Mt. Naeba rob way and Ski experience in Japan

It was nice experience visiting Naeba the mountain town of Niigata prefecture in Japan. I traveled to Naeba with my friends in a car, after about two and half hours journey we landed in a place with cluster of mountains covered with silver blanket. White white everywhere, the fingers felt freezing cold what an amazing landscape we spotted in the morning. (Formula: Water + cold weather = Snowflakes.)

Naeba is famous ski spot to host world cup tournaments for skiing, hence it attracts more people. This town is filled with rental shops of Skii equipment. I had a chat with the local rental shop owner (Looked in the age of 80s), he stated almost 6 months in a year Naeba has snow. Later I also came to know he is a champion in the sport long time back. He also visited Himalayas for training Indians on snow surfing sports. One can rent (daily) the ski equipment from 1000 yens to 3000 yens. As I had no experience in snow sports, I had to spend nearly 2 hours to learn how to stand, start and stop the ski. Believe me I had felt carrying 10kg on my foot while wearing the ski equipments. The Mt. Naeba skiers aged from 3 years old to any upper age.

Mt. Naeba has good facilities for accommodation, food and health. Often I could see the snow bikes of patrol people driving around. The food court near Naeba has Italian and Japanese food varieties. In fact inside the same food court there is an onsen (Japanese hot spring bath) for after ski experience. I had real fun having Japanese curry rice food, it was good.

The Mountain was very steep and you can literally see the skiers every part of the mountain skating down towards. There are many cableway facilities that take the skiers to the top of several ski spots and they start skiing down from those areas. Since I had no experience I was not really confident on skiing from such a steep spots but I never missed to go on top of the Mt. Naeba, about 1789m summit I had traveled on the cable way, there was no words to express the feeling of my cable car experience. In simple words Fear, Thrill, Sad, Surprise and Glad are the various expressions I had during the cableway travel. While climbing upwards I had encountered many sceneries and landscapes of Niigata prefecture.

I took the cable way bit late in the evening; hence I had only 3 mins to spend time on the summit. You know what I would have done with that short time span, clicked few photographs.