Bukovel

I went to Bukovel in the winter of 2019, back when going to Ukraine for a ski trip still sounded like a slightly eccentric idea to most of my friends in Lyon. It wasn’t. It was one of the better ski weekends of my life, and cheaper than a long weekend in Chamonix by a wide margin. Lia wasn’t with me for this one — I’d tagged along with a Polish colleague who swore the snow in the Carpathians was underrated, and he was right. The resort itself surprised me with its scale: it’s genuinely the largest ski complex in the country, with more than a dozen lifts stitched across several peaks, and on a Saturday the base area felt like a small, temporary city built entirely around getting people up and down a mountain as efficiently as possible.

What struck me most wasn’t the skiing, which was solid but not extraordinary by Alpine standards — it was the atmosphere at the bottom. Rows of wooden stalls sold hot wine, deruny (potato pancakes) with sour cream, and grilled meat skewers, and everyone seemed to be having a genuinely good time regardless of skill level. I watched a grandmother in a fur hat outski half the twenty-somethings on the beginner slope. The lift lines could be brutal on weekends, something nobody warns you about, and I spent a good forty minutes shuffling forward in a queue that seemed to have no logic to it whatsoever.

The village itself is built almost entirely for the resort — there’s no real “old town” to wander, which took some adjusting to after years of visiting places in Mexico where every town has a zócalo with its own history. Bukovel is function over form: wooden chalet-style buildings, ski shops, spas, a strange abundance of sushi restaurants for a mountain town in western Ukraine. I remember being confused and then delighted by how good the sushi actually was. In the evenings the thermal pools at some of the hotels became the real social hub — sitting in hot water at minus ten degrees, watching steam rise off the snowbanks, felt like the most honest form of après-ski I’d experienced anywhere.

I think about that trip differently now than I did when I took it. Bukovel was thriving, full of Ukrainian families on holiday, Polish and Israeli tourists, a genuinely international mountain-resort energy. It’s strange and a little heavy to write about it in the present tense knowing everything that’s happened since. I hope the lifts are running again for people someday soon, mulled wine in hand, grandmothers outskiing everyone on the bunny slope.

When to go: December through March for reliable snow, with January offering the deepest base — though be ready for serious weekend crowds and book lift tickets and lodging well ahead.