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.

So I DID go Skiing

So I did, in the end, go skiing with dad.  There are a fair number of good photographs, but these ones are the ones which remind me of travelling around and jumping headfirst into the snow.



I have a feeling that those fresh tracks in the background might have been me or dad.


That green jacket is absolutely fantastic.  Before I tried it, I assumed that all jackets had small flaws in their design.  My current jacket is pretty damned waterproof for a ten year old skiing jacket, but the pockets are a pain in the jacksie, and the place where you put the ski passes is inconvenient.  This jacket has it all - it's waterproof to the Nth degree, it breathes really well, and it's damn near luminescent.  What more could you ask for?

I stole dads bright green jacket, so he had this much more modest number.

It's really difficult to appreciate just how mountainous Japan is, until you see it first hand.  Even looking at the interior (which is about 75% of the land in reality) on a map doesn't prepare you for the Alps style perilous drives through the mountains.  There were a few moments where I thought we might void the insurance on our little rental car, but it turned out okay.

Top tip, if you ever need to rent a car in Japan, don't use Nippon Rentacar!  They are terrible.  You aren't allowed to leave the parking area in their cars if you are a foreigner, let alone drive in rain or SHOCKED GASPS, snow.

You're much better off renting from a company vendor like Honda, which is where we got our car from.  The guys were really nice despite my incompetent Japanese, and everything went off without a hitch.  We brought the car back a day early because we forgot which day we were supposed to go back, but that gave us a chance to pick up some souvenirs.  All part of the plan!  Kind of.

The mountains aren't as dramatic as Europe (or I imagine Canada) in terms of their sheer size, but they go on forever in all directions.

Unfortunately I couldn't work out the settings on my camera to capture it, but the snow was melting/freezing constantly which led to a crystalline effect in the snow, reflecting the light in tiny diamond like spots.  It was really fascinating (for me, anyway) because I've been skiing any number of times, but this was the first time I've seen this effect so vividly displayed.  You'll have to take my word for it...