Japan 2023 - Day 8

Today was our last day of skiing the slopes of Madarao and the weather threw a little bit of everything at us short of blizzards and sleet. The day dawned overcast and snowing and before too long decided add a pretty decent amount of fog to the mix. It certainly made the skiing difficult.

Conditions were challenging enough that Caroline, coming to the end of one of our early runs of the day, she went to ski down to the lift for the next run only to find out she’d turned left a little bit early. Off the side of the run, into the deep powder and fwoof she was all but buried in it. There wasn’t a lot I could do to help as that would have involved either skiing into it myself or wading in it to try and assist with her retrieval and so she was left to extricate herself, skis off and wading back up the two metres onto the run. Hey, at least it provided me with some amusement and at least there was no injuries!

Today was also Saturday which meant lots of weekend skiers up for the day/weekend. There were actual lines to get onto a lift. Like, sometimes we had to wait like five minutes. We were definitely aware that we’d been spoiled over the prior two days with simply skiing up and pretty much getting straight onto a lift. It also meant the runs were cut up a lot earlier in the day.

The day’s skiing was challenging enough that Caroline, Emily and I decided and early break was in order and settled in for a drink and a crepe. Progressively pretty much the entire crew joined us and we decided we’d get in a little bit more skiing before heading to an on-mountain burger joint for lunch to see what it was like.

We managed to pretty much all meet up at the appointed time and found the place to have limited seating, so we staked the joint out, watching and hovering over people in the hope that it would encourage them to eat quicker and vacate their seats. After a while we decided to start ordering so that maybe we could coincide getting lunch with getting a seat. We were told the wait would be an hour. I think it’s a sign of how tired we all were that we agreed to stay and wait.

We did eventually get burgers and they were pretty good, but they were waaaay over-priced (compared to what else we could get on the mountain) and the wedges spiced within an inch of death so all in all, not what we were hoping for.

After lunch we decided to coordinate a trip across the other side of the mountain so some could again ski the natural half pipe. That turned out to be a long and painful exercise in herding cats that meant we didn’t end up doing a whole lot of skiing in the afternoon. The sun did come out though, which was as much curse as blessing as we started to get slushy snow and icy patches that detracted from the enjoyment a little.

We returned to our accommodation ahead of dinner and the younger members of the party decided that Michael and Oliva’s little slide would be a whole let better with a toboggan. And even better than sliding down with a toboggan, it would be better again if there was a jump. Caroline and I return from the mountain about the time the jump had been introduced, hearing gales of laughter coming from the rear of the building. We had to investigate of course. Apparently it was due to this:

Prose has always been my main means of conveying things in this blog, but sometimes words really can’t do justice to what you're seeing. I stayed outside long enough to witness these two amusing runs down the slide:

But, well it was cold, I was tired and I really wanted to get the ski boots off so I returned inside along with Caroline. The kids however weren’t done. By the time they were the jump was apparently about a metre high and resulted in the following. I'm sure you'll take as much joy from watching these as I did given I wasn't there to witness it first hand!

After that there was little to do but eat, compare aches and pains, pack and get ready for our transfer to Osaka the following day.

I have to say though, dinner included a visit to what has been my favourite Japanese toilet of the trip so far. I know I've detailed various aspects of the toilets here previously, but this is honestly the first time I came across one that was wifi enabled!

Now I'm not entirely sure what that does for anyone, but would guess that perhaps you can activate the toilet functions from your phone. That would mean you could scroll your socials and jet-clean your bum at the same time! Happy days!

Also, I have to say I loved the fact that there was no need to touch any component of the seat/lid if you didn't want to!