Oz and Sinagpore

Recent family news took me to Oz for the first time in over ten years. It was a strange yet familiar trip. I got to meet three new family members and say good bye to one.

Customs in Oz is always so serious, I was directed towards the long line of people opening out their suitcases and showing the customs officers food and other items. The list of questions on the customs card can also be ambiguous. One was something about being near a lake in the last seven days and another about having soil on your shoes. At the counter I did take of my shoes to show the customs officer, all was well and they let me into the country.

One thing that did strike me about Sydney is all the traffic, each side three lanes wide and there always seemed to be a jam. Dropping my cousin off at the airport, a car was flashing his lights and beeping at me to move. If the car behind had looked a little further than his own bonnet he would have seen a taxi in front of me whose driver was getting the luggage out of the boot. Not much I could do when the car behind me had blocked me in so there was no where for me to go.

On leaving Sydney I went with my family to spend a few days in Singapore and also apply for my Japanese visa. As a Brit, there are different rules to extending and changing a visa in Japan which I and SkiJapan have learnt in the last few weeks.

We ate, shopped, ate and walked around in the humidity. Orchard road is going though some re-development with a lot of luxury brands lining the street and new shopping malls that feel like a whole new shopping experience that I don’t currently have the money or need, to indulge in.

We did have money to indulge in the food courts around the hotel, in China town and little India. I have since learnt that dim sum is known as yum cha and roti chani is known as prata. The lime juice, chrysanthemum tea and iced milo is a good as it was, as is the fresh fruit, roti chani and all the other good food that remind me of the family holiday’s spent in Malaysia when I was much younger.

Oz and Singapore

Leaves in the Mountains

Autumn as arrived in Hokkaido, Aleisha and I went to Daisetsu-zan national park to view some of the autumn leaves near and at the top of Kuro Dake san.

It was a long drive out to the national park, not taking the freeway and going though the towns there were traffic lights every hundred meters or so. On the way out we stopped by Shikotsu Lake, the second deepest lake in Japan with very clear water in Shikotsu-Toya National Park.

While on the way to the lake, I was pulled over by a motorbike policeman. All my encounters with police have been in Japan. Third time’s a charm. I was doing 80 on a 50 KM/H road. Once I had shown him all my documents, the International drivers licence, gai-jin card and passport, I think he realised that to actually book me for speeding would be a large effort on his part. Aleisha came out to help and he said ‘be careful as it’s the weekend on a national holiday.’ And he let me off with a warning, phew.

Just after check-in, in the early evening, a couple of tour buses pulled in to the hotel and streamed into the hotel. It’s one thing that I would like to experience while in Japan, a ‘follow the flag’ tour.

The hotel wasn’t very exciting, dinner looked very pretty on the tray. There were tables and tables of identical dinner trays for the bus loads from the tour buses so it was Japanese fine dinning on a mass production scale. 

The hotel onsen had a peculiar rancid type smell to it, but it was still nice to soak in the hot water after a whole day of being in the car.

Early start in the morning, to use the rotenburo, outside onsen, before cleaning time. Buffet breakfast then up the cable car and chair lift, strange using a chair lift with no board or skis attached to my feet, to climb the last section of the Kuro Dake peak at an elevation of 1984 meters. The climb was relatively short in comparison to Youtei or the trail run I had done previously. At the top I could see snow already on some of the distance peaks, there was also a couple of cute looking squirrels scampering around the visitors.

After coming down the mountain back to the car, it was the the long, uneventful, six hour drive home with the exception of a McD’s stop. 

Kuro Dake