The 175km Sella Ronda circuit at the core of the Dolomites offers blissful skiing

The 175km Sella Ronda circuit at the core of the Dolomites offers blissful skiing for intermediates covering four valleys and a well-linked lift system and snowmaking.The Italians are piste-bashing poseurs who don’t like tough skiing. They prefer wide gentle open pistes where they can bomb down for an hour or so before stopping off for a mega-lunch.The Italians are known for their hospitality towards families but they do not always have good childcare facilities, probably because the Italians are so loathe to let their bambinos out of sight and usually bring grandmama along to look after them.AccommodationItalian hotels are usually of a high standard and those who run them friendly and hospitable. The Super Dolomiti ski pass gives access to over 1,000km of pistes and nearly 500 lifts, but much of this is still not properly connected. The mountains rise up to 3,899m, while the craggy stacks of rock, sharp cliff faces and narrow valleys are breathtaking and intimidating by turns. The highest skiable peak is the Marmolada (3,344m) while there are another 35 peaks measuring over 3,000m.
StyleAt one time, about 10-15 years ago, Italy was notorious for its rather chaotic skiing and archaic lift systems. This is no longer the case and the Italians have put a tremendous amount of money, time and thought into their resorts so you’ll now find their pistes well-groomed, their snowmaking facilities extensive and their lift systems up to date.Although there are some internationally renowned Italian resorts such as Cortina and Courmayeur, expert skiers would still be hard pushed to find anything as challenging or as extensive as in some of the premier league resorts in France or Austria. Gentle in parts, jagged in others, this southern range has a tremendous feel of drama and unpredictability.

In fact the single nastiest thing I have eaten in 1997 was a Chilean hot dog known as a completa, of which the largest, heaviest components were thick shining layers of multi-coloured grease which squeezed their way over my cheeks and nose with every bite.My winner of the overall category for nicest place visited was Marrakesh in spring. Nowhere else does summer begin with snake charmers, hooded strangers and Club-Med style hotels in such exquisite proportions. Tattiest place? Liverpool was promising; Baghdad edged it on atmosphere.. THERE IS something very special about skiing in Italy. The scenery is stunning, the people hospitable, the food delicious and the pistes surprisingly well-maintained. Italian skiing is split into regions and the atmosphere varies considerably, depending whether the resort is near France, Switzerland or Austria.

The Dolomites used to be part of Austria and is the most beautiful stretch of the Alps – 5,000 square kilometres of widely varying rock formations. They look strikingly different from the rest of the Alps – jagged teeth- like mountains which glow a magical pinky grey colour in the evenings. The Dolomites are named after the Frenchman Deodat de Dolomieu who discovered the limestone-type rock which gives these mountains their slightly pinky- orange tinge. On the subject of Europe, mussels in Lille and prix fixe menus in Bordeaux were also highly memorable (but then they always are).Europe is not the only continent to have tickled my palate this year.

Sushi and sashimi delivered by conveyor belt in Tokyo stunned me by its miraculous cheapness and that was three months ago, before the east Asian currencies had started to collapse. My worst culinary experiences of the year tended to be in Latin America, where distilled additives and processed meat seem to have become a substitute for food. To this day nobody has the faintest idea of what happened to my shirt and I can only assume that there is a waiter somewhere trying to impersonate me.What about food? My favourite meal took place in a German pub on the banks of the River Moser overlooking the Luxembourg border. Not only was the pork and beer extremely hearty but the sense of pan-European unity could have been pricked with a wurstchen. The shirt never came back and I was forced to attend a black tie function in a T-shirt with a shoelace round my neck. On the other hand, the plane itself turned out to be so clean and new that it might as well have been inside its Boeing wrappers.My favourite hotel experience by quite a long chalk was in the Park Hyatt Tokyo where I sat on the 49th floor in a bath that would have been big enough for my extended family had I wished to invite them.One of the worst hotels that I experienced, on the other hand, was on Tenerife where I made the mistake of leaving out my most expensive shirt – in fact my most expensive possession – to be pressed. I also enjoyed flying long-haul on British Airways, not least because BA offers more scope for celebrity-spotting if you hang around by the toilets in the front part of the plane (my jackpot was Princess Anne and top Chilean footballer Marcelo Salas on the same flight).

My most charming flights of 1997 were internal hops around the Seychelles where the pilot has to buzz the grass landing strips before landing to stop the kids playing football on them.For my least promising flight of 1998, however, I nominate Yemenia, who put me on hold for three days before suddenly phoning me up one evening asking if I cared to get down to Heathrow in the next two hours. The worst journey was the bus from London to Amsterdam on which my fellow passengers had reached a state of vomity drunkenness before we were out of Victoria Station.My experience of airlines this year has been pretty random, but I certainly did enjoy the massage service offered in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class. So another year of travelling draws to a close and the time has come for me to draw a few conclusions on my best and worst travelling experiences of the year 1997 – starting with transport. What would Scrooge have made of that?”God bless us every one,” said June Street, echoing the words of Tiny Tim, as she sent us off into the icy afternoon with Christmas spirit renewed.q London Walks (0171 624 3978) has Dickens’ Christmas Carol walks from Tower Hill tube station at 2pm today (21 Dec), Christmas Eve, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, and at 11am on 28 Dec and 4 Jan No need to book; just turn up The walk lasts two hours and costs pounds 4 50..