Snowboard In Japan

G’day snow fans, well we finally arrived in Furano yesterday afternoon after 3 days with next to no sleep.  There was a small hiccup the night before our flights, and we received a text message from our airline at 1:00am stating that our 7:40am flight to the Gold Coast was cancelled.  We had to call the airline to rebook another iternal flight.  Luckily we got on a fligh to Cairns at 7amwhich connected directly to Tokyo and got us in 5 minutes before our cancelled flight.

By the time all this was sorted out, it was only 1.5 hours until our maxi taxi was due to pick us and our boards up at 3am, so we decided to stay up rather than sleeping. By the time we checked our bags in and were on the flight, we were ready for a good sleep on the plane. We ended up only getting a couple of hours.

Our flight got in to Tokyo Narita at 6:55pm on Firday night.  We were booked in at the Excel Toyu hotel at Haneda airport, so we took the airport limousine to Haneda airport which is an hours drive and checked into our hotel.  We were quite tired, but still decided to make the most of our Friday night in Tokyo and took the monorail into Shibuya central Tokyo to grab a bite to eat and a beer.

It was quite late when we hit the hustle and bustle of Shibya so we explored the alleyways off themain drag and found a traditional noodle bar and devoured some traditonally prepared dons.  After that we found a trendy little bar tucked in an laneway and had our first Japanese beer for the trip while listening to the smooth tunes playing on the decks.

We woke up Saturday morning at 5am to grab our flight to Chitose airport in Sapporo.  The flight is 90 minutes, but we managed to get a bit  more shut eye on the way over.

Once in Sapporo, we boraded the resort liner bus to Furano.  This is quit a slow trip through the snow coverd plains and foothills of Hokkaido.  3 hours later, we reached our destination of Furano and checked into Pension Furanui.

With everything settled we took a walk around the village. We had planned to do some night boarding but this was cancelled to make way for the annual Furano Snow Festeval comprising of a big air jump competition, food and beer stalls, bonfires, sleigh rides, military band with the evening finishing with a fireworks display.

Over a few drinks and some average pool playing we met a few locals at Ajito – a bar that is just up the street. We should mention at this point that it hadn’t stopped snowing since we arrived, so we headed back to the pension for our first full nights sleep in three days.

Waking to a beautifully clear day we started out with a couple of easy runs and with some minor adjustments to our boards, we headed up to the summit for some serious powder.

Furano as a reputation of having strict snow patrol and limited off-piste runs. This appears to have changed slightly this season as it didn’t take long before we were in the trees and knee deep in powder familiarising ourselves with Kitanomine Zone.

By mid afternoon we made our way over to the Furano Zone snow area where there was more stashes of powder and ever fewer ropes providing loads of free-riding tree powder runs.

Back to the pension for an onsen and a powernap, we walked a short distance to a sensational Mongolian restaurant  for dinner – cranking snow the whole time.

After dinner we began reviewing the days footage with great anticipation. We only used the helmet cam today as a test run to perfect our craft which was  huge success. We’ll be uploading some of this footage to the site shortly.

We plan to make another post and upload some more videos from Kamui and Tomamu in a few days time, so please stay tuned and leave any comments.