Today was a rest day from skiing and we went to see the snow monkeys. The hotel took us up to the bus stop cos it was a long way. The bus trip was back through Nagano and we got some good views of the Japanese alps. The trip was about 2 hours to Jigokadani then a half hour walk up a steep, narrow, winding and icey track. The monkeys have their own onsen and they are the only monkeys in the world that do this. Story goes they started doing it about 40 years ago an...

We had so much fun there yesterday we are going back there again. It is snowing again this morning so it should be a good day. Well heat wave is a relative term. When we left home we had temps in the high 30s but here we had a heatwave today at plus4 deg. It was sunny and warmish and that turns the snow into slush. The skiing was better when we first got here but we still had a lot of fun today. We went up and down around the mountain and explored different runs,...

My Japanese is comin along beautifully. I was a bit slow and tender getting out of bed this morning. Im feeling really old. I guess I will be fine when I hit the slopes again this morning. We are going on the shuttle bus to another part of the mountains to try a beginner slope to try to get the hang of skiing. The kids are struggling, of course Im good to go.......hahaha. Tsugaike-kogen is another village north of here and we are told the slope there is way more ...

Today is gonna be our first day on the slopes.Chris a I have skiied before, about 6 years ago in New Zealand, and Kate and Laura have not skiied before. Chris and Laura are gonna ski board and Kate and I are gonna ski. Chris has been talkin it up for months so we have a competition...first day straight up take the ski lift to the top and first one down wins. Im pretty confident I can winn that one but I am sure it will be a different story on the last day. Breakf...

The flight up was fairly uneventful except for the last couple of hours when Laura got sick. They were just the usual flights with a stopover in KL and then straight to Tokyo. The taxi I booked was there to meet us and we had to go to Terminal1 to collect another couple who were also from Aus. They had come up on Singapore airlines.The first part of the drive was fairly quiet cos the kids slept a bit since none of us got much sleep on the plane. We had 2 piot sto...