Thrills and spills are a downhill experience

As well as the original green tortoise, this plushy protective gear now comes in various shapes and colors, including bears, pandas and cartoon characters. But the tortoise is undoubtedly the classic, and from an amateur's perspective, its dome shape seems to be able to offer the best protection.

The problem is, you'd struggle to squeeze all three of them into the chairlift, and some may find wearing them makes it harder to maintain balance. My friend, for example, found it difficult to even get up from her snowboard, especially so in the afternoon when the slopes became icy.

She then sat at the bottom corner of the slope, which was in her words "a gathering spot for the hopeless".Quite a few people, having lost their motivation to get up again, had taken off their skis or snowboards, and opted, instead, to enjoy their time taking photos with their friends.

Though tempting, I decided to savor the rest of the afternoon with a few more rounds on the hill. One foot on the board, I trudged toward the chairlift entrance, queued for more than 10 minutes, squeezed the tortoises into the chairlift and took my first tumble getting off it.

My personal favorite, an intermediate trail at Nanshan Ski Resort, attracts slightly fewer people and has the ideal steepness to practice snowboarding. I tried to take linked toe-and-heel turns down the slope. The journeys were almost never smooth.

Each round usually involved me taking a few standard tumbles, sitting on the slope reflecting on my life decisions, and occasionally falling hard on the ground and scraping a shower of snow dust when catching an edge.

But the last trip of that particular day was able to compensate for all the previous torment. The sun was kindly offering its last golden blaze of the day, and the sky morphed from blue to pale yellow and then pink. I slid down the hill at full speed without trying to control my posture, as the villages in the distance, covered by an ashy pink and golden sheen, gave a sense of apocalyptical beauty. I felt Nabokov's "ineffable happiness" flowing over me, and that perhaps life could actually be "a splendid ski run", of speeding and tumbling, passing people, and a world of surreal beauty and immense possibility on the horizon.