wherever I may roam: February 2006

About two weeks ago the guys from town and I took a bit of a vacation. We planned a trip up to Hokkaido. It was a multi purpose trip. Hokkaido has some of the most famous snowboarding in Japan, and in Sapporo there is also the famous “Yuki Matsuri” or Snow Festival. Let me start the tale with the trip there…

Saturday morning. Rise and shine bright and early. Our flight out is around 1pm, but we have to trek it down to the airport. The airport in Nagano Prefecture is in Matsumoto City. It’s 2 trains and a bus ride away from my house. All said and done, it takes about 2.5 to 3 hours to get there. The cost of the trains one way is close to $40 as well.

So there we were riding along the rails down to Matsumoto on the second of two trains, and Brandon get a phone call on his cell phone. It’s the airport. Apparently there is a blizzard sweeping across Hokkaido. Good for snowboarding, bad for airplanes. Our flight has been cancelled and there is only one flight a day from Matsumoto to Hokkaido. After sitting in disbelief for a little bit, we get a call back with some decent news. There is space for the three of us on the flight out the next day. So getting to Hokkaido is taken care of, but we are on a train that costs the better part of $30 that doesn’t stop until Matsumoto. We get some advice on hotels, but after some frantic calling we get no where. We are now totally screwed for the night, as we either have to take the train all the way home and then back out the next day, or we have to find somewhere to stay.

We end up calling a friend of Brandon’s who lives in a suburb of Matsumoto. He not only offers to put us up in his little apartment for the night, but he says he will pick us up from the train station. So we cram 4 dudes, and 3 large snowboard bags into his car (well half in his car) and make our way to his house. We ended up having a good time, as we went to a good restaurant and also to an arcade. The next day we are off to the airport again, and thankfully we didn’t get any unexpected calls. However this started the real day from hell.

We show up at the airport, flight is on, but not on schedule. It’s and hour late. Ok we can deal with that as long is it gets us there. Now Brandon had planned out all the transfers and trains to get us to the hotel we are staying at. We take a look at it all, and even with an hour delay we should make them all. So a little bit later we are boarding the plane. Now there are 2 airports that service Sapporo…but none of us knew that until we got on the plane. Our flight is going to New Chitose Airport…however Brandon’s schedules are planned from Sapporo Airport. Ok, we do some math, 1 hr flight delay plus about 1 hr from the new airport to Sapporo station. We should still be able to make it, just barely, but we should make it. Touch down and bust off the plane. Get the bags and run to the train platform, we should just make the train out to Sapporo. We made it there in time, however the train didn’t. Apparently the snow is causing trouble with trains too. The train finally shows up over 20 min. late. These delays are starting to get serious now, we are right on the borderline of making it to our final train transfer. We pack ourselves onto the train and find a corner by a vending machine to cram into, as all the seats are full. The train ride goes smoothly…until we get between North Sapporo and Sapporo station (our terminus). The conductor comes over the speakers and announces a brief delay for snow clearing on the track ahead of us. Brief means 15 min. and that’s enough to screw things up big time.

We finally arrive in Sapporo, almost 3 hours (and a day) behind schedule. We are all tired and worn out, and I am the only one keeping my humour at this point. Most of you know me, and know that sometimes when stuff is so horrible wrong you just have to laugh at it. Apparently some people don't like that when stuff is going wrong, cause I was getting the rough side of some attitude issues that evening. Brandon went in to find out if we could still get a train to where we were planning on going. The people in the railway office said that there wasn’t a train like that one until the morning. So we thought about a hotel or a bus. In our search we go to the station office (as opposed to the railway office). They tell us that the train we missed is really late and it is at the platform right now. We run through the gate and burn up the stairs, and just as Rich reaches the platform the train leaves. Would you really have expected anything else?

So there we are no direct train (now let me include this here, there was a train, but we would have had to transferred, but since everyone was pissy, no one really wanted to hear that logic, so we followed this route…) and we are stuck in Sapporo. We think about a hotel, but after discussion we decide to see how much a cab will be. Now cabs in Japan are much more expensive than Canada, and this is gonna be a few hour cab ride. Well we ask a cabbie how much, he calls it in and gives us a ball park of $250. We decide that that is a better deal than a hotel, since we would still have to pay for the train in the morning. The problem is this: we all have snowboards and board bags, and he only had ski racks. Well we pull the boards out of the bags; throw the bags in the trunk. We then proceed to put all the snowboards into the cab of the car, and the three of us, plus the cabbie pile in. Brandon was sitting in the front eating his knees, and rich and I were getting cozy in the back seat. The cabbie was a super cool dude, and he stopped so we could get some food at a 7-11. The roads were snowy, and the whole trek took about 2.5 hours. He only almost slid out once…he came with in inches of the snow bank. In the end it was about a $250 cab ride, but since he was a cool cabbie, and we were just happy to be at the hotel, we gave him a $50 tip.

Well that is the adventure of getting there. The rest is pretty much snowboarding and seeing the snow festival. I will put some pictures of the snow festival at the end of this post, so I won’t talk about that too much. As far as the snowboarding: Hokkaido is everything it is cracked up to be. We were at Niseko resort. It doesn’t have the vertical drop that Whistler has, but the terrain is comparable, and the powder is so light and fluffy. The tree runs there are simply to die for. Wonderfully spaced out white birch trees with tonnes of powder between them, it really is a world class resort. Two days the winds were high and the visibility low. It made for less than desirable conditions, but still the snow was so soft and light, that I found it hard to complain.