Our plan was to fit in a couple of days skiing before heading back to Tokyo and home, but the weather had other ideas. We woke to pouring rain (being late April it wasn't cold enough for snow) and had to spend our day chilling out indoors. At lunch time, we braved the rain and walked down to a local restaurant that made a pizza as good as any in Italy and had a bottle of lovely Chilean shiraz (and people protest against globalisation?!).
Late in the afternoon, the rain cleared off enough for us to go for a walk. We walked up to the base of the ski lifts to check out what we had been missing and then back along a nice path through the forest/cemetery towards the village. On the way down, we saw a bit of movement behind a boulder a bit downhill of us. We walked around the boulder to see what was there...
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| Holy Sh#t! It's a bear! |
We walked around the corner to see a bear not too dissimilar to the happy character above smiling at us from about 5m away. Summoning up all of our Australian courage we bravely ran back up the hill as fast as we could! Later research revealed that what we saw was a Japanese black bear. It's brown colour suggests that it was still a juvenile, but it was still big enough to send us running!
After all the excitement of the day we needed a good meal - and the ryokan we were staying at (Ryokan Kiriya - lovely family run place, would recommend to anyone!) put it on in spades. A huge spread of local delicacies including (amongst several other dishes) river fish, egg cooked in the the hot springs and horse sashimi! After quite a bit of hesitation from Em, she tucked into the pony to find that not only was it edible, but it was really tender, and the nicest cut of meat we have had in a long time!
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| Dinner. |
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