9 January, and early start….
After our 5 days based in Osaka, We had a long day of travel up into the Japanese Alps in the Nagano prefecture. It was a trip of over 450km and we would be traveling through some pretty spectacular scenery.
Despite having mostly packed the night before we still had an early alarm at 6am and were outside with the suitcases by 6.40am, ahead of schedule. It was a dark and cold walk to our now familiar Tennoji station, but it’s always much slower walking with the luggage. What seems like a trivial walk other days is a lot more effort dragging the bags.
The first train for the day on the Mido-suji line was very busy, despite the early hour, but we eventually made it to Shin-Osaka station by 7.30am. It was time to procure breakfast items (which turned out to be food and snacks to sustain us through the day) and much needed coffees and find our train. We were not going from the Shinkansen tracks first up, so had to navigate to a different part of the very large Shin-Osaka station.
Welcome to the Thunderbird……
We were on the ‘Thunderbird 7’ for the first part of the trip which was a fun name, although it took us awhile to find where it left from. As usual, the Japanese trains with reserved seats continued to be excellent, plenty of space for luggage, and leg room and they are always perfectly clean and on time.
We left on our Thunderbird just after 8am and head away from Osaka and back through Kyoto. Not long after zipping through Kyoto the views became more snowy as we skirted along the West coast of Japan’s Honshu island. There were lovely water views and plenty of snow on the hills and on the passing rooftops.
Shinkansen time….
After an hour and 20 minutes we had a change of trains at Tsuruga, which is a nicely rebuilt station (apparently this was done for the the Tokyo Olympics) and it was the easiest change ever with bags. Large lifts and a nice big station to roll through.
We were now on a Shinkansen bound for Nagano and everyone continued to snack on today’s form of sugar and chocolate laden breads, and admire the snowy views. We had about 2.5 hours on this leg of the trip, so Soren watched skiing videos trying to cram for his first ever ski the next day. Zinnia refused to nap until the last minute, despite being tired all day. We’d had a lot of long days, late nights and plenty of walking so everyone else had been glad for the restful day!
By the time we reached Nagano station at 12.30pm it was a whole zero degrees. We were about to start our run of very cold weather!
Hakuba Valley bound…..
Getting through to Hakuba Valley was most efficient on a direct bus, but there were no bus seats able to be reserved until 2pm, so we took our chances with walking up to get tickets and got on the 1pm bus. But by the time we moved the bags through a million escalators and lifts we had no time for food provision in Nagano station, so lunch was the same bag of snacks we’d been feasting on all day.
The bus ride to Hakuba was pretty snowy, but rather scenic as we wound our way into the mountains. The girls were feeling weary and napped through most of it!
We were being picked up at the Hakuba bus station by Hiroko who was managing the accommodation we were staying in, so no dragging bags through the snow – yay! Having done this many times in Europe we were glad to avoid it this time around. When we arrived in Hakuba she was waiting. There was quite a lot of snow on the ground so we were pleased to bundle into the van for the snowy but short drive to our cottage.
Hakuba Cottage….
Our little chalet in Hakuba was awesome, plenty of space and amazing snowy views. We’d booked this cottage a long way ahead of time and it lived up to the online reviews, with plenty of space and right opposite the bus stop.
Zinnia even has a little futon in the loft area. The other kids voted themselves into the proper beds downstairs!
Time to get kitted up…
After dumping the bags inside and changing to snow boots, Hiroko offered to drop us at Rhythm, the ski gear hire place, to save us walking into town through the snow. Bonus! There are a lot of ski gear hire places in Hakuba and they are probably all just as busy at this time of year. The staff at Rhythm told us it was a ‘quiet day’ but yet there were lines of people all the way out the door. We did make it just before the ‘rush’ though which was for the best. I swear most of the staff were Aussie and the rest were Canadian. The customers seemed about the same mix. It did mean we had a break from attempting to understand Japanese and just spoke English!
It took awhile to get all the gear sorted for 5 people (and that was after we had pre-booked). The people who just turned up had an even longer wait. We got there in the end, and we all had boots, helmets and skis sorted. Rhythm offer a drop off service, so we were happy to wait for the next van to avoid trudging back with bags of boots and skis for a couple of kilometres in the snow.
Shopping Hakuba style….
Where we are staying has plenty of restaurants nearby but no shops or supermarkets. Hiroko said we there was a nightly ‘shopping trip’ to the supermarket for all the guests of the accommodation group. Anto had booked us into the 5pm trip and we made it back just in time to the cottage to dump all our ski gear and for Astrid and Anto to head off with Hiroko to procure food. Meanwhile I unpacked for our 5 days here and the Soren and Zinnia voted for playing in the snow.
It was rather cold and snowy outside so after her initial snow fix Zinnia voted to come inside and read in the warm, but an overtired and hungry Soren wanted to lay in the snow without appropriate clothing on!
The shopping trip took Anto and Astrid to an actual decent sized supermarket (not convenience store size) and it had reasonable prices, so they returned with a giant box of supplies including plenty of fresh veggies, noodles and tofu. We were all hungry after a day of nothing but convenience store snacks. Anto whipped up rice and noodle bowls for dinner, which we all devoured. We were also pleased not to having to go out again in the cold!
With full tummies, the kids were banished to bed, we all needed some energy for our first day of skiing the next day….. Zinnia was quickly out like a light in her loft bed!
Despite there already being a huge amount of snow already in Hakuba more was forecast for the next few days, we were off skiing the next day, so keen to see how much snow was up the mountains!
Up next….
Our attempts to ski (some were more succesful than others!) and an unbelievable amount of snow…….
