorological society. Dressed in a mix of brown suits and sportswear, they decide to invest a considerable sum in testing the vodka tolerance of our British group.

Looking on bemused are four young free-riders from Murmansk, in far north-western Russia, and a group of Slovakians who are sampling the range’s off-piste potential. Uzbekistan is traditionally a place only the most intrepid skiers would venture in search of untouched snow and relatively affordable heli-skiing.

My head remarkably clear the next morning, I muster near the summer swimming pool above the hotel and soon disappear in a blizzard whipped up by a hulking Mi-8. The helicopter, operated by Uzbekistan Airways, sits deep in the snow as I clamber in. A dusty pile of military-issue cross-country skis sits under the long benches, which have room for 24 passengers.

Soon we’re soaring 40 miles further east, deep into the Ugam-Chatkal National Park along the border with Kyrgyzstan. Our mountain guide is even more of a workhorse than the helicopter. Grigoriy Trebisovskiy, a deeply tanned Ukrainian with a white beard and gold teeth, says he was the first heli-ski guide in Uzbekistan when he landed here almost 30 years ago. He’s nudging 70 now, and says we are his first group of British skiers.

A high avalanche risk confines us to slopes so gentle that the snowboarder among us struggles to build speed. Trebisovskiy deems it a waste of energy to turn at all. As he leans back on his tails and descends in a straight line, he looks so old-school he’s almost black and white.

We return to Beldersay in the afternoon. On the rusting chairlift, I get the day’s biggest jolt of adrenaline behind a safety bar that feels about as sturdy as a breadstick. On a nursery slope at the top, a group of young men in jeans and brown jumpers is trying out antique skis and boots from a rental cupboard next to the café, where a Nescafé Gold costs 30p. Snowballs fly. Children make snow angels. The joy of discovery on their faces is infectious.

The gleaming new top station of Amirsoy is visible in the distance as I explore Beldersay’s terrain in the fading light. There is zero competition for untracked snow. The chairlift now having creaked to a halt, a couple of us stop to put on climbing skins to ascend for one last run. Soon, Anton Egulikov, one of two volunteer ski patrollers here, who otherwise works in IT in Tashkent, arrives to politely kick us off the mountain.

After a more civilised dinner at the hotel, Trebisovskiy pops in with his daughter, Kseniya, who’s 34 and a ski guide herself. She plugs a memory stick into the lobby TV, interrupting a football match. In one video, Grigoriy and Kseniya star in Go East, a riotous 1992 ski movie in which Grigoriy guides a young Dominique Perret, the Swiss extreme ski pioneer. Kseniya — then a tiny blonde toddler — looks up in mock horror as Perret launches himself from cliffs and surfs avalanches on his matchstick skis.

Back then, Uzbekistan was a wild place in which to ski. And it remains so — for now. By choice, Grigoriy still lives alone in a shack with a tin roof alongside Sakdi, his husky, at Chimgan, another of the resorts due to be part of the shiny new master plan. He and his daughter are tentatively hoping that the region’s transformation will be good for business.

“There are two sides to everything but I think the changes are positive,” Kseniya says. She noted today as she glanced across the valley from a deserted Beldersay that the Amirsoy car park was full. “We’re just happy if more people want to enjoy these mountains.”

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