Day 4.
I don't know where Day 3 went but I think it involved most of the same as day 2.
We had the opportunity to book the Fire Festival in the local village of Nozawa later today, so we only had a half day of skiiing. We decided to take it easy with skiing so Jules, Amelia and I headed to Happo-One on foot later in the morning and take the green runs while the others had already gone to the harder runs straight after breakfast earlier that day.
I got to take some footage with the Sony Action cam I had packed and Jules and I also took one of the easy cat trails to get used to the powedery surface that had accumulated.
We all met back at Hakuba House around 1pm and headed to lunch at Hakuba70, a small lodge that also has a dining area.
The food was great and there was a very relaxing atmosphere, only broken when May kicked the heater and we all thought we might get blown up in a gas fire. Luckily the nice lady who was serving us came out and fixed it for us.
After lunch we headed to the Visitor Centre where the tour bus was picking us up.
Our tour guide, Rob, is a goat herder originally from Australia, and had been living in Japan for 15 years, 6 of which were in Hakuba. We got the feeling that Rob wasn't very comfortable in his Tour Guide role and kept treating us like children. I wasn't too bothered but it rubbed some of us the wrong way.
It was about this time when the bus rolled out of Wadano that I realised something was terribly wrong with my stomach. I had some severe pains shooting through the lower portions of me and I had a great need to 'relieve some pressure'.
Thankfully we stopped off after about an hour for a toilet break and I was able to make the rest of the journey. I was still in quite a bit of discomfort for most of the tour so a lot of it went by unnoticed but dinner was a fantastic meal with lots of soups and veggies which seemed to knock my stomach back into order.
The fire festival itself began after dinner and the streets were a clamour of activity. People running about and setting up sake stands on the side of the street. We made our way to the main site for the fire in the frigid wind and waited.
The fire festival is a 150 year old tradition and sees all the men in the village of 'evil/unlucky' age taking part in the ceremony. The older 42 year old men would get blind drunk and sit at the top of a 3 story pyre that had been built by all the men over the past few weeks. They would throw sticks down to the rest of the villagers who would then light the sticks and try and use those to set fire to the pyre.
The source of the flame is a separate fire started by the 25 year old men who first have to run through town taking sake shots from all the locals, then heading up the pyre getting sake shots from the men there and as they request the flame. Once the source fire is lit, these men then have to defend the base of the pyre (and hence the older men atop) from the rest of the town trying to burn them. At this point they have all had about 3 litres of sake each, running about 15-17% alcohol content.
We watched from the freezing cold hill overlooking the pyre as the young village men successfully protected the singing drunks atop the pyre. Once all the old village men had gotten down from the pyre, they proceeded to light the pyre but our bus was leving so we never got to see it burn to it's fullest. When we got back, the bus didn't drop us back near out lodge so we had to walk. It was pretty cold and miserable, but at least we had a lot of fun.
Day 5 and 6 will be combined in the next update as I was recovering from Day 4 and hence not doing much.
No comments:
Post a Comment