Day 16! And our last full day in Nagano prefecture. We’d booked through Klook a day visit to a highland for snow activities and also to visit that very famous snow monkey park. In a sense, this day trip was probably the most important item in our itinerary for this 18-day trip, since we basically constructed the second half of the itinerary based on the dates on which these day trips become available. For the trip providers we checked, 23 Dec was the first date in December when these trips would operate. I guess this has to do with the projected monkey sighting dates and when they are expected to come down from the mountains surrounding the park and bathe in the hot springs. There are also different variations of this day trip, with some operating out of Tokyo and others from Nagano prefecture itself.
The one we opted for on Klook would pick us up at Nagano Station and include a morning segment of snow activities at a highland — in our case Shiga Kogen. There is also an option for pick-up at Yudanaka Station, and for a period of time during our initial itinerary planning we’d reserved a stay at an onsen property in Yudanaka. We eventually dropped our reservation there on account that we’d have to make our way to Nagano Station on each and every one of our other days in the prefecture, and it would be a costly train ride both ways each time for all of us. There was also the reality that we’re not really onsen persons, and there is little else of interest for us in the Yudanaka area too.
So we dropped our Yudanaka reservation and opted to stay in Matsumoto instead — and as our daughter quips, “we dodged a bullet there”. Our tour bus dropped off two guests at Yudanaka on our return back to Nagano, and it indeed didn’t look like the kind of place we’d want to spend four nights and days at! It was basically very sedate, and looked freezing cold.
There were 14 guests in our trip today: three families of four including ours — and it looked like one family was from Hong Kong, and the other from Singapore like us — and also what sounded like a Singaporean couple who were staying at Yudanaka. Our first stop was Shiga Kogen, a 50-square-mile highland and mountain resort area, and from its Wikipedia entry, regarded as the largest ski resort in Japan and also the second highest in terms of elevation. The resort was also the site of several events for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, and the specific resort we were operating out of for the morning still showed marketing collateral and other paraphernalia from that event.
We spent about 2 hours at Shiga Kogen — the trip included lunch where we chose from a range of curry and udon items — then hopped back on the bus for another 10-minute ride to Kumanoyu Ski Area within Shiga Kogen to ride a chair lift to a higher point in the hopes of getting a look at the Japanese Alps. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that look as it was cloudy up top, but the group did get another half hour of snow play time with about 2 feet of snow: sufficient for the kids across the three families to go nuts, and the parents to look on with a mix of amusement and possibly discomfort at the biting -10 °C with about 2,000 meters elevation above sea level.
Pictures from the morning segment of today!
By the time we’d finished our visit to Shiga Kogen at about 2PM, I reckon the group had had its fill of snow activities and just wanted somewhere less cold! We headed back to the bus for a 25-minute ride to the snow monkey park. Continued in the next post!