Day 163 in Japan - Hakuba Goryu skiing

This morning, we got up nice and early to cook breakfast in the backpackers before heading out to the snow. We arrived about an hour before the first-timers started their lessons, so we decided to give them the quick "How to put your skis on and move" schtick. Everyone got the idea easily, so Rob and Shane (Simon's NZ friend who we met last night) and I left for the higher slopes. Venturing up to the top of the mountain was lovely - we were rewarded with a lovely view, and a wonderful morning of skiing.

Up the top of Goryuu, we discovered that we could actually ski all the way to Hakuba 47, which we had thought was a totally separate ski resort. But it turns out that they are linked quite nicely at the top. The main difference seemed to be that Hakuba 47 was decently signposted, where we could barely tell which way we were supposed to be going in Goryu.

After we met up with the others for lunch (and bought the last fries remaining in the ski resort, much to the disgust of the other customers waiting in line behind us), Simon and Carl decided to join us up higher on the mountain for the atfernoon. Our first mission was to climb to the highest point on the mountain, so we kicked off our skis and crawled in the deep snow on all fours. Simon actually had a wonderful monkey-style climbing thing, but I just slogged it out, and used my solid ski boots to kick my way up the hill. It was worth it - we sat up the top and watched the clouds roll in and then roll out to reveal the beautiful Hakuba township in the valley below. Ahhhh, Japan!

The rest of the afternoon was a blur of skiing around the beautiful mountain, catching the bus back to the hotel, having a lazy hostel pub dinner and playing pool before collpasing into bed. More details on everyone's skiing tomorrow.

Food Highlight of the Day: Fish and chips - wedges with chicken salt - the Australian way.