Hokkaido - The Adventure, Pt. II

First off, where is Hokkaido? Well, it is the northernmost prefecture in Japan (the BIG island).

Here is a map of Japan with Hokkaido being in dark blue. Okayama is in Chugoku region (light blue), roughly between Hiroshima and Osaka (Okayama's eastern border is the border with Hyogo Prefecture which is in the red kansai region).



We landed at Chitose and took a bus (over 3 hours) from there to Hirafu, the name of the ski resort in Niseko.



On the way to the ski resort, we stopped at a rest stop at a little after 5pm to a really funny site: Tons of high schoolers frolicking in the snow, complete with boys throwing snowballs and girls in short skirts screaming. Turns out (I asked) they were from Oita prefecture, 2nd year students on their school trip, and for many of them, their first time seeing snow. They were absolutely thrilled. We took some pictures and marveled at the willpower of the girls to wear school uniforms, i.e. short skirts, in such cold weather. Here's a picture of Sarah with the ladies on the little hilltop.



Finally we arrived at Hirafu. There was only one other person with us on the bus. Actually, here's a funny story: We reserved seats on the bus such that they knew we were coming and just in case it was full. We got on and there is one other foreign looking male and us. We wait. It is past the departure time for the bus when two asian males get on the bus. How fitting, comments Sarah, that for as punctual as Japanese usually are, here's juxtaposition with a bus of foreigners waiting on the Japanese. This theory held up until about 5 minutes in when finally one of them spoke up quite loudly and we all realized that it was definitely not Japanese, but Chinese that came out of his mouth. Oops.



So we call Morio, who is the owner of "Log Kanon" where we were staying, and have him come and pick us up. He was very low-key and helpful, and didn't feed us with the usual BS of most Japanese people hosting foreigners. All in all, a perfect and wise choice by Sarah (albeit convenient since it was the cheapest by far out of all the possible lodgings at Hirafu, and why I don't know because it was seriously comfortable, warm, and homey).



It only being about 7pm, we decided to suit up and go for some home-schooling lessons on how to snowboard from Sarah. It was quite cold but I had bought a snowsuit for 4000yen (roughly forty dollars) from Daiki (used to be DIK, a do-it-yourself hardware store in Tamano), so I was totally warm and cozy despite sub-zero temperatures (in celcius), and some awesome snow falling everywhere. Here is me on one of my runs down the little hill we were using as a practice ground.





On the way back, I got a nice shot of the slopes from the bend in the road right before our log cabin.



I cannot begin to express how much snow there was, and how hard it was snowing all day Saturday and Sunday. I was just flat out amazed/impressed, and this was still considered the "pre-season". The season actually starts on December 22nd so the slopes and everything was not very crowded at all, and overall seemed a little bit like a ghost resort almost except that everything was fabulous.