It was an early start on Christmas eve 2005, with a taxi pickup at 7am to arrive at Brisbane airport in time for a 9am flight to Cairns.
Despite packing light this year and only taking one snowboard bag between Ben and myself, we still managed to weigh in at close to 60Kg between the two of us. Michael* from Qantas was a bit cheeky and wanted to charge us $50 per kilo that we were over our 20Kg (per person) allocation. After some charm work on my behalf, and some negotiation from Benna our luggage was checked without incuring any additional cost.
The flight from Cairns to Chitose Airport (just outside of Sapporo) was pretty much empty so basically everybody had a row of seats to themselves. We all enjoyed a couple of complementary beers and I caught plenty of zeds which felt good after not spending much time prone throughout December.
Our group of eight was bused to Rusutsu and dropped at our lodge around 11pm. It was pretty cosy and located conveniently next to Seikomart (which you can read about on the Japanese wikipedia – in Japanese). Rusutsu is tiny so we relied pretty heavily on seikomart for obento boxes, karage trays and Asahi.
Christmas morning was pretty low key. A few seasons greetings were passed around amongst words of encouragement e.g. “get your shit together and lets get boarding”. The first few runs of the trip were magic, everybody was straight into it and I was pretty happy to regain my touch pretty quickly.
We made it across to Niseko and had a crazy Japanese New Years Eve celebration. More about that and further snow stories in another post.
For now I highly recommend you check out my Japan05-06 photo set.
* Names changed to protect the innocent.