Blogs from Hokkaido, Japan, Asia - page 14

A ski trip to Niseko seemed the perfect way to end my 2months of working in Perth's 35+ degree weather, after just hearing by word of mouth how good the snow was there I booked my flights and accomodation in about august and didnt really think twice about it till about a week before i left. I arrived in Sapporo late tuesday afternoon and caught the bus up to Hirafu, when i arrived in Hirafu it was about -20 and i was just wearing my trackies and a jumper. The kind staff at the welcome centre called the backpackers and they came and picked me up, which worked really well. After a good nights sleep, i woke to about 20cm of fresh powder, the lady at the reception had told me that they knew of somebody ... read more

As mentioned previously, breakfast was illegally early and to make matters worse, the culprit was late. I shared the joke with my new Japanese best friend across our mugs of hot milk, proving once again that some jokes really are universal. Today's chopstick challenge was a fried egg, which despite first thoughts, oddly turned out to be easy once you twigged where to start. Mr Fiennes even went so far as to put his yolk on his toast but I considered this way too risky that early in the morning. The weather had improved immensely, although a light midnight flurry of snow had dusted the scene. Weirdly, the snow looked like tiny white sugar balls ready to sprinkle on your donut. I didn't have time to try this out though as with clear skies, we ventured ... read more

Day one dawned, and after wishing the aussies in the lodge a good day I was whisked away to meet the rest for avalanche training. Despite the jetlag I took copious notes, and then it was time for the transeiver hunt. It's deceptively difficult, and on flat ground it was taking us at least 5 minutes to find the box; that's pretty frightening as 93% of people don't survive beyond 15 minutes, and we'd still have to get to the avalanche site in the real thing! In the afternoon we headed up the mountain to go digging.. We were each given a shovel and told to dig a vertical face in the snow so that we could check the layers, and distinguish the good and bad types of snow. It was about this time that a ... read more

I was rudely awakened by an early alarm clock at 6.30am - far too early an alarm for a holiday don't you think? However, I could also hear what I hoped were fresh coffee beans being ground so with my hopes high, we went for breakfast. Not only did we get fresh coffee but also 6 kinds of homemade jam, some from native wild fruit. Of course, Mr Matsuo and I, then got into an in depth chat about 'stuff what I have grown and made into jam' which I guess delayed breakfast a little but certainly not to it's detriment. It appears I need to move on from jam and into liqueurs. We also got into an international conversation which I shall entitle 'I remember when this was all fields' which we could understand even ... read more

We made a fairly early start as we had seats on the 9.30am bullet train back to Tokyo so we grabbed a few edible supplies at the station (pringles, macadamia nuts with crunchy cheese, and some green beans that tasted like mushy peas) and hopped aboard). The journey was uneventful which is how I like them and Mark managed to grab some better pictures of Mt Fuji. The lack of events ended once we arrived at the airport however. The departure board displayed our flight to Kushiro in Hokkaido as 'check-in unavailable at this time' and several other flights on the board either delayed or subject to weather conditions. Tokyo was sunny but our flight was eventually cancelled due to the huge piles of snow at Kushiro airport.  We took the decision to transfer our flight ... read more