To be honest I wasn’t that impressed with the skiing, I think I had expectations of waist high fluffy powder and me effortlessly peeling it back while doing the odd helicopter off of a tree stump.  When we arrived, it was in the middle of the biggest dump of snow of the year and it snowed pretty much non-stop for the first day and a bit.  I spent the first few days with Grobbler just playing in the snow, sledding, and skiing with him between my legs so it didn’t really matter too much about the skiing. When I decided to leave him at a ski school with mum for a few hours, I took off up the top and tried to find some black runs (because once you’re Franz Klammer, it never leaves you) and really only came across some intermediate slopes that had been groomed to absolute perfection.  I was more like Tiger Woods skiing without Lindsay Vonn, and less the prescription meds.

Anyway, it didn’t really matter to me that much, it was good skiing and basically like having the mountain to yourself.  It’s pretty cold up there, around -10 and lower, and they have these hoods on the chairlifts that keeps the windchill out so you don’t end up freezing going up. I haven’t skied any places other than New Zealand and Whistler in Canada, but haven’t seen that anywhere.  There’s also a couple of Gondolas.  If you’re a real powderhound or younger twat who thinks they too are Franz Klammer, you might be a bit disappointed, but for families, it’s fine and you’ll have a great time.  As with everything in Japan, they really cater to the kids so theoretically, if you were one of those parents, you could leave them at a ski school the whole day and piss of by yourself and ski and the kids would be happy.

We spent 5 solid days of skiing, stopped over at Niseko for a quick sled on the way to Sapporo, which you can read about here, and which I don’t recommend on going to unless you want to spend 2 hours driving about 10km to get into the city at peak hour. Absolute nightmare.