Japan Day 7-9 - Tokyo to Niseko

Wednesday, 3 January 2024

New Years Day started early for 3 of us with a run around the Imperial Palace Grounds. I took the metro for a few stops there and back to avoid running 12km on ashfelt (I still ended up running 8k) but Jon and Jett were happy to pound the pavement all the way for the 2nd day in a row.  The loop seems to be equivalent in popularity to the Tan track in Melbourne - it's almost exactly 5k and on New Years Day it had a lot of extra people wanting to watch the sun come up over the Palace.

It was a nice enough loop - a shame about not being able to run in the gardens - it's another thing closed over New Year in Tokyo.

We all arrived home around 8 and had an hour to pack up our house and leave on the fairly complicated 3 train journey to the airport which I had written out the day before. There are lots of options for getting there - but I wanted one which would get us as close as possible on the remaining hours of our 24 hour passes we bought the day before.  There was no avoiding the final $25 train  but it took us smoothly to the airport arriving comfortably a few hours before our flight on the airport's busiest day of the year.

After we arrived we took a bus for the 2 hours to Niseko with all the other skiers (mostly Australian)  (we had just started this journey when the earthquake hit the rest of Japan) and then did a final transfer from the Welcome Centre to our incredibly spacious apartment here at the snow.   After picking up our rental gear we could finally relax at about 8pm - so it was a pretty long day. Jon and I went for a short walk to get some supplies and then we all went to bed as early as possible.

The next morning we went out as early as we could to get a few rides in before Zali and Jett checked in for their day lesson at 9:45.   Unfortunately Jett was feeling sick by lunchtime and had to abandon the rest of the day but the rest of us survived until the lifts closed at around 4pm - they close pretty early here as it gets dark so early although there is night ski-ing on some slopes for the super keen beans.  I should mention that the weather was cloudy and foggy for most of the day so it was impossible to even see where a chair lift ended as you rode it. 

Jon and I then took a night bus 15 minutes away to the nearest regular town to stock up on supermarket items - the round trip took us about 2 hours so we were pretty exhausted after our first day of ski-ing since 2016 and the long days.

Today we woke up to sunny blue skies so we once again did a early few runs before we all checked in for our day long lessons.  I'm glad Jon and I are about the same standard (he's better) but we are similar enough to get ranked in the group for lesson purposes so we can spend the day together.   Anyway the views today were great:

We all did well in our lessons and the day went by really quickly - the kids are now up to our group so if we do another lesson we might all be together. 

Back at home we made pizzas for dinner and it will be another early night. Unfortunately I've now got Jett's cold so I'm not feeling the best - hopefully I'll be better tomorrow as it may be our last sunny day of the trip.