Ill get back to that later, as i guess i better let everyone (the giant crowd of 8 people who are following this blog ;)) know what we have been up to over the last week or so.Firstly - WICKED powder in Niseko - seriously, Australia just cannot compete with how good and how much snow they get. Simple. Its pretty much another Australian suburb but thats another story altogether. Below is a few pics from earlier on in the trip which we couldn't get off the camera until now of our night out at the ice bar in Grand Hirafu.
At the start of last week we had a good dump of snow, Monday and Tuesday were absolutely fantastic - hitting some great back-country (Annupurri back-bowl for the peeps in the know) with Frampton, Benny, Doova and Clarkson. Went for another Moiwa trip and got some great runs over there, but it was starting to get a little icy and after riding soft deep fluffy powder for 8 days straight the knees and legs couldn't handle a huge amount of ice action.
The last few days warmed up considerably in Niseko,the temp was sitting around 2 degrees. So the snow wasnt that great (felt like Aus hehe). We built an absolutely cracker jump in a parking lot outside our accomodation and along with a few biiru for confidence - proceeded to have a great time pretending to know what we were doing! See Doova's facespace for the pics of that.
The last night in Niseko we met up with Mia, who is the owner of Pension Fuu (where the boys stayed last year - legend) and he took us out for dinner with an English speaking friend, an awesome Japanese snowboarder named Kenjo and 2 Kiwis who are living in Brissy at the moment. It was probably the highlight of the trip for us - we couldn't stop smiling and it was great to spend time with Mia.
The night ended in a jazz bar playing pool, and with a massive impromptu jam session with a Japanese piano player... where there are drums - Doodles will play :) - a life changing night to say the least.
With some severely sore heads we got up at 5.30 the next morning to get a train to Sapporo - an absolutely awesome trip which takes you along the west coast - we got some dodgy pics below - its a bit hard out of a train window!
After checking out the Sapporo Beer Museum with the boys, we said sayonara to Ben and Frampo and sent them to the airport back to Australia. It seemed like our real trip started then as the last few weeks had been with the whole crew and so we were now onto the next leg of our journey.
We spent that night with Clarkson who was leaving in the morning to Tokyo (with a horrific 12 layover in Narita.... enjoy boy!) and realised pretty quickly that we were going to have to learn Japanese fast, as we had some hilarious communication breakdowns ordering dinner!
Yesterday was the first day by ourselves in Japan, so after a strange Japanese Bakery breakfast we headed off to the Sapporo Chocolate factory (anyone's guess whos idea that was!!! ;)). It turned out to be more of a chocolate cookie factory, but the production line was pretty cool:
We then hit the Maruyama Zoo, which was super cool - I mainly wanted to check out some of my brethren - Polar Bears baby!!!!!! Hell yes! It was a pretty cool zoo, we saw some sweet lion "nookie", got the closest to a tiger ever, and saw some seals just flopping around outside their enclosures. Check out the pics below:
After that we jumped in a cab to head to the Toyota Big Air - an international snowboarding comp held annually in Sapporo, which is like a mini festival with bands etc. Unfortunately for us we were prompted by Clarkson to a ski jump arena which turned out to be on the COMPLTETELY wrong side of the city, and the "5 minutes" that the cab driver told us turned into half an hour and 5,000 yen - around $60 cab fare. Anyway - we finally got there and to put it simply - it was FREEZING...actually it was about -10 C and about 20 knots of wind, so it was probably -20 with wind chill. We realised we should have changed clothes into out boarding gear as it was super duper cold and we were only in jeans and jackets, everyone else was totally rugged up!Despite that, after a few biiru's, we checked out the massive jump setup and some of the guys were absolutely awesome - the top 3 were doing 1080's switch and all sorts of jazz I will never achieve.
The headliner band -'Dustbox', came on around 7ish, a shirtless Japanese punk band. We decided the best way to keep warm was join the mosh pit - Japanese punk mosh in -20C...Benny - you can tick that one off the Bucket o' notes!
Check out some pics and video to get an idea of the size of this jump - huge!!!
Anyway, today we had planned to get up early - hit a local knife shop we had found and then jump on a midday Shinkansen (Bullet Train) to a place on the southern tip of Hokkaido called Hakodate, where we were planning on staying 2 nights. We got to the knife shop, and I must say, this is the beez kneez of knife shops! I held my first ever Katana sword, and if i was a few grand richer, i would have that baby strapped to my back right now ready to slice open a hotel room at a moments notice!!!!!! Unfortunately I'm not and i don't, so the hotel room lives to see another day. Needless to say our knife collection has just increased significantly and hopefully we don't have any problems bringing the armory back into Australia :)
Also today we met a couple whos head to body ratio was larger than "Dandelion's". Chief you are not alone!!!
After spending a little too much time playing pachinko, we were rushing like crazy to make our train. After showing our tickets to the JR staff, we were told that the earthquake in Chile (again by the time we get to South America we may be spending some time helping clean that place up: earthquakes and mudslides.. what next?!) had triggered a tsunami which was forecasted to hit the east coast of Japan (of which Hakodate is smack bang in the middle of the south eastern point of Hokkaido) so all trains had been canceled for the afternoon.Which brings me back to the tasty G&T and the hotel room in Sapporo. I just checked the update on the tsunami and a massive (10cm ;)) wave hit a small island south of Tokyo this afternoon, so i think we will be fine!
Anyway, next stop in Hakodate for a night, then onto Tazawako in Northern Honshu which is Japans deepest lake (and also has a sneaky ski resort next to it), then onto Tokyo for a quick stopover before we hit southern Japan - Kyoto, Osako and Kitukyushu.
Until then - take care of each other and enjoy the warmth!
Peace and Love
Doodles & Boos Boos
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