Sightseeing, bamboo skiing and deep powder turns

So we left Hakuba and headed south towards Takayama.
We didn't plan it, but we realized that it was quite a cool hanging around town and take picture in typical japanese style:

With a nice old town, we wandered around and got lost through some old winding streets.
On our visit of the Hida Folk village, I found what looks like a no-board, but made with bamboo skis!
A pair of it was only a bended slice of bamboo and the other was a few smaller pieces of bamboo tied together.

It was quite cool to try out and actually, I wasn't able to ski the bended slice of bamboo from the top of the hill all the way down since it was going too fast!!

We also made a day trip from Shirakawago to check out a village in which most houses actually have a straw roof. It is really impressive to see this construction still holding on and seeing how cold the houses are and we were really wondering (and still have not figured why), why the houses are not more insulated.

A really great proportion of the village actually have those houses and people are still using them as their main home!

We saw some big mountain around Shirakawago and we figured that there should certainly be some good skiing around!

We kept on driving south towards Gujo where my friend Yoshi, who I've met kayaking in Switzerland is living.

He let us stay at his cabin which is locating not that far from his home and just by the river.
During dinner with is family, Yoshi told me that he was actually skiing a day ago in the mountains near Shirakawago that we just scoped out!

After showing me photos of its day, a plan was made to make the 2 hours drive back there for a little tour!

Surprisingly, even if only one day have elapsed since its day out, the skintrack was covered!
As there wasn't anyone else there, we had to proceed to some really deep trailbreaking!
In some places, the snow was even mi-thigh deep!

Yoshi led me onto a nice ridge and we skied down in a really nice opening which was really deep and light!

I was totally amazed on how deep and light the snow was!
It was actually hard to take pictures on which Yoshi do not only look as a big snowball!

We didn't make it all the way up and lapped the trees as a second lap!
It was also really good in there!
It is really a nice area, but according to Yoshi, we kind of hit it at a perfect timing.
This area usually do not see snow as often as Hakuba and can get quickly spoiled by the sun and warm temperature.

With only 2 days left on our Japan journey, we left Yoshi's place to make it to Tokyo to check out this crazy big city.

On our first day there, we kicked ourselves early to head out to check the Tokyo's famous fish market.

This market is the busiest in the world regarding sea products. There is around 2000 tons of products that are sold each day in there. Everything is happening in quite an hectic way. I cannot say that I'm close to understand how everything is happening in there!

It is so crazy and have attracted so many tourists that we are not usually allowed in until 10h00Am when the action is almost done because we are getting in the way of the action. We sneaked in before, but we were quickly showed out by the security.

We went back there when everything calms down.
The is quite some craftsmen ship slicing and preparing those red tuna.


After this crazy show, we kept on exploring and wandering in various Tokyo neighbourhood (as well as trying the craziest massage chair I've ever seen!). Even Mario Kart since to be strolling around the city!

We repeated the metro hoping for another day.
I cannot say that I'm much a city guy, but Tokyo is certainly quite a crazy place to check out!

After checking my Dad to check out his luggage at the Haneda airport, I hoped on the train to make the 2 hours journey to Narita where I am taking a flight to head to Kazakhstan!

Interesting adventure awaits and as my grandma was alway saying:

Evans

Powder shredding festival in Hakuba!

After surviving the wild ride on the ferry...

Apparently some folks were having less trouble than me!
We headed from Niigata to Hakuba.

What is nice when you are chasing snow is that you have the chance to drive through some really nice snowstorm…

After having some really nice days last year in Hakuba Cortina, we headed straight there. Since there is no alpine in this resort, I was confident that lifts would be spinning and that everything would be open.

Well, I was mistaken…
When we showed up at the resort, I was surprised by how few people were there to enjoy the pow! I quickly understood that the top lifts (lift #4 and lift #5) would be closed all day for some avalanche shaddy safety reason…
We were than left only with some beginner lifts to ski on.

We eventually figured out that we could climb up above one of them to ski onto a run where pretty much no one have touch with 40cm of snow on it!

Unfortunately, at the end of the first run, my Dad when head first and on its shoulder onto a cat-track that we could see due to the low visibility. Since it looked only as a bruised shoulder, we kept skiing the run was so good that we lapped it a few times!

Beside the cat-track that are only a constant danger on low visibility day, it seems that there was other danger around on this resort!

We found out that Hakuba Cortina is posting on its Facebook page the lift status and snow report around 7h00AM each day.

The following day, since we were able to figure out that the same lifts at Hakuba Cortina would not be spinning, we headed out to Hakuba 47. We picked up my friend Tree and her boyfriend Stefan who just got in town.

Hakuba 47 have this special regulation about some certain tree skiing area.
In order to legally ski those areas, you need to follow a useless 10minutes lesson. Following this lesson, they handed you a bib.

Problem is that the legal area is fairly small and it is getting tracked out by around 4 laps.
We were then left to either ski some skied out runs and tree areas or poach some untrack trees… Guess what?! We quickly ended up poaching the non-legal trees!

Poaching trees as well as skiing right under the chairlift, when it is not allowed is not ideal to take pictures, so there is no trace of this skiing!
We lapped it until the patrollers start catching people who were joining us in the tree poaching!

The lift got eventually got shutdown around 3PM after quite a good day of skiing!

Since my Dad's shoulder was not really moving well, we went up to the doctor after the day.
30 minutes later, we were out of there with a diagnostic: most likely a torn rotator cuff.

The doctor also made it clear that my Dad should not be skiing anymore!
Especially after the third time he asked in a different way if he could keep on skiing! ;)

With my Dad out of skiing, I rallied up with Tree and Stefan to hit Hakuba Cortina which upper lifts should open after two days of constant snowfall which left around 80cm or so…

We weren't the only one that got the memo and there was plenty of people who showed up to enjoy the freshies!

We furiously lapped the resort trees which were pretty epic!
The snow was exactly as you would want it: deep, light and bottomless!!

We also lapped the backside of the resort from where you can make you way back to the resort easily through a cat-track.

Cortina is, in my humble opinion, the best resort in Hakuba on a snow day.
The fact that you are skiing mostly in the trees, creates some pockets and stashes where the snow stays good for a good full day of skiing.
The patrollers also let you ski everywhere which is really not that common in Japan.
The resort is also not grooming the powder unlike Happo-one which usually make sure there is as less fresh pow available as possible!
You can also traverse and ski the backside with quite an easy way back to the resort. But since every run on the backside takes about an hour or so to lap, the snow doesn't get hammer too quickly!

We went back the following day for another powder-shredding session which got a nice 50cm refresh overnight!

Hakuba not being quite a touristic destination beside skiing, my Dad was quite bored after 2 days of hanging around.

It was heart tearing to leave Hakuba since there was still some fresh snow that was requesting my shredding services to go play the tourist, but I kind of feel like I had to rallied up with my partner buddy.

Looks like there is much more sightseeing of the forecast than turns for the few days that we have left in Japan! I guess, I'll be able to catch up the close to no-sightseeing I've done on my previous 5 trips in Japan!

Cheers,
Evans.