Thursday 22nd January Emi and I walked to the bus stop in Hon-Atsugi to start our 3 day snowboarding holiday in Hokkaido. Having arrived we were told the bus was going to be late - no big deal, we have 40minutes in hand. Well the bus was late due to slow traffic caused by a traffic accident. As this bus goes between Haneda Airport and Hon-Atsugi this of course we had to go past the accident spot. This meant our 50 minute bus journey turned into 1.5hrs...We got off the bus, quickly walked into the airport, checked-in, walked straight through security and boarded the plane at the final call...that was close!
Having sat down we were then told the plane might have to turn around due to poor weather! Thankfully the weather was fine. Having landed in Sapporo we had to wait 40 minutes for our bus before travelling to Kiroro snow resort. Within about a few minutes we were on the slopes and enjoying the snow!
We snowboarded until about 5:30 and then stopped as we were both tired and thought we should save ourselves for tomorrow. So we headed off to a Japanese fish restaurant for dinner and then went to bed.
Got up in the morning and looked out the window - that is a lot of snow! Walked down to breakfast and it was clear the snow wasn't light and there was a very strong wind. As I started tucking into my huge breakfast (it was eat as much as you can, I mean "want") it was announced the resort would be closed for the day! So our only full day of snowboarding wasn't. We went back to the room where Emi did some ringing around of the tourist information places and discovered a bus to Otaru was leaving in a few minutes. Ran down the stairs and out the front door...nothing. Asked a guy at the hotel, it was at another entrance so we ran across the hotel and got on just before it left. Too many close calls.Having arrived in Otaru we got a local bus to the other side of the town to a large shop. This shop sold thousands of different music boxes/box inspired things - jewelry boxes, mirrors, mobiles etc. It all looked nice and the staff were very friendly but after 20 minutes I had had enough of Eminem, Sound of Music and Starwars in a musicbox stylie. After we finished here we started walking back towards the main bus stop and stopped off in a Ramen shop. Hokkaido has it's own distinctive ramen so I wanted to try it. My verdict is it was tasty but not so different to most other ramen types! As we walked we popped into various shops before going into a glass museum.
This glass museum was Venician Masquerade themed so there was lots of info about making glass, Venice and Masquerade. FYE (for your education) Masquerade was a big city-wide party before 40 days of fasting pre-Easter where they got drunk, partied and ate up the remaining food (like we have Shrove Tuesday in the UK but without the drunken partying). The word Carnival comes from the Latin "Carne" and "Vale" which mean "meat" and "without", it comes from this i.e to eat until there was no meat left. Anyway it was interesting if a little long but the resturant served a nice cuppa and some tasty cakes!
Other than popping into some very expensive chocolate shop we went back to the bus stop and then after an hour wait headed back to the hotel. For dinner it was another eat as much as you can restaurant and like any Englishman presented with this situation I ate until I was only just able to walk back to the hotel room.
In the morning we got up, looked our the window and were relieved to find that the weather was much better. More eat as much as you can breakfast washed down with the Earl of Grey's finest recipe and then onto the slopes. Unfortunately the higher slopes were closed and we had already exhausted the better slopes towards the bottom but enjoyed ourselves anyway. At lunchtime I had so very poor canteen Yakisoba and then we got ready to leave.
The return trip was smoother than the outbound trip but still it didn't go 100% smoothly - our return flight was cancelled. Thankfully because our bus has arrived early we were able to get an earlier plane so it actually worked out better.
Sunday 25th we didn't get up to much, just relaxed.
