surfarthur
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Posts posted by surfarthur
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The Seiko Mart has some good options.
We ate at the Hotel (Tower) a few times and at the Italian (I don't rate pasta ) the kids prefered the spaghetti at the seikomart.
Gozaimaas just let us know on a different thread about a couple of places
When you there Dyna?
Seemore
Yes, for a cheap meal you can't beat the Seicomart
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Yes they do have english menus, but some places don't have many, so you may have to share with other tables.
RE: Pirateman, yes it is kind of hard to find. If you are standing looking at the little strip of restaurants, there is a short road to the left of the strip. It leads to a T intersection, turn right when you hit that. You will then find a sharp left hand corner, and a smaller road off to the left. The first building down the smaller road is Pirateman. It is only about 200m walk from the strip of restaurants, even though my directions make it seem much further.
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There is a small strip of places, maybe 5? different places, just north of the resort that are significantly cheaper than eating in the resort. If you are going with a group, make sure to book for these places as they are all very small. Behind this small strip there is a place called pirateman, good gyoza there
Inside the resort we found that there is a place called Kakashi at the bottom of the highland lodge, it is advertised as a tavern, a fair bit cheaper than the main resort restaurants, athough you may have to wait for a table to become available, I don't think they take reservations. The all you can eat BBQ place is quite good too, athough the ventilation leaves a little to be desired, best to wear clothes that you are planning to wash as they will smell of BBQ smoke after you eat there. We never ate at the main French/Japanese/Italian restaurants.
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Seemore, in the international departures area there is a place with a green circle and a cat as the logo that stores luggage, not 100% on the pricing - I saw a sign saying 800 yen per bag for the day, but did not see an overnight price. There was also one of these places in the arrivals area of the domestic airport.
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Gozaimaas
Would have been good today with that weather.
Mate could you do a restaurant review if you visit the local eateries during your stay.
Cheers Seemore
Seemore, the restaurants outside of the north wing hotel near the main road are all pretty good, we didn't spend more than 5000 yen for 2 of us at all during our trip, including 2-3 drinks each at the restaurants. Pirateman is pretty good too, its around behind the little strip of restaurants, but my pick would be the Izakaya closest to the resort in the little strip of restaurants, I just can't remember the name of it, but I remember that next door to it was an upstairs place with fairy lights up the stairs.
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How was it Gozaimaas?
It looked busy for the weekend looks like it's snowing pretty hard now though.
Hopefully tommorrow will be good for you and Surfarthur.
Seemore
Snow today was excellent Seemore, thanks
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There are a few cracks showing on Shiribetsu at the moment, as well as under some of the lifts. They have been covered by fresh snow, so will be difficult to spot.
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Will try to have a look for you, will be heading through on Chitose on the 26th of Jan, will post up what i find.
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ha ha funny ones arthur. i love the fox. i want one.
I got the fox at the souvenir shop at the New Furano Prince Hotel, was fairly cheap, they also had bigger ones.
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Hi Seemore,
yes I have some more pics, but will probably upload them when I get home. At the moment I am resizing the pics one at a time before I upload them, I seem to remember Snowjunky mentioned a program he was using to resize a bunch of photos at once, will try to find that when I get home. Regarding the steepness of Furano, Furano zone i think is steeper than Kitanomine. I think the overall gradient of the Furano zone is probably steeper than Mt Isola at Rusutsu, however I think that some of the ungroomed black / double black runs at Rusutsu are steeper. I will post more on my thoughts about the similarities and differences between the 2 a bit later.
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A tale of 4 baby cheeses - Pt 1
I heard a small voice calling to me from the convini at Furano, it sounded like it was coming from a 4 pack of baby cheese. The cheese asked me for a ride to the ski field. I asked the cheese, "are you narly enough?" the cheese responded, we are knarlier than you!". How could i refuse a 4 pack of knarly cheese?
I took 2 of the cheeses to Furano zone with me. One of the cheeses kept talking up foil as the replacement for gore-tex, far superior he reckoned. The other cheese said, "I am too narly for technical outerwear, I will hike naked in the snow." I tried to talk him out of it but he wouldn't budge.
Unfortunately, the narly naked - hiking cheese quickly succumbed to exposure. I made sure that the body was properly disposed of.
The other 3 baby cheeses were distraught, but this did not stop them getting the bus to Rusutsu with me. They were too upset to ride on the first 2 days, so i left them in the fridge.
I came back from my second day of riding in Rusutsu, to find that Furano Fox, who also got a ride with us, had gotten into the fridge.
Down to 2 baby cheeses now. Stay tuned, we are going tree riding tommorow, will the 2 cheeses survive?
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No Problem Snowjunky, Rusustsu stuff still to come, resting the legs for tomorrow, hopefully eating powder for breakfast tomorrow morning
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We arrived at New Chitose airport on the 14th, got on the bus to Furano. While we were on the bus, the weather started closing in, and it started to snow. The closer we got to Furano, the heavier the snow was falling. We got ourselves settled in at our accommodation, had some miso ramen for dinner, and fell asleep, exhausted after 18 hrs of travel.
We woke up to the sight of fresh snow blanketing everything, and the sound of trucks, all loaded with snow, about 1 truck every 2 minutes. A quick walk to the 7-11 for some supplies, then into our boots and onto the shuttle to the Furano zone. Day 1 was definitely a warm up day, however there was boot deep powder just off the groomers, plenty still untouched after lunch. The snow was light and dry, although some of the locals were saying that it was slightly heavier than normal. There were light snow showers on and off through the day. We concentrated on the runs on the lower half of the Furano zone the first day. We finished the day with an onsen and then dinner in Furano town, at a little noodle place, some of the best food of the trip. I can’t remember what the restaurant was called unfortunately.
