Tokyo and Niseko, Japan

Tokyo, by Mike

For anyone who as been anxiously waiting for our final update on our Asia trip, I am truly sorry. Somehow writing about travelling just doesn’t happen when you’re not travelling. Well, we are now travelling again, so it’s time to finish up some loose ends.

Cindy’s arrival in Tokyo was memorable. She reported slight nausea upon landing at Narita. An hour later, on the Narita express train to Shinjuku, the slight nausea had evolved into a desperate search for toilets, bags, trash cans – any possible receptacle for an unstoppable barf-o-rama. The final triumphant act of the barf-o-rama was a hurl into a transparent garbage can in front of a hundred disturbed people on the opposite platform of Shinjuku station.

Following that spectacle, Cindy had to lie low for her first two days in Tokyo. I got to know Japanese convenience stores really well, searching out things like ginger ale, soda crackers, and chicken noodle soup to help with the recovery. In between supply runs I did my first solo travelling of the trip, exploring Shinjuku, Shibuya, and various other random neighbourhoods that I can’t remember the name of now.

Shinjuku is a pretty cool place. It’s essentially wall-to-wall shopping and eating. Normally I’d rather do almost anything than go shopping but it’s totally different in Japan. It’s like every Kickstarter project that America will ever come up with is already for sale in a Tokyo department store. My favorite store was Tokyu Hands, sort of an awesome Japanese version of Canadian Tire.

By the third day in Tokyo Cindy was able to leave the hotel room. Despite her weak stomach we made the most of the fresh sushi at the Tsujiku fish market. It was good, but truth be told not much different than what we eat on a regular basis in Vancouver for half the price. Dinner that night would involve searching for a specific Tripadvisor-advised restaurant in Shinjuku. Unlike in Canada, where almost everything is street-level, Tokyo is a 3D puzzle. Every city block consists of a 9-storey Borg cube of a building with restaurants throughout. Finding a specific restaurant is like a needle in a haystack.

We eventually found the restaurant we were looking for, but it was closed by the time we got there. So we wandered among the cube and randomly selected another restaurant, which was actually pretty awesome and not like anything we’d ever eaten.

We had a very short time in Tokyo but we saw enough to know that we will have to go back. It’s a place that has developed to an extremely advanced level, but independently enough that it feels like another world entirely.

Niseko

Niseko is a ski village in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. It has a reputation for delivering epic dumps of powder snow and this held very true during our visit. It snowed non-stop, with about 30cm falling during each of the 2 days we skied. The terrain is fairly gentle by BC standards, but with that much dry, fluffy snow, it didn’t matter.

One odd thing about skiing at Niseko stems from the tendency in Japan to apply technology everywhere possible. So, every chairlift tower on the mountain has a big loudspeaker mounted on it to allow them to broadcast announcements to skiiers – mostly in Japanese, but stuff like “Please get ready to get off the lift,” and “Please refrain from using foreign walkie-talkies in Japan,” and other useless information. The speakers are mounted everywhere, so with the speed-of-sound delays across the mountain you hear endless announcements and endless echoes of announcements all day. It’s gives it a really Orwellian atmosphere.

The village is also really nice, with lots of good Japanese food. The place is largely run by Australians so if you like Aussies, epic powder snow, and Japanese food, you’ll love Niseko.