Skiing

Colleagues back in Gothenburg had spoken warmly about skiing in Japan. It was the New Year's, when many people here take holidays, and the slopes would be pretty full. I hadn't skied for six years, but meters of powder and an opportunity to get out of Tokyo were very tempting. I was lucky to find a room in the little skiing village of Nozawa Onsen and arrived there early on the 31st after a night in Nagano. I am writing this on the Shinkansen train back to Tokyo on the evening of the 4th of January. It's been five amazing days of skiing. There are some photos in the album "Skiing"!

Nozawa Onsen is a village of 4000 people in the mountains north of Nagano. People I spoke to said it has the best snow in Japan. It also has, yep, onsens. Thirteen small bath houses, all free and open until late. The men's section in the ones I went to was pretty much a shelf for your clothes, a tub of say 3 by 2 meters and some space around the tub for washing. In order not to splash on other people, you sit down when washing. But there was nothing to sit on except the stone floor! Observe the locals: grab bucket, fetch hot water from tub, throw onto floor. Aha! That's much better! The pools were very hot and I had to get in very slowly to avoid being cooked. The Japanese just jumped in!

The ski resort has about 45 slopes that are a pretty even mix of beginner's, intermediate and expert slopes. A lot of the slopes aren't pisted and there are a lot of wooded areas between slopes for off-piste skiing. I started on the intermediate slopes and slowly got back into it. The snow was really AMAZING. On New Year's eve it started snowing heavily in the afternoon and it kept going into the night. The New Year started very well with 50 cm of fresh powder snow! The skiing was unbelievable. The pistes were covered in deep fresh snow and stayed fresh and soft well into the afternoon. That night it snowed another 30 cm. The mountain top now had 360 cm! A great day for challenging oneself! How much can it really hurt to fall on 80 cm of fresh snow? Black unprepared runs GO!! Huge fun for me and probably for the people in the nearby lift too. But after a while I got the hang of it. Like in Kempo, "100 % relaxed". I could now go faster, ski for longer, and do most of the slopes. We got a little more snow yesterday and today but the slopes didn't stay fresh as long. Still, the top of the mountain had amazing snow and the five slopes up there stayed fresh well into the afternoon. It was beautiful. I spoke to many people but skied alone. Most people were with their families or with groups of friends. Most were Japanese but a fair share were Aussies. Most of them (not all!) acted like the owned the slopes and made stupid jokes on my expense when I tried to speak to them. Good thing Australia is far from Sweden.

What most reasonably skilled skiers at Nozawa Onsen did was to stay at the top of mountain until it closed at 3.30 pm. Then a big line formed at the little pair lift that linked those slopes to a slope called Skyline. This was the way to end a day of skiing at Nozawa. A 3500 m red/black slope with a vertical drop of around 800 m that runs on top of a mountain ridge. It has amazing views in pretty much all directions. Dangerously easy to get distracted! At the end of Skyline it was possible to go down the black unprepared slope I had practiced at on New Year's day. A great way to end a fantastic run! Before 3pm there weren't even that many people on Skyline. It became my favourite run, and at times I had it to myself. Yesterday and today I went up the mountain on the fast gondola lift, took the short lift up to the mountain top, did a couple of quick runs up there. Between 10.30am and 1pm the queue to the gondola was very short. I guess most people went up the mountain in the morning and stayed there. This was perfect for me: I could do Skyline and the black unprepared slope, head down to the gondola, go straight back up and do it again. I pushed myself to do the run quickly but without stopping (or falling!). Then a fifteen minute break on the gondola, and repeat. Heaven! Although there were many tourists, a lot of the information and signs were in Japanese. But if these was something important they made sure to put it in English as well. So not a problem!

Like most things in Japan, skiing is cheaper than in Sweden. A 5 day lift pass set me back 20,000 yen, about 1400 SEK or 160€. And it was valid in five resorts in the Nagano area. I stayed in a lodge, nothing fancy but comfortable, for 12000 yen a night for a room with two beds. One of many amazing things about Japan is that they don't inflate prices even if they could. A meal in a restaurant in Nozawa is about the same price as in non-touristy places. Looking for dinner one night and not finding anything interesting, I was lucky to see a restaurant sign pointing down a concrete stairway. Figured this wouldn't appeal to tourists. Perfect! In a concrete-lined hall below street level was a shack which didn't look like much. Cardboard boxes piled up outside and hard to find the entrance. If an Aussie happened to come down the stairs, surely this would scare him or her off! I dove in. Not a Western face in sight. They'd managed to make a pretty cozy little place down there, low ceiling, tatami floors, the counter with chairs facing the open kitchen that is so common in Japan. I had a really good evening, trying lots of small dishes like raw horse meat and lightly pickled squid with wasabi, and chatting to the staff in broken Japanese/English.

Skiing in Japan was an amazing experience for me. Martin and Eric, I really hope you managed to find the time to go! Linda and Pete and all other skiers out there, give it a try! There are many resorts, some geared more towards experts, and I think in Hokkaido you can go off-piste on slopes without trees. But if skiing a wooded slope in fresh powder is your thing, Nozawa is the place!

Two days left. Tic toc. Final entry here on Wednesday!