Day 6.
We'd booked a snow monkey tour today which included a sake brewery and temple tour. Rob was again our tour guide but he seemed a bit more relaxed on this one. Maybe because it was a more regular tour, maybe it was because the tour was in the morning and not the late afternoon, maybe because the bus ride wasn't so long as the last, but everyone was feeling a little more tolerant today.
We arrived at the Jigokodani Onsen entrance around 10am and walked the 1.6km track to where the monkeys were. When we arrived the first I saw of them was when a lone monkey just walked right by us on the trail. No warning. It just appeared. It was so sudden my photo of it wasn't that great. I kept thinking that if the whole onsen was like that I wouldn't be able to get a good shot. I was wrong though.
The onsen was a small hot spring out in the middle of a patch of snow and it was crawling with monkeys. They were climbing on the bridge rails, playing in the snow and searching for food, or just lazing in the water. I took a couple of shots of the ones in the snow and down below in the man made river bank. It was actually quite hard to get a shot of a monkey's face as most of the time they are walking away from you or looking up the bank rather than down it towards where the tourists can walk. The monkeys in the water were a lot better candidates for photos. I snapped off a number of shots of monkeys totally relaxed in the water. There were also small young monkeys clinging to their parents or wading in the shallow parts of the hot spring. I pulled out my Sony Action Cam and hit the record button before placing in the snow at the edge of the water. Before long, a baby monkey crawled over to it and began to grab at it. I knew I was going to get great footage but I was also a bit weary of the camera falling into the water. Not because it would get lost or hard to retrieve but just because of the temperature difference, the lens would fog up and it's very hard to recover from that while out in the field and not in a clean, dry environment, so I snatched up the camera before the baby could pull it into the water. Upon later inspection, the camera was in slow motion mode which was a boon as the framerate was a lot higher and caught a lot more movement detail.
http://youtu.be/1Ojds_kKnPk
It's quite interesting that the keepers have to regularly spread oats and cereals around into the snow to keep the monkeys up at the higher altitute spring, or risk them straying into the lower human baths where they can contaminate the water or bring disease.
One hilarious moment while we were waiting to regroup on the way out was two monkeys cleaning each other decided to have sex. Right there in front of us. Twice. Unlike me, Amelia had no qualms about firing off a rapid of shots of the 'monkey business'.
There wasn't much else to do there apart from look in the sparsely decked out
souvenir shop, but judging from my friends smiles as we left there
wasn't much else needed. A good time was had by all.
The next stop on the journey was the Masuichi sake brewery in Obuse where we had lunch, and were able to sample the local apple strudel. A sweet cold sake came with our food and after we were able to sample their entire range in the tasting room. Despite the lack of English spoken we were able to get a good idea of the history and creation process for each type of sake and also sample a strange sort of hot soup that is sometimes drunk along with the sake. We also had the privelidge if being able to sample the Hakkin (platinum) sake which is their most expensive sake, both in 10year aged and 1 year ages variants. The different in flavour was astounding. The 1 year old was quite clean and crist whereas the 10year seemed to have about 5 or 6 different nuances running around in the one sip. I was very temped to get a bottle given its taste and the cool metal bottle it comes in, but the ~AU$120 for 600ml was a bit to steep for me. Surprisingly, one of the cheaper 'square one' bottles which I eventually picked up was only $22 for the same size and most of us thought it was very good for the price. I thought the other varieries such as Kohzan and Hekiiken were a bit more of an aquired taste and might not work as well in a more general purpose sense.
There is also a gallery/museum with famous Japanese woodblock artwork by Hokusai (you might know his japanese wave picture) but I wasn't able to view it as we ran out of time.
A little tipsy, we got back on the bus and headed to the Zenkoji temple in Nagano City. Rob gave us some insight into the ingenius simplicity of the maintenance and construction of store houses in the area over the years and also a bit of history on the oldest spice dealers in the area, of which the shop is still there (although now updated to modern standards).
The tour of the temple is actually given by some local volunteer tour guides who give up their own time to take us through some of the points of interest around the temple and inside the temple itself. We also got to see the tail end of a wedding ceremony in one of the nearby sites that opens up into the temple grounds. The Zenkoji temple is apparently one of the oldest temples of it's kind in the area and is still getting people travelling there on pilgramiges.
The group split into two and my group's tour guide was Masahiro-san, a softly spoken older gentelman with good knowledge of the temple's landmarks, including the original area where horses were tied because they weren't allowed onto the inner grounds. He led us though to some other prayer sites including one for young hopeful students, and another for parent's who had lost babies during birth or at a very young age.
Once inside the temple, for a small fee visitors have the option to walk into a pitch black passage to try and find themselves spiritually. Some of the younger people in our group wanted to go in, and Masahiro-san accompanied them, so the rest of us tacked onto the other tour group led by a very softly spoken lady. While we chatted to her afterward, we found out that she had once planned to go to Australia and had changed a whole lot of money over to AU$ but then wasn't able to go, but she hadn't actually changed her money back afterwards. She still wants to go one day.
After the temple the bus took us back to Hakuba and dropped us off back at the Visitor Centre. There was an onsen nearby inside one of the hotels and some of us went in, while others stayed outside and chatted so some other visitors.
This was our last night in Hakuba so we all wound down and had a relaxing end to a huge day and also and end to the ski section of the trip.
Next up: Shibuya and Tokyo.
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