Right, so I promised to do a post on my trip to Hokkaidō (北海道) but considering I didn’t manage to finish it before I went to the Alps I’ve decided to do a longer post on my entire snowboarding season, probably the best one I’ve had so far.
Every year in Sapporo (札幌) they have a “Snow Festival” (雪祭り). The main attraction of said festival is a bunch of snow and ice sculptures ranging in size from small to pretty bloody huge. Me, Yumeko and Daniel (friend of mine currently studying at Tokyo Institute of Technology (東京工業大学)) were all interested in having a look at this spectacle, so we made arrangements to do so before I left for Japan.
Of course this also made for a perfect excuse to check out the famed powder snow of Hokkaidō. Yumekos weird work-schedule meant she would be free Monday 4/2 and Tuesday 5/2 with Tuesday being the first day of the Yuki-matsuri (the snow festival remember?). Me and Daniel thus decided to go ahead and fly up on Saturday and get two extra days of snowboarding (skiing for Daniel).
The trip didn’t start of too well with Daniel catching a seriously nasty cold with accompanying fever just two days ahead of departure. Apparently his dorm at T.I.Tech (yes I know that’s some funny ass initials 
) is…how should I put this…”slightly drafty”, in the sense of it by all accounts practically being a like a wind tunnel in there. Luckily he got better, and shit-early (as we say here in Sweden) on Saturday morning we both boarded the plane bound for Chitose airport (千歳空港) outside Sapporo. I must mention that living around 5min from the airport has it’s perks.
Well in Sapporo Daniel still felt a bit out of it and opted out of skiing in favour of some less tiring sightseeing leaving me charging solo into, well the slopes eventually but before that, my first real “if your going to loose something, make sure you do so i Japan”-experience. Yes, it would seem like while being completely occupied with getting off at the right station I managed to forget my backpack on the shelf over the seats in the train. Of course I didn’t realize this until I’d made my way pretty much up the entire mountain by bus (“wait a sec…where did I put my?…..oh poo”). Explaining my predicament to the bus driver he refused to let me pay for the ride up the mountain, checked his time table and told me to get off at the next stop where there would be a return bus pretty soon.
Sure enough there was, I went back down the mountain again, and again explained my predicament, this time to the clerk at info desk at the train station. After asking some questions he went over to a large drawer and while smiling and asking “is this the one?” pulled out my backpack! I’d been lucky enough that this had been the last station for my train. I exchanged courtesies with the clerk (“omfg! thankyou-thankyou-thankyou! you’re my hero!…”) and was on my way again!
The first of three days of snowboarding was spent at Sapporo Teine, a smallish lift system (for you swedes it was a bit bigger than Romme Alpin or Kungsberget but with longer and better slopes) about 30min by public transport from Sapporo central station. The slopes were really nice but seeing as I was riding alone I didn’t really feel like venturing offpiste except for a couple of silly runs under one of the smaller chair lifts. Wasn’t really steep enough to ride properly but I did very quickly realize that there was a lot of snow.
In the morning when we’d arrived at Sapporo central station we made a visit to the tourist info centre and we found a rather sweet deal on a one-day trip to Niseko for just 4900円 (approx 295sek or 30€). Niseko is the biggest lift system in Hokkaidō and we’d wanted to go there but figured it’d be way to expensive and too much of a hassle to actually make the trip. The price above though included bus both ways as well as a lift pass for the entire mountain (Niseko consists of three neighbouring resorts on the same mountain) so that effectively nullified the cost argument and while the bus ride were to take 3h it wouldn’t be that much of a hassle, sooo we decided to go for it. Good choice!
The next day after getting up way too early we made our way to the station and got on the bus. Luckily, mostly on account of said early morning call I managed to sleep through most of the trip. After arriving we got our lift passes, rented our gear and got into our snowboard/ski-wear, leaving us with about 6h to explore the mountain if we wanted to catch the bus (the lift pass was valid for 8h though, bummer).
The weather was superb, apparently we’d managed to pick the one sunny day in a week that had otherwise been very cloudy and yes, very snowy. That meant lots of powder for us! We soon noticed that quite few of the pistes were groomed at all. Most were just left as is, making them large powder fields (yum!). Of course they didn’t stay untouched for long and soon the snow started to pile up here and there. This was when we really noticed the special thing about the snow here, except for the sheer amount of it that is. Bracing for a bump while riding into one of the snow piles I was really surprised when my board just went *pooof* straight trough it. Apparently the snow in Hokkaidō is really dry, meaning that it doesn’t pack as easily. The point being that just about anywhere we went it was riding on fluffy clouds, absolutely wonderful!
After some warming up in the pistes and deciding against hiking to the top as Daniel was still feeling a bit off we headed into some of the more easily accessible offpiste areas. We found some that were surprisingly untouched and we got pretty much addicted to swooshing down through the trees in the Miharashi Course (見晴しコース) with a nice catch trail at the end ensuring you couldn’t get lost. Towards the end of the day big chunky snowflakes started to come floating down from the clouds that had slowly and stealthily covered the sky. When Daniel said that he was content we had just enough time for one more run and I decided to go once on my own before we returned our gear and got on the bus back to Sapporo.
The ride back wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the one to Niseko (not that that one was very comfortable to begin with). Thing is, we’d been so absorbed by the wonderful riding that we’d decided against eating lunch, figuring the bus would make a stop by a kombini (convenience store) on route as it had in the morning….no such luck. When we finally arrived in Sapporo we were pretty starved and barged in to the first Mr. Donuts we came across and promptly proceeded to get a severe sugar rush.
The next day started with meeting Yumeko (she flew up from Tokyo that same morning) at Sapporo station. We then went to Sapporo Teine (again for me). Yumeko is a relative beginner at snowboarding so I spent the day trying to teach her as best I could while Daniel went exploring the mountain by himself.
Nothing too special about this day except for my first, and last, run from the top. As the lift to the top started to close I decided I’d like one proper run for myself that day so I just managed to slide through as the last person to get on before they closed the lift. As I wrote above I hadn’t really checked out the offpiste two days before, but after my experience in Niseko I really wanted to have a look. I’m glad i did. There was pretty much bottomless powder hiding in the forest and while I was a bit nervous riding in that much snow knowing there was noone behind me, it really was a brilliant run.
The next and last day we went to see the snow sculptures of the Yukimatsuri and thus this day featured no snowboarding. Actually that’s not exactly true as we did get to see some of the practice before a bigjump competition that was going to be held during the festival. Some of the snow sculptures were really impressive, my two favourites being one that featured a lot of different landmark buildings from around the world and one that was a scaled down (still huge though) copy of a traditional Japanese castle (shiro 城), can’t remember where the real castle was located and what it was called though.
Towards the evening we flew back to Tokyo.
A bit long winded post perhaps but I really had a good time and I’d love to back and especially to spend a week or so in Niseko.
As promised I’ve uploaded pictures from the trip.
Next time: Multicultural Skiing with my language school.
Comment