Japan 🇯🇵 - Day 49 & 50 - Togari Onsen ski trip

It was a wet rainy day in Tokyo as I left the hostel in the morning. In some sense I was happy to leave the bad weather in Tokyo, but worried it would follow me to the mountains. Let me tell you now, it sort of did. My japanese friend Momoka had found and booked for me an all inclusive 1.5 days ski trip with transport from and to Tokyo for ¥19000 (~120€)!

With a quick 25 minute metro ride from my hostel, I arrived close to the bus station with plenty of time to spare. Good thing I did because when I got there, I couldn’t for the life of me find the actual bus station. I could tell from the GPS I was close, but there were no buses anywhere to be seen.

I ended up asking a couple of young looking guys walking past in the street. Of course, they didn’t understand what I was saying, so I just showed them the departure place on my coach ticket, and they signed me to follow them. Sure enough, they were going there too, so they took me right where I needed.

I was astounded by how disorganised the whole place was. The Japanese are usually well organised, especially in trains and public transport in general, but this was a different story.

It was just a huge underground garage with lots buses parked around, and a small table in the middle. There were no signs—not that I could understand at least—and no screens showing departures or anything of the sort. I had to painfully ask some other people to actually notice and find the table in the middle.

That table was in fact the check in desk. I showed them my reservation information, and they gave me all my tickets. These included the coach tickets to go there and back, the hotel booking info, and the equipment rental “voucher”.

I finally found my bus, and after a few minutes we were off!

The bus finally arrived in Togari Onsen at 12, after an almost 5 hour journey. I went to the hotel immediately. I couldn’t access my room yet, but I could at least leave my bags there and put on some more ski-appropriate clothing.

My whole booking included 1 and a half days of ski, so I could already start skiing that afternoon. With my bags safe at the hotel, I made my way to the ski rental place. Once again, everything was in Japanese so I wasn’t sure where to go. Once I located the place, I was given a form entirely in japanese that I needed to painstakingly fill in. As many times during this trip, automatic translators on my phone came in so handy.

With my skiing equipment secured, and my ski pass picked up at the desk at the bottom of the slopes, I could finally out on my skis, an hour and a half after getting there. The weather was okay, not particularly beautiful but still reasonably good.

As it was already 2pm when I got to the top of the mountain, I was getting really hungry. I stopped at the restaurant on the slopes, just to see if the prices were reasonable enough, and to my great surprise they absolutely were! I got a sort of pasta bolognese for ¥950 (~5.50€).

This time I decided to play it safe and easy, so I just took a picture of the displayed menu and showed it to the person behind the counter.

Since it had been a year since I last was on skis, it took me a few rides to really get back into it. The skis and snow somehow felt different to what I was used to. Might be due to the fact I was half way across the world.

The sky cleared up a bit in the afternoon but it stayed mostly cloudy the whole day.

Dinner at the hotel was served quite early, at 5.30pm, so I couldn’t stay on the slopes too long. It felt very strange because I was the only non japanese person there. I went to bed soon after dinner.

Breakfast was served at 7.30 in the same dining all. It was a japanese style breakfast of course, so quite unusual for me, but it was good.

The weather in the morning was more or less the same as the day before, but it kept getting worse as the day went on.

Visibility was reasonable in the morning, but by 1pm it was getting dangerously hard to see while skiing, so I took an extra long lunch break—I had ramen this time. It was snowing really hard and continuously since 11am.

I must say I was also rather ill equipped for skiing, although that wasn’t the primary purpose of my trip to Japan.

The coach back to Tokyo was at 4pm, so I went back to the rental shop by 3. That left me plenty of time to move around and go back to the hotel, but also the weather conditions weren’t making it enjoyable to ski.

When I got back to the hotel, I got great news that the coach was not going back to Tokyo because the snowfall had blocked the roads back 🫠

They instead offered 2 options. Either I take the coach to the closest train station which was a 20 minute drive away, but it has to pick other people up from another place before, or they could call a taxi to take me straight to the station. Although I picked the former because I didn’t want to pay for a taxi, I definitely should’ve gone for the latter. The coach did a huge detour all around the mountains to pick up the other people, driving super slowly on the snow. What was supposed to be a 20 minute drive ended up being a 2 hour drive around the mountains..

That gave me plenty of time to figure out what I wanted to do. Initially, I had planned to go back to Tokyo after the ski trip, and stay there a couple nights, before finishing my trip in Osaka. But since I needed to take the Shinkansen (bullet train) anyway to get back to Tokyo, I figured it would be easier and maybe cheaper to just go directly to Osaka. I’d lose one day in Tokyo, but I had already seen some of it, and not much of Osaka.

In retrospect, I’m not sure it was much easier or cheaper, but that’s the choice I made on the spot, when I was tired and annoyed that the coach company wouldn't give us another option or pay for the honestly slightly expensive train.

When I finally got to the train station close to Togari Onsen, I took my tickets to Osaka. I needed to stop and change in Tokyo anyway. This journey cost me ¥21000 (~132€) but I integrated in my budget the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka a couple days later anyway.

The ticket machine edits a bunch of little tickets to use at different moments. The big one is a receipt, and the four little ones are 2 normal train tickets for the two legs, and two corresponding “Super express” Shinkansen tickets.

I finally got to Osaka right around midnight.