Snowboarding at Rusutsu

Rusutsu resort offers you a wonderful blend of pretty high-end facilities, many runs spread over three mountains, great snow and hideous, nightmarish animatronics and carnival rides.





That tree thing was right there in the lobby, and all I ever heard were people saying "kowaii!" (scary!) I felt kind of sorry for the resort for splashing out on it - and then I remembered Dogs and Demons, the book I finished recently, and then I got a little depressed.

Snowboarding at Kiroro Resort

Insured and semi-ready. Back on the mountain - back in the snow:





I was delighted to find that I hadn't forgotten much, and that I could pick things up again fairly easily. Today however, is a pretty painful day for me.

Excuse me if I don't get up. I'm sure you can see yourselves out.

Magical Camp 2009!

Magical Camp, a small one night festival on the side of a mountain, was really fun! For one thing it's on the side of a mountain so you get views like this:


On the other hand, it's on the side of a mountain, and the campsite is on a ski slope so almost all of the tents are pitched on a crazy incline. But on the third, mutant, hand it's only for one night and the music is non stop from four different stages - so I reckon most people don't even bother going to sleep. I only used my tent as somewhere to dump stuff although Olivia took a nap in it late on. The whole thing takes place in the Teine Highland ski area, and it just looked spectacular. That's the Ishikari bay and the sea of Japan you can see up there, and at night we got the sparkling lights of North Sapporo and Ishikari to look at.

The organisation was bizarrely slap-dash in some ways. For example the first shuttle bus to the site didn't actually get there until after the first act had started, which is just odd, and there were still people setting up lots of things throughout the site until well into the day. But none of that really mattered because the whole thing had a very laid back atmosphere, and, with no artists that I desperately wanted to see, I could really enjoy the whole thing. Of course, dragging my sorry carcass home after much dancing, drinking and no sleep was no fun, but I'd certainly extracted the appropriate amount of enjoyment from the event before then. Also, last time I went to Teine Highland I broke a rib, so this was way better than that.


That's a guy with a giant brush doing an insanely intense kanji writing performance. It was awesome, and afterwards his kanji banners were hung near the main stage. There was a lot of fun stuff going on that wasn't music, and since there were less famous bands and the site was infinitely smaller than Rising Sun it came across as a lot more interesting for me. There was a precarious looking skate ramp, a kind of giant-bicycle-music-box that was pretty fun, a "Living Library" where they had interesting people giving talks to anyone who wanted to listen. And what's more the festival was centred around the ski-lodge so you could use nice indoor toilets and they could set up rooms like this:


Musically, the artists were less famous and more dance oriented - there were a lot of DJs, and... to be honest the kind of music you might describe as "festival fare". However I still saw a bunch of great stuff and because I wasn't expecting much, it was a nice surprise. Katsuhiko played and was awesome, as were Shonen Knife, and the British group Pest, who I'd never heard of but they're on Ninja Tunes and were really fucking good. It was utterly surreal to see a British band playing at a Japanese festival though. I saw a little bit of a couple of small Japanese bands that I liked too - Aoizera Kyoushitsu and... another one that I'll have to look up... so it was cool to find good new music.


If the fates allow, I certainly check it out next year. It was fun, and fairly relaxing although it did get pretty damn cold because you're near the top of a fucking mountain. Still, I love fucking mountains so I could live with that happily enough.

Sky Report

Last weeks sky (day unspecified): Awesome. Please click to enjoy and embiggen.



They are distant, but I can see mountains from my appartment, and I'm beginning to think that was all I needed.

Up The Mountain - Alex vs. Maruyama

As I was about to leave the zoo, Tara's voice rang in my ears: "You should hike up the mountain while you're there, it only takes about thirty minutes..." Although I had already cycled forty minutes in inhospitable heat to get to the zoo, my body temperature was back to around normal and I felt pretty good so I thought - ok then!

Maruyama is not a very big mountain, it does only take a little less than half an hour from bottom to top, but it is nevertheless a mountain, and as such is pretty tall. So even though it's a pretty quick hike, in the sweltering heat it turned out not to be the wisest thing I attempted last week. At times on the path I thought "I'm bloody glad I'm not running into anyone because I'm sweating like a bastard and my heart may try to make a run for it, separate from my body..." When I got to the very top though I met some people and one guy looked a hell of a lot worse than me. The little old ladies all looked fine, but then they were all stacked to the gills with hiking gear.

Despite this I'm glad I made the effort because if I hadn't I would've missed out on stuff like this:



And that is some good stuff. At the top the view was really nice, and it seems a lot less of a touristy viewpoint than Moiwa or Asahiyama which are just a little south.


Oh and here's a picture of some dude that I took because he framed himself so nicely amongst the rocks and branches:


Mountains are awesome, and I want to go up some more, but I need the temperature to drop severely before then.

Pain from Teine

Sunday, snowboarding at Teine.





Teine is divided into two sections, Olympia at the bottom of the mountain (so named because it was used for the Winter Olympics way back in the day, that's the Olympic flame platform up there at the top) and Highland, which is at the top of the mountain. Olympia was kinda short and boring, even for me and I suck, but Highland looked interesting. However this time I found the snow unforgiving. Bruisingly so. Possibly rib-crackingly so. Ow. So, I'm in a great deal of pain today in at least... wait let me count... five places. It's not fun, but really, snowboarding was pretty fun.

Snowboarding at Niseko Grand Hirafu

I'll put the set up soon on flickr.