Hokkaido, Japan

On Christmas day, Tanya and I flew to Japan. It was a long journey — we crossed from Geneva to London, then to Tokyo via a twelve-hour flight over Russia, then from Tokyo to Sapporo on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. The flight path across Russia took us far, far north, into remote and icy territory. It was night-time and luck was on our side, because somewhere near the northern apex of the route the aurora borealis appeared. What started as a green glow gradually formed into curtains of pulsating colour against the inky black of the night. This beautiful and constantly changing spectacle stayed in view for a couple of hours as we tracked steadily to the east.

We went to Japan to catch up with Tanya's sister Andy, and our plan was to go together to sample some of the fabled Hokkaido snow. This was my first time in Japan. I know only four words in Japanese, and one of them means "worker bee" and is thus essentially useless. So I spent large portions of the trip in wonderful confusion about what was going on. There is a certain freedom that comes from being totally lost. Sometimes we watched TV; in one weather segment there was a cartoon mouth and moustache in the corner of the screen, making faces. I have no idea why. In our hotel in Sapporo were keychains for sale, in the shapes of crabs or ears of corn, with a roaring bear's head coming out of them. Later in the trip we discovered this was rather a theme. Also available in the "with emerging bears head" line were beer glasses, grapefruit, and little toilets, each containing a neatly coiled turd.

This last key chain I can understand — excepting the bears head, of course — because Japanese toilets deserve to be celebrated in keychain form. The seat is heated, and not by a previous user. They are adorned with various buttons that can send jets of water in suprising and varied directions, play sounds to cover any embarrassing noises you might make, dispense deodoriser (one button noted the deodorisor was "even more powerful"), and flush the thing once you're done.

Our plan was to spend two days in Sapporo, then go inland to go skiing. The problem was that our skis, packed together in one immensely awkward bag, were lost somewhere in the quagmire that is Heathrow airport and didn't arrive with us in Japan. We called the airline the day after we arrived and asked for an update. The good news was the skis were, by then, in Tokyo. The bad news was that we were told it would take a week to get them to us using a courier. Tanya explained why this wouldn't do. "Oh, then in that case we'd better have your skis delivered direct to you once you're back from skiing", said the airline rep, with not a hint of irony. We suggested an alternative, in the form of the airline using its own substantial transport network to have the skis on the next flight to Sapporo (Tokyo-Sapporo is, indeed, the world's busiest air route). This was taken as though it was a genuinely new idea, and sure enough our skis were delivered early the next day. Skibag dragging dutifully behind, we set off for Furano in central Hokkaido.

Furano is a little town with a ski hill about 3 km away. At the base of the hill is a little village that has a few restaurants, a brewery, a bar, and a convenience store. It's a pretty quiet place! We skied there for a couple of days, getting the feel of the place, staying on-piste and enjoying the fact that the snow was being regularly topped up. The snow in Hokkaido is something else. For a start, there is just lots of it. It seems to snow all the time, which explains the insane average snow amounts. Furano gets nine metres of snow per year on average. Because it's cold, the snow falls in impossibly perfect dendrite flakes and stays super dry. And it was certainly cold; one morning it was -19 degrees, and I have now learnt that at about -15 degrees your nose hairs freeze and you can sense it in your nostrils. It makes a reasonable temperature gauge.

From Furano we went on a day trip to the onsen at Hakuginso, where we went snowshoeing for an explore before heading to the amazing hot water of the hot springs. There were wonderful outdoor hot pools, and it was just bucketing snow, and these giant fluffy snowflakes were piling up on people's heads. I couldn't help but think of the nature documentaries where you see monkeys keeping warm from the snow by using thermal pools. When I went inside my hair was frozen solid.

Time for a hot coffee from a vending machine.

After Furano, we spent a couple of days skiing at Asahidake. This is where we experienced what we came for — deep Japanese powder. It was just exceptional. The day before we went there it snowed 1.3 metres, and then cleared up for a bluebird day on the mountain. Asahidake is an unusual ski field in that it has a single gondola which runs every twenty minutes, and two groomed cat tracks. The good terrain, though, is off-piste, so it is kind of a slack-country paradise. You get the gondola to the top, ski down through the incredible snow amongst the trees, and probably have time for a snack before the next gondola leaves. As a bonus, Asahidake is an active volcano, with steaming fumaroles at the top and natural hot pools (a hot creek, even) at the base. The mountain receives about fourteen metres a season on average of this incredibly dry, light, powder snow. It's seriously good.

I had never skied snow like this before. It was knee-deep to waist-deep powder, and the feeling of skiing in it was completely different to skiing in harder snow. It's a smooth-flowing, freeform feeling, like trailing your hand through water, steering not by using edges but guiding your path through a fluid. It's really, really fun. Of course it doesn't always work like this, and once you have fallen over it is surprisingly hard to get back on to your feet. At one point I popped a ski and it took a few minutes of dedicated probing with ski poles to find it again.

Asahidake was everything I hoped skiing in Japan would be. As the sun set at the end of our first day there, we took a last run down the volcano, which had turned pink in the early evening, and I felt very lucky.

After Asahidake we headed back to Furano and then to Sapporo, where we spent a couple of days wandering the city, and then all too soon it was time for us to leave Japan. Tanya and I were tracing our same path back to Switzerland, and had booked cheap flights with an airport change in Tokyo. I confidently asserted it wasn't a problem because we had the whole night to make the transfer, not knowing then that the amount of time required for a late-night Haneda to Narita transfer is one whole night. Arriving in Haneda after trains had finished, we followed a complex and confusing route via night busses to Narita airport. When we got there, at four in the morning, it was completely deserted. I rang our airport hotel to ask how to get there. "Please take a train", said the helpful man at the front desk. "Are there trains running now?", I asked, to which he merrily responded "Oh no, not at this time!". In the end we got a few hours sleep and made our next flight, which whisked us again across the frozen expanses of Russia. From 36,000 feet we could see frozen sea ice, and the lights of remote outposts shining in the arctic dusk. Tanya imagined polar bears.

I love travel and I love flying, but Heathrow airport took all the joy I felt at being miraculously whisked across the world in an incredible flying machine, and ruined it for that moment. I would describe the Heathrow experience as one of standing in queues for no apparent reason while being shouted at. At security a woman watched me with suspicion as I put my laptop in a tray, paused a beat for effect, then yelled "ANY LAPTOPS?". It felt pointless to answer. It was made clear that if we had liquids that weren't in a special plastic bag, we'd miss our next flight and would deserve it. Endless looped voices announced the end of every moving walkway and of civilised society in general. And they lost our ski bag again, so that's two out of two, an impressive record in a short period of time.

But let's not end this post on a sour note. It was an incredible trip to Japan with amazing company. I skied the best snow I've ever touched, saw a steaming volcano, met interesting and lovely people. Ate difficult to identify vegetables and meats, was happily confused most of the time, drank the local beers. It was a trip that reminded me again of the value of travel and new experiences, and it's an experience that I will now treasure.

Michael Raupach

A walk in the fog