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Lounging on a sunny terrace munching a margherita pizza hot from the oven sounds like Italy. But there are no lift queues here and the slopes are nearly deserted.
Duolemeidi Ski Resort isn't Cervinia beneath the mighty Matterhorn or Courmayeur on the southern slopes of Mont Blanc. It's wilder in the empty valley in the Damaqun Shan where the North China Plain meets the Mongolian Plateau, 226 km north of Beijing. Here, there is a hint of alpine air.
It's the first Chinese ski station entirely funded by foreigners - specifically two Italian winter-sports giants. Leitner Technologies builds ski lifts at the world's top notch resorts. The Dolomiti Superski Group is a ski resort designer and developer.
Leitner is an old hand in China. It built Hong Kong's Gondola lift, the 5.7 km Crystal Cabin on Lantau island and the six-seater cable up the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in Yunnan. It built Italy's first chairlift in 1947 in Corvara, now the center of the vast Dolomiti Superski region near the Austrian border.
More recently Leitner developed a wind turbine generating enough electricity to power a whole ski area. Its latest Eye of the Wind stands on top of Grouse Mountain Ski Resort, the heart of Vancouver's Winter Olympics this year.
Leitner's 1947 chairs carried 158 people per hour, Duolemeidi's six-seater takes 2,000. But the budding resort's three restaurants, four lifts, eight ski-runs, 18 snow cannons and 11-instructor ski school are just the beginning at Duolemeidi.
With a 145 million euro investment (about 1.5 billion yuan), in the next few years, Duolemeidi could emerge as a fully-fledged ski resort with four-star hotels, eight ski-lifts, lodges, condos, cabins and cottages. Mountain restaurants and bars will fuel punters skiing the 22 trails. During the summer, there will be golf, mountain biking, tennis, hiking and horseback riding. Construction of these venues starts this year.
Driving up the valley to Duolemeidi, men in fur hats fish through holes in a frozen river, donkeys haul carts of straw and cows meander across the road.
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A new highway cuts through hills, tunnels under mountains and soars across valleys. Scheduled to open in June, the Zhangcheng Expressway will possibly bring the slopes of Duolemeidi within two and a half hours of Beijing.
At Duolemeidi, language is no problem in the hire shop managed by Manchester University graduate, Yi Li. He has a fine stash of Nordica skis and boots, rails of ski suits, lockers to store belongings and changing rooms.
There's nothing quite like having a mountain to oneself. Duolemeidi attracts 1,000 punters at weekends, but Monday to Friday a scant 200 snowboarders and skiers hit the pistes.
Edelweiss, China's first super speedy chairlift, named when Duolemeidi's Italian construction workers found thousands of the famous rare flowers blooming here, whisks a skier 2,000 m in four minutes behind a polycarbonate wind shield.
From the top, the Milano and Bologna red runs swoop 1.5 km through silver birch forest - silent but for the sound of skis on snow and the more challenging Firenze black piste takes the direct route.
The Torino button lift leads to the pretty Napoli and Parma red runs that wind down through the trees to the snowboarder's park and the blue Roma beginner's slope.
Chongli's I Snow Hotel is 15 minutes down the valley. Rooms have warm room of wood flooring, with cappuccino cotton duvet covers, two styles of pillow and a heavenly foam mattress pad.
After a hard day's skiing what more could one want? Except maybe late wild dancing in the bar. I Snow has that too at weekends.
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