Day 2 we had a private lesson, we brushed up on our technique while exploring more of the Furano zone. Really enjoyed the runs from the top pair lift. No fresh snow this day, however there was still some untouched powder off the sides of the groomers in the morning. This was all pretty trashed by lunchtime. We really noticed how quiet Furano is today, being a Monday, there was significantly fewer people than the day before, not that the Sunday crowd seemed to be particularly busy to us. Once again we finished the day with an onsen, then we had dinner at the restaurant at our accommodation, Duck, ham and salmon, salad, and furano wine jelly for desert.
Day 3 the sun came out for most of the day, once again no new snow. After a few runs from the top pair lift on the Furano side, we took the link run down to Kitanomine zone. The top of the link run has some uphill sections, for snowboarders you need a lot of speed to make these, we ended up having to skate about 100 metres before we could strap in again. The link run is very fun once you are past the flat/uphill section, some good reasonably steep sections and some fun snow banks off the side, probably one of my favourite runs on the mountain. Unfortunately, the run from the bottom of the link lift to the kitanomine gondola is very flat in sections and by this stage it was showing how out of shape we are and our quads were getting very sore through these flat sections. We took the gondola up to the top of the kitanomine side and rode back down to the link lift. The Kitanomine zone can be broken up into 3 sections, the top section is quite steep and narrow, the middle sction is a nice constant gradient, and the bottom is quite flat in places. For our level of riding, the Kitanomine side was not as good as the Furano side. If you were getting into the off piste, ducking ropes etc, there is probably more scope for this on the Kitanomine side though. We finished the day by meeting up with Kokodoko for a beer, then headed out for dinner in the Kitanomine villiage. It was good to put a face to the name.
Day 4 we had organised another private lesson, this time on the Kitanomine side. There had been about 5 – 10 cm of fresh snow, and it snowed continuously through the day, big fat snowflakes, getting slowly heavier as the day went on. We got the cable car up the Furano side and rode down to the Kitanomine side to meet the instructor for our lesson. There was about 5 cm of fresh snow on top of the groomed snow down the link run, and this was probably the best run we had the whole trip as not many people had been down the link run yet, so it was nice and smooth. On the lesson we worked on carving turns. By the end of the lesson, I had improved my carving turns quite a lot. I am starting to ride a lot faster while staying in control. After we finished riding, we finished the day with an onsen, then dinner at the Izakaya at our accommodation.
Observations about Furano:
We were staying halfway between the Kitanomine and Furano zones, so we needed to get a shuttle there and back each day. This actually proved to be a good thing as we found that we liked the Furano zone much better than the Kitanomine zone. The only disadvantage was eating out in the evenings required a 15 minute walk or approx. 700 yen taxi to Kitanomine, 1200 yen taxi to Furano town.
Furano zone has less flat / uphill sections, and narrow cat track type parts than Kitanomine.
The premium zone on Kitanomine side did not open at all while we were there due to a large crack in the snow, so we were not able to check this out. Had this been open, we may have felt differently about the Kitanomine zone.
The runs off the top pair lift on the Furano side are split in half, one side steep fast groomers, the other side ungroomed bumps / powder stashes. Further down the mountain, there are plenty of powder stashes off the sides of the piste without having to duck ropes, plenty more easily accessible stashes if you are willing to duck ropes without necessarily having to go into the trees.
Most of the forested areas, the trees are very tight, under some of the lifts it appears that there are creeks and streams just under the surface of the snow.
We saw plenty of tracks in the off piste areas, but not many people. Even 2 days after fresh snow, it appeared that there are still fresh tracks to be had in the off piste, however access through the trees could be difficult.
Plenty of people were ducking the ropes. Some of the people where we were staying got caught, names taken down by ski patrol and given a warning, but no-one had their lift tickets taken from them as far as I am aware.
For us, 4 days was plenty of time, if we had stayed longer I would have wanted to visit some of the other resorts in the region.
Pics to follow.
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I guess the main thing is that you have found a setting that works, so you can at least get some footage in the meantime, but definitely send it back before the warranty runs out if you can't get everything to work correctly.
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Yeah i saw that earlier today, pretty funny!
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You will notice that the post by Thursday was actually posted last year, 2011, January, so its just that the topic hasn't been active for a while
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New Chitose, then bus to Furano. After that, heading to Rusutsu.
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Would love to find some Aki-aji, but it might be hard to come by. Thanks for the recommendations Man
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I will have to check. Looking forward to arriving on Saturday, plenty of different beers to choose from. Which one first?
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I have been trying to find proper Japanese beer in Aus for a while, the Sapporo classic we get here is brewed under license in Canada, the Asahi is brewed in Tailand, are there any beers imported into Australia that actually come from Japan?
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Love the guitars Chriselle, how long does it take to make one?
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Box stickered!
Good to see the SJ sticker on the phone box!
Whoever put it up there, good job
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Don't botherr taking your skis. Just take your boots. It's too mucn trouble lugging it around.
take your own stuff. Renting is way too expensive now.
Rusutsu Dining Options - Restaurants?
in Snow talk, trip reports, Japan avalanche & backcountry
Posted
Are you getting breakfasts included in your accomodation Dyna? If you are, the western breakfast option doesn't open until 8am, but the buffet opens at 7 am. The buffet gets very busy by 7.30, it is best to get in before this time, or after 8 if you are sleeping in. The western breakfast option is a set menu with soup, eggs, bacon, sausage, salad, bread and jam, yogurt and fruit, served as 4 seperate courses, full silver service. It is quite funny to see the staff wearing suits and the concierge wearing a tux, when everyone eating in there is wearing snow pants, slippers or boot liners and t-shirts.
The buffet option has various western and Japanese breakfast dishes, and french fries and chicken nuggets