Saturday 5 March 2016

Skiing in Pictures

So I went to Hakuba a while ago for some snowboarding.  We went for the weekend, arriving early Saturday morning and staying overnight.  The hotel was, like all Japanese hotels in the mountains, old and grubby, but the town was pretty nice.  It was obviously styled after a european town, but no one managed to get to europe before they did so.  Everything looks like a disney town from the 70's, plastic and glass fibre which is kind of weird, but also fun.


The skiing was okay, but the snow was terrible.


It started raining on the Saturday night and didn't stop on Sunday, so we decided to abort the Sunday skiing and check out the town.


There were a few quite interesting places to visit in the town, including a place to make some glassy stuff (pictures at some point later) that we did.  Walking around with the clouds and the mountains gives a pretty cool (haha!) effect whenever the sun comes out, in that the roads heat up and create great swathes of mist, which form fog, which cool the place back down, which clears the fog, which then let's the sun through and so on.  It happened a few times while we were walking around and enabled a couple of these pictures where everything seems foggy and mysterious.


It was difficult to tell when it was going to stop raining, so when it did we ran around taking pictures and trying not to step in the lakes that had formed about the place.


I'm not sure whether I like this picture, but it has a light and a dark half which is kind of cool.


My favourite snow based machine.  These are everywhere as you might imagine.


See how filthy that snow is?  That's because they hadn't had snow in weeks by the time we got there.  The conditions were downright bad for skiing.  It snowed the day after we left.

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