Snow fo sho

Well, I haven't had the chance to get on the lobby computer til now, so I'll tell you about the past 2 days.

Yesterday after writing the post, we had some breakfast. Dean and me couldn't wait to hit the slopes. We had fresh pow and lots of it. After Monday's icy efforts, gliding down fresh, soft feathery powder was majik. We both had some really good runs. One run we did, I hurtled down, through a heap of hairpins, down a slope and around ski schoolers. So cool.. In the afternoon the snow started coming down lightly, just to top things up. We finished up down the bottom of Takamagahara at about 3.30pm sampling the local brew (Shiga Kogen Highlands Brewery Pale Ale on tap). After that we were wrecked as we had been shredding since 9 without much of a break. We went up about half way then through some trees back towards the area where our hotel was.

Because we ate a late lunch, none of us felt like much of a dinner (and we didn't feel like eating the dodgy food at the restaurant in our hotel). Dinner consisted of chocolate, ice cream and a brew. Only problem was, because we had one everyday, me and Dean were over beer (Is the even possible??) so we decided today to go dry.

This morning, both me and Dean were feeling wrecked, so we decided to take "half" the day off and go see the Japanese macaques in the Jigokudani Monkey park. For those not in the know, the monkeys are wild (actually they live all over these mountains) and have their own hot spring bath near a geyser/volcanic hot spring. To get there required us to get a bus to another section of the ski fields, then another bus from there to near the place. Then we had a 2km walk through the national park to get to the main area. We saw them before we'd even reached the end, but it was worth the walk. Hot springs, monkeys, the smell of volcanic sulfur in the air... all pretty good. Dean took about 200 pics with his SLR, while me and Whitney had our point and shoots. We have to wait til my laptops back up and running, but the monkeys were so cool.

At the moment it's about 8pm and it started snowing heavily outside. Should be another good powder day tomorrow, with Dean and me trying different runs.

Hope to write soon.