Sapporo Yukimatsuri

Ever since I was a little kid I have known about and wanted to visit the Sapporo Yukimatsuri. Ya-Chan called me up a few months ago to tell me that he had come by a handful of bargain plane tickets to Hokkaido during the time of this famous winter festival and I jumped at the chance. We left Okayama early in the morning of the 8th of February and travelled by bus with his friend Yuuji to Kansai airport. The plane tickets were like hot potatoes, being passed from one person to the next until I left them on the table at the restaurant where we had lunch and we were chased down and alerted by our waitress. After acknowledging that, had this been any other country, those tickets would have sent three waitresses on holiday instead, Ya-Chan decided it was best he didn't delegate responsibility for such important items. Somehow I ended up with them again, though, and I nearly left them on the plane.

I have seen snow before, but nothing like in Hokkaido. The landscape was white, punctuated only by trees and buildings, which were mostly white. Some of the roads were well enough travelled or cleared to have visible tarmac, the others were only recognizable by the fact that they were long and flat and had things like roadsigns near them. I wondered how people could tell which mound of snow was their car and which was a shrub or dog kennel when they woke up in the morning and dug their way out of the front door. I figured that one out when I saw mounds of snow with windscreen wipers sticking out of them. On the train from the airport to Sapporo we rolled through fields of pristine sparkling white and I realised why people put the words 'winter' and 'wonderland' together.

We set about searching for the Hotel Doreal, our home for the next few days, when we reached Sapporo. Treading gingerly down icy sidewalks past mounds of snow with windscreen wipers was interesting for a time, until we realised we actually had no idea where we were going, so we hailed a taxi. We found our hotel, a real bargain for what we paid, then set out to buy skipants for snowboarding, which we'd planned to do as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the evening yielded neither skipants nor skislopes. Instead, we took our cameras to Odori, the main festival area and snapped away like real Japanese tourists at the various interesting snow sculptures.

The next day we were up bright and early to find our pants (The reason for this pants mission was that it is actually cheaper to buy ski gear than to hire it, and we were sorted for jackets so hiring would have been a total waste of money) I was so pleased with the price of the pants I bought that i decided to buy a classy looking pair of jeans too, only to find out later why they have changing rooms in clothes shops. Besides the jeans, everything else fitted, so we headed to the slopes. The place was called Bankei *waits for South African readers to stop sniggering* and it was on the side of a small mountain barely outside of the city. We got into our gear and headed up the ski lift to the beginning of the beginners slope. I thought someone had made a mistake. This slope looked something more akin to what I saw in the iMax Extreme Snowboarding video. How could beginners possibly hope to begin on a slope like this? I slid down on my backside and as it started to level out I got braver and tried standing up. The next time down it didn't seem as steep and I managed to start off standing up. The third time I was picking up speed and wiping out into tumbling powderbursts, wondering why I had been so chicken the first time. Then I found out that snow can actually be quite hard if the back of your head travels into it at a high enough speed. My whole brain was ringing and I was seeing green and orange stars. It was time for a break. I hobbled into the building and bought myself some chocolate and a can of tea, and even though I still felt like I'd been sat on by a yeti, I got on the lift and headed to the top again.
We boarded into the night, with floodlights illuminating the slope. Our next stop was an onsen (Japanese bath house) which provided a welcome, if temporary, relief from the pain.

