Our friends invited us to their annual ski trip where up at this place called Villa Alpen near the Japanese ski region called Shiga Kogen. It is about an hour by bus from Nagano, which is about two hours north of Tokyo by shinkansen (bullet train). We are not the skiing type, but thought it would be a very fun opportunity to learn! Unfortunately…I tore my plantar fascia literally the day before we left on the trip, so I spent a lot of time soaking in the onsen and reading the Hobbit by the fire instead. But, I did get some photos while I was up there.
It was a beautiful little place set next to a lovely run through the trees. I mostly wandered around the bottom and watched the team ski down, but it was still fun!
There wasn’t too much fresh snow, but it did come down an inch or so each evening. Northern Japan is one of the snowiest places on the planet, with the northern most point getting something like 30 feet of snow per year. Insane! Since we were still pretty far south, it was a lot less, but still enough to go out and have a good time. I did enjoy some light walking around (as much as my foot could handle).
We did walk down a rather long path through the mountains (and now that I’m remembering the journey up through the town and along the trail until we got to the monkey park – I’m kind of surprised I actually did it with this foot!) to a snow monkey park! Along the way, there was a cute little onsen (for humans) nestled in the forest along this river and it was pretty cool.
Look at these monkeys! They were in and around the visitors but mostly very interested in food. The keepers would come and throw pieces around the park (and in the hot springs) and they would scurry after it. They seemed to genuinely enjoy the water amidst all the snow, but would hop out quick in a hurry to get some food!
Look at these guys throwing each other around, haha. It was very fun to see them scampering around in and out of the snow and the water and the little rock formations surrounding the park. There were probably 40 or 50 or so throughout the whole region, and most of them seemed juvenile. Maybe that’s just how they were!
I got a cute one of Erika as we were leaving the park. The sun set pretty early because of both the season and the mountains, but we made it back before the sun set. On the way back, the trail had gotten very muddy from the day and the travelers, so we spent about an hour slipping down the hill trying not to fall off into the valley, haha. We did make it back to the last bus before they stopped running for the evening, so that was very nice!
Thanks for reading!