Over afternoon tea in a comfortable wing chair in Lord Kitchener’s former residence, I was prepared to believe anything. Including all the on-line blather and the blurbs scattered around the drawing-room about the Oberoi Wildflower Hall in Chharaba, near Shimla in Himachal Pradesh, India.

The blurb was pretty straight-forward: “Kufri is agog with activity. Tourists, in their thousands come from far and near to partake in the poetry of motion, skiing. No dictionary has been able to describe the joys and thrills. It cannot be described. Only experienced.”

I was sold. Some hours later, having exchanged teak floors and knotted rugs for three inches of slush, The Ambassador I was a passenger in skidded to a halt. The small shrine on the dashboard fell to the floor and our driver said that he could not go any further. He feared for our lives and for the health of his taxi.

“The vehicle will be bobbing and dancing on the dirty ice something frightful,” he said. “And we will be shooting off the mountainside and crashing to our deaths most certainly.”

His eyes smiled at me in his rear view mirror. He meant it. We decided to get out and continue on foot. It sounded safer.

Besides the road were about a 100 pairs of Wellington boots. All were available for hire. Our driver said the man in charge made a good living when it snowed. He had cornered the market in sleet-wear. We joined a queue of barefooted customers trying to make their way up the mountain. We leant on each other to try on various pairs of Wellingtons. Some weren’t very waterproof and the ‘burst’ look seemed to be in.

A row soon broke out at the front. It seemed that people with big feet were being charged more. After haggling over a pair of size 39s and trying to persuade the footwear hawker that an Indian 39 was smaller than the European equivalent, we trudged up the steep hill. The boots had cost me little more than a euro and I could have them for two days.

Forty-five minutes later I had no further use for them. The road was too slippery. So, we hailed a horse and paid a boy 50 pence to take us up through the cedar trees of the Hindustan-Tibet road as far as Mahasu Peak. An hour later we dismounted and were told the only way to continue was by ‘deluxe yak’. The steep mountain pass was awash with brown ice, which is the black ice equivalent for yak traffic.

Kufri is meant to be the most accessible of India’s ski resorts. It is certainly the oldest. All the blurb said was that it takes 25 minutes to get there from the hill station of Shimla. Less from The Wildflower Hotel. In the end it took us five hours.

“No noise, no jostling crowds,” the puff continued. “At 9,000 feet, the resort offers wonderful views of Badrinath and Kedarnath in Uttar Pradesh and Pir Panjal in Kashmir.”

The best way to ski in India is when there is no snow. Just go up to the resort when it is not snowing and wait until it does

When National Highway No. 22, at last, petered out and we eventually got to Kufri, all we saw was a white-out. There had been some snow, yes, but not enough to ski. There was barely enough snow to make a snowman embryo. We could play badminton, if we so wished.

No one knew whether neighbouring Mandi, Solan or Narkanda (“engirdled with awesome pinnacles”, or so the blurb would have us believe ) had any snow. The only sure knowledge was that they were at least three hours away – by taxi. By yak, it would take a day, by Wellingtons a week. We were told the road was impassable due to heavy snowfall.

So we ended in a tatty zoo looking at an elderly leopard and some mutely despondent barking deers. And listening to descriptions of, rather than seeing, Narkanda, which lies some from 65 kms from Shimla. “Very good for potatoes and apples,” said the yak-driver, tapping his pocket to denote there were more Golden Delicious than there was snow.

A scruffy, betel-toothed local tried his best to talk the place up. “Here, commands unsurpassed views of the majestic Himalayas and perennial snow-clad tips.”

He forgot his lines momentarily before adding: “We are at 2662m.”

It was hardly Breckenridge or St Moritz. And there was significantly more dung in its streets than Klosters. The place doesn’t have chalets, it has shanties.

We had a bowl of two minute chow mein at a roadside, tin-clad stall and read the Times of India’s ski supplement, which described Auli in Uttar Pradesh as being popular with “cootchy-cooing honey-mooners” and “fresh-air lovers getting away from grotty, old Delhi”.

It also advised skiers to “bring enough medicines to prevent the common cold”.

Auli, in Uttarakhand, is 500 kms away from Delhi and apparently has 20kms of runs. The longest is three kilometres. The All-Indian Skiing Championships are held there, although nobody knows when. It also boasts “abundant snow” – again, no one knows when.

In the meantime, we attempted a visit to Kufri, where there was nothing much to do apart from being tempted by fried snacks, admiring the satellite pylons and watching visiting ladies, aboard straw-hatted and very dispirited mules, posing as Phoolan Devi , the bandit folk heroine. Kufri Fun World and “high-end entertainment park” was closed, so we couldn’t even have a go on the world’s highest go-kart track.

India has its own endearing logic. Ask an Indian about anything and you’ll get five opinions. Ask him about skiing and he’ll give you a dozen. You have to love skiing a lot, to go skiing in India. It is not easy to actually find ski-suitable snow. Feeling very crest-fallen, because skiing in India seems such an exciting thing to do, we returned to our base camp in Shimla, where we stayed at The Cecil. The hotel boasts one of the few jacuzzis and indoor swimming pool in the Himalayas and a front desk manager who knows all about skiing in India.

He told us all about Gulmarg (at 8,750 feet) in Kashmir. He snapped his fingers, remembering Manali, which is reportedly another popular ski centre and only 270kms away from Shimla. Allegedly, Mount Patalsu offers heli-skiing up to 10,000 feet. Trishala and Loira peaks and Fatru are the places for powder.

Manali is near Kullu, which is an hour’s flight from Delhi. But you can also take a semi-sleeper government-run bus – the journey takes 13 hours. The Hotel Iceland, in the Solang Nallah Valley, is the place to stay. It thinks of itself as the adventure capital of India and offers good zorbing.

The sales spiel was all wrong. Skiing in India cannot be experienced. It can only be described

“Khem Raj Thakur is most marvellous, expert skier,” a passing bellhop informed us. “He represented India in the 2002 World Cup in Iran.”

Not wishing to concede defeat, we rang up to find out whether we could get there. But were thwarted again. Too much snow meant that no planes were landing and the desk manager thought the snow would probably melt by the time we got there, if we went by car and train.

A return taxi would probably take a week, by which time winter might be over.

“The best way to ski in India is when there is no snow,” he said with a smile. “Just go up to the resort when it is not snowing and wait until it does. If you wait until it snows, you won’t ever be able to get up there.”

There had been a small sprinkling of snow overnight in Shimla and the high street was offering India’s own kind of highish altitude skiing. Not to be outdone and showing indomitable spirit and pluck, we borrowed some skis from some soldiers preparing a float for some military march-by. We put them on and set off from outside the famous Gaiety Theatre (India’s second oldest theatre and home to the country’s oldest amateur dramatics society), snowploughing and cross-country skiing through Shimla’s Bazaar, past St Michael’s Church and down to the 1898 Clarkes Heritage Hotel.

It wasn’t a long stretch at all, but at least we could say that we had done some skiing in India. It wasn’t exactly exhilarating, but a lot safer than trying to ski down the 1:67 gradient railway track.

The sales spiel was all wrong. Skiing in India cannot be experienced.

It can only be described.