Naeba 苗場 [01Jan-04Jan]

Our destination: Naeba 苗場 - an apparently trendy place for young people to hangout and look cool skiing/snowboarding.
Purpose: snow-based-fun&frolics

It's 930pm and we're at the West Exit of Shinjuku station 新宿 and we just about had time to find a cafe to have a hot drink before we met up with Rei and her friend at the bus station...we spent a good hour standing around waiting for the bus to turn up....which happened around 11. The bus was a glorious pink, and it's roof was covered in snow (good to know, as we wanted snow), in addition to the pinkness of the outside of the bus, the lighting in the bus had been designed by someone who seemed to want to spread a message of happiness to the world, but had mistakenly thought that this could be best achieved by multi-coloured lighting... The Overnight bus trip itself would have been fine, if the bus didn't stop every hour for fifteen mins and turn on all the lights, just to really make sure that you knew it was stopping.

Anyway, we got to Naeba at 5am, whence upon we had to try and find our hotel...called White Palace...which was appropriately painted brown (Amy pointed this out to me...I wouldn't even have noticed the irony of the name...). Reception didn't open to 8am, so we napped in some chairs in the foyer/smoking-room-of-lung-death. There were several other Japanese (who'd been on our bus) napping on the floor too....which was kind of reassuring. At 7am (maybe they pitied us and got up early for our benefit) the reception sprung to life and we managed to get our ski wear hired (apart from Greg and Akiko who had to go to a completely different shop to get kitted out...not a good enough range of shoe sizes apparently...). By 930 we were on the hotel provided shuttle bus and heading to the main mountain...

Me in some snow...

After scoffing some breakfast we managed to get on to the beginner slope and Greg tried hard to teach me to snowboard. This mainly ended up being, Greg sitting around on the slope for most of the day watching me fall over in slightly different ways...and over the next 3 days I found MANY different ways to fall over while my feet were firmly strapped to a plank of wood. Some methods involved my neck....which my neck was not very happy about, many involved my knees, which had so many bruises they gave up the concept of individuality and decided to create a merger, to form one very large bruise over both my knees...

We had wondered where Amy and Rei had gotten to, as we'd lost sight of them when we got to the ski lifts....after we got down we found that Amy had basically refused to go any where on the slope and had gone for the safe and non-bruise option of having a coffee.

We did stop for lunch, and then we disbanded again to go on our separate slopes to do our thang....or in my case: try not to die.

When it came to dinner time, we all met up near the entrance of the ski resort and waited for the shuttle bus to take us back. We had time to have a nice hot shower and get out of our ski gear before heading to the dining room.

I ate a lot. I was hungry...all that falling over business is hard work, OKAY!?

After dinner there was still time for night skiing! and very conveniently there was a slope just behind our hotel, which even contained some jumping slidey obstacles for the more experience skiier/snowboarder...meanwhile, I was busy imitating a falling leaf and floating down the slope.

Anyway, this was the routine for the next two days, which my body was not very happy about...We did however, manage to get Amy on to some snow, after she bought herself a sled...

And here are some photos of the night skiing to round it up...