Tokyo to Hakuba - Day 5

Up at 6am to have a quick breakfast and catch the train to Hakuba for the skiing part of the holiday. The 3hr 45 train ride was comfortable and relaxing. It took a good hour to leave urban Tokyo with its 35 million inhabitants. The buildings are all ugly, functional concrete blocks with the odd pretty blue tiled roof on a house or a shinto/Buddhist temple here and there. There's almost no greenery. 25% of the city was destroyed during the WWII fire bombing campaign in 1945 because the incendiary bombs tore through the mostly wooden and paper houses. Maybe this is why the suburbs now seem so bleak. But this could also be because we were going through railway countryside.

The countryside was not too inspiring either, but that might be because it's winter, so everything is quite bare.

Pulling into the snow-covered villages near Hakuba was wonderful and made everyone excited to be going skiing. There had been a huge amount of snow in recent weeks so the buildings were covered in domes of white and some homes were still completely snowed in.

Check-in to our chalet was easy and quick. Pizza for lunch and then we got our ski gear and did a supermarket shop, ready to hit the slopes the next day and hopefully find our legs.

We watched Titanic and then Ali managed to shrink three of James's favourite t-shirts, which made him quietly irate, even though she had washed his clothes for him. His underpants got smaller too (unless they were Freya's? 🤔)Read more