4 February 2026
Day 14 (Travel to Kyoto from Osaka) 28th Jan.
Day 15 (Golden shrine) 29th Jan
Nice coffee, bought a wood block print.
Day 16 (Nara visit and Kyoto train station) 30th Jan
Bought glasses at Jins and had a tea tasting.
Day 17 (Kyoto to Hakusan) 31st Jan
Day 18 (Hotpot and Hike) 1st Feb
Day 19 (Onsen) 2nd Feb
Day 20 (Hakusan Skiing) 3rd Feb
Big first day for us to go skiing! We put our faith in our AirBNB host Kon san, who took us to “the ski fields with a better view”. The close ski fields were 15 minutes drive and he took us to a resort 30 minutes drive from our residence, called Hakusan Ichirino Onsen ski area. Extremely kind of him to drive us around like that. When we got there he helped us rent skis and boots, since it’s not a popular tourist location, not many people hadEnglish, and our Japanese was still limited to politeness. The cost was $40 for lift/gondola access, and $30 for the rental equipment, between a quarter to a third of the price of skiing at perisher.
There was fresh powder, and very few people skiing. Clare got her legs and hardly crashed through the whole day, very impressive for her second day. She did a few intermediate tracks which wore her down quickly, and I spent the last bit of the afternoon trying to find an impressive black run that Clare would be able to see from the cafe window. I didn’t end up finding the run but I did have a great time.
Kon picked us up at 3:30pm, and asked if he could take us to his favourite lookout location. Of course we were all for it, and so we drove further up and around the mountain in his van. The snow on the sides of the road that had been bulldozed aside were taller than me, nearly 2 meters of ice and powder. The road took us to a two floor cabin, and inside was an observation level where telescopes, binoculars, and high zoom camera’s/recorders were looking at serow (Japanese mountain goats) and deer. We had a great chat with the observers thanks to Kon san translating.
When we got home we quickly went out again to do a coin laundry wash, and have some sushi. The coin laundry did all of our clothes, washed and dried in an hour from the same machine for $7, which I thought was pretty good.