The following morning I felt like the yeti had got off me, kicked me down the stairs and then run me over in his truck. Ya-Chan and Yuuji were keen to head to another slope. I wanted to die, but I didnt want to be a killjoy, so I agreed to go with them, even if it meant just hanging out and trying to breathe normally while they snowboarded. We stopped at Starbluech's under the false assumption that a good shot of caffeine would ease the pain. Yuuji and Ya-Chan were feeling it too, though not to the extremes that I was enduring. The coffee was terrible, and to add insult to injury, there was bacon in my croissant. In Japan, it is necessary to but bacon in almost everything, unless its seafood, in which case its necessary to add chicken. I managed to eat a meat-free corner of the croissant and gave the rest to Ya-Chan to finish off. I tried meditating, stretching, thinking positive thoughts, the works, but the pain would not go away. The resort was about an hour out of Sapporo, called Teine Highlands (or to be more specific, since it was spelled in Katakana, Teine Haairanddo.) It was majestic, commanding sweeping views of snowy Hokkaido and the sea and covering the best part of a fairly large mountain. It had slopes for all inclinations and levels of sanity. The equipment rental was even pretty cheap (I use this term very loosely in Japan). We had tako (pasty fried dumplings with octopus tentacles inside) for lunch, and suddenly and inexplicably, I felt great, ready to send myself hurtling down the nearest slope, which we did, repeatedly. I took it gently to start with to avoid any more trauma, but soon the desire for speed and learning new manoevers had me tumbling around like a joyously masochistic ragdoll. The snow was much softer and more forgiving here, but there were more people, and a collision with another beginner on the natural course had me worried for a bit. The natural course started at the very top of the mountain and meandered down through the forest. This guy didnt know how to stop and he crashed into me with the sharp edge of his board hitting my wrists. It was sore, but the cold was forgivingly numbing, so I didn't think much of it until my next wipe-out, when I looked behind me to see a streak of blood through the snow to where I was lying. Thankfully, the wound froze shut and I could continue with ironing out the glitches in my newly found style. My last few runs were fantastic; I was surfing a mountain!

On Sunday it was unanimously agreed that further snowboarding was impossible. We were doing things like lifting our legs with our hands so we could put our shoes on. It was time to visit the zoo. Asahiyama Dobutsuen is Japan's most famous zoo, about an hour and a half out of Sapporo. Apparently its famous because the enclosures are like the animal's natural environment, but I think the person who came up with that idea has never left their house, opened a book or turned on the TV. Zoos are always sad places, even if people think fiberglass rocks constitute an approximation of a natural habitat. That said, it was fascinating to get up close to animals I would never have seen otherwise, like polar bears, a tiger, a snow owl, arctic foxes and even a jaguar. I saw a lion too. He was the darkest maned, best fed, unhappiest lion I have ever seen. I have come across evidence of leopards in the wild, even hearing one purring in the bushes a few feet away once, but I'd never laid eyes on one until this day. I made eye contact with one and it told me "If those bars weren't there I'd kill you and eat you without hesitation". They are beautifully deadly creatures.

Back in Sapporo, we climbed the TV tower to the obsevation deck to look down on the festival's proceedings. The people who opted to climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator were given a cup of warm milk as a reward, and we sat around with Kana, an interesting girl Ya-Chan had met on the train, drinking our milk and discussing Japan's future. Kana left and we made our way to the ice bars, built entirely of, yes, ice. The roofs were the only non frozen parts of the structures. Each one sold only a handful of specialty drinks and one led straight into another. There was even ice karaoke. By the time we reached the end of our freezing pub crawl we were in high spirits and ready to party. We ended up at a club called 'A Life' and became the guests of honour at a crazy Japanese birthday party. We headed downstairs just as the featured DJ hit the decks, playing average, but danceable progressive trance. Ya-Chan made friends with the bartender, who proceeded to get him very drunk. The evening descended into a weird blur involving a busking ninja, a medical emergency trying to proceed through a language barrier, Ya-Chan becoming a snowman while running around in a blizzard with no jacket on and a dreadlocked westerner flailing his arms around in a wild attempt at proving something. It didn't stop. People passed out and woke up again and I eventually found myself in my hotel room furiously scribbling revelations onto little pieces of paper and stuffing them into my camera case, wide awake, unwilling and unable to go to sleep. A taxi came to take us away and soon we were on a plane, leaving a raucous, painful, exciting, bewildering, fascinating experience behind us. Whatever insanity had gripped us on that last night was safely stashed in the snow on the other frosty side of Japan and we are safe to proceed with our lives, haunted only by what little we can clearly remember.