Last weekend was my second attempt at snowboarding, and we elected to head up to Nozawa Onsen, about 1 hours drive from Nagano. If you haven’t heard of Nagano, the 1998 winter olympics was held there. As you can imagine the skiing is excellent, unfortunately I’m not.
The trip started with the 6:09 Shinkansen to Nagano, approx 2 hours, then a $100 cab rid to the ski town. Once we had arrived and dropped the bags in the room, we headed back down for a few drinks. As usual it turned into 5 bottles of wine and some good laughs.
The name of the hotel we stayed in is Haus St.Anton, ハウス サンアントン highly recommended for anybody going that way, and the owner can also speak good English if you are worried about communication.
We headed own the next morning for a very western style breakfast, just what you need for a day full of physical activity. We walked to the mountain around 8:30am, geared up and hit the snow.
The previous week I had gone to Gala Yuzawa were the sun was shining and my whole experience was great, this time round it was snowing, raining and visibility was about 5 meters, I can safely say the fun police were in full force.
The ski runs at Nozawa Onsen are very long, about a 1 to 4 km’s long, and by the end of each run I was so worn out I needed a 10 minutes break. As much fun as it was, I think I need to stick to shorter runs while I am learning.
I finished snowboarding at about 1pm, headed in for lunch and beer, and the beer didn’t stop until we hit the shinkansen at 9pm Saturday Night. We also hung around for a great dinner, again a good mix oflocal Japanese cuisine and hearty western style grub, and of course more wine.
Because of the rain and Grey sky’s there wasn’t much of a photo opportunity, but here they are anyway. Check out the track on the 4WD, very serious snow driving!
This post is tagged Nozawa Onsen, Snowboarding
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