Live And Let Die Chimes

The place that I am staying at currently is called Pension Furannui. I'm not entirely sure when it was built, but I'm guessing the early 80's or sometime around then. From the outside it almost has a German Black Forest village house thing going for it. Inside it's got basins in corridors, toilets randomly around the place, a pretty good communal hot bath room and a very annoying P A system that constantly pumps out this music that is played on a xylphone or somethig. It goes 24 hours a day. It's pretty annoying. Every now and again a tune will come on that you will recognise. It often takes a while to guess what it is, as it's been horribly bastardised. Tony thought that he heard Stairway To Heaven this morning. We definately heard Mariah Carey's Hero. There's also been the theme to Under The Sea and the James Bond theme. It's funny for the first little bit, then it just gets annoying.

The Furannui is an interesting place really. There's a bear skin rug near the entrance and some mounted deer heads. There is also this wax monstrosity that started out as simple tea light in a wine bottle. Apparently the owner has added to this humble beginning every day for the last 15 years. It is now 5 feet high and he needs a ladder to get up to light it. It's pretty far out.

The owner of the Furannui also collects model motorcycles and matchbox cars. He's an interesting guy. The breakfast they do here isn't the greatest, but it's not the worst either. I mean, I leave every morning full, so I can't really complain. I do have a fairly high threshold when it comes to shit food though.

There's a bus you can get to take you up to the hill from here. Even though the walk is only a couple of hundred metres. The bus is totally pimping though. Each seat is sort of a captain's seat with lurid purple and pink designs splashed over them. The bus is only half the normal length, but the rest of the dimensions are the same. The back seat is a bench seat, and there are bench seats extending out of the back row along the walls. It would be an awesome bus to do a longer trip on. Plenty of room. Unfortunately I think that it only does a 500m round trip each day during the ski season.

I can't really remember where I got up to last night, but I think that I'm just about up to date. Yesterday was a fantastic day of riding. Today was just as good.

Yesterday Tony and I had seen a few parts of the mountain that we wanted to hit today, so we did. The first one was a run that was out of bounds but was directly below one of the chairlifts. It was an incredible run, waist deep powder, fresh tracks, no-one around except the people above us on the chair lift. It was supposed to be awesome. Unfortunately it was a little bit scary. The snow was a little bit too deep. The terrain was a little bit too steep and sketchy. The run out at the bottom of the chair lift involved going over a bridge two logs wide that was covered in snow. Just before the bridge it was quite steep and it flattened out very quickly. It was a bit hairy, and I went slow. Unfortunately Tony didn't go so slowly and fell off the side. It was a 7m drop down. Thankfully he landed in some deep powder and didn't hurt himself. It did take a little while to hike out though. I couldn't believe it. We were very lucky.

After that we really should have stayed on piste. But we didn't. We spent the majority of the day ducking under ropes and getting into waist deep powder. It was amazing. It snowed all day here, and there was no wind. It was unbelievable. I rode for almost 7 hours today and could have kept on going. I was in heaven.

I did stop for lunch though. At the top near the cable car station there is a little hut. It's ordering system is a little bit different to your conventional restaurant/cafe/diner type place. Here you order your food from the vending machine which discharges a ticket which you give to the kitchen. There are vending machines absolutely everywhere here. It's incredible. Down the road from the Furannui there are 5 machines lined up along the street in the middle of nowhere. It's bizarre. But handy.

So yeah, today was another epic day of Japow. This is supposedly a bad year, and it's probably the best snow I've ever seen. It's incredible and it just doesn't stop falling. It has snowed every day since I have arrived. Amazing.

Anyways, there are a few more videos and things linked up from Tony's MySpace page.

We're off to Kamui for the day tomorrow. Apparently it's even more deserted than Furano with plenty of snow, so I can't wait.