Nisicko

Seabass and I can’t live without skiing, so we tracked down a Japanese friend of mine, Dice, in Tokyo, and we together made a beeline for Hokkaido. We wasted no time. When we arrived in Tokyo, Dice met us at the station straight after his work. At 8 a.m. the next morning, we were on the flight to the northern island. By 1 p.m., we were on the slopes.


Dice calculated every step of the trip to the second. For him, seconds of vacation count. Dice, like so many other Japanese, is a working stiff — understandably so. He has a house, pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter to care for. However, the amount he works makes both Seabass and me numb. A typical day for Dice consists of leaving the house at 7 or 7:30 a.m. and then getting home about 10 or 11 p.m. His commute starts with a 10 minute walk to the station, then continues with an hour ride train into Tokyo, and finally ends with another 20 minute train toward his workplace. He toils a chain gang of hours selling bulk widgets, specifically piping valves, and then reverses the commute home. It sapped me to see the tired look on his face after such a long workday.

Without trying to sound self-centered or give myself credit where obviously none is due, I felt good knowing our ski trip would off Dice a break, however brief, from his work life. We had just two and a half days, from 1 p.m. on Friday to 3:45 p.m. on Sunday, to ski before Dice had to return to the grind. By that Sunday afternoon, we had to be on a bus to Sapporo and on a flight home early the next morning.

Dice uses his precious free time wisely, even better than I previously understood. Moreover, his selection of ski venue, Niseko, was perfect. Seabass and I had never heard of the ski town. Now that we know the resort, we prefer to call it Nisicko.



Niseko is a white hole. It sucks all snowstorms in Northeastern Asia to its mountainside. While the rest of Japan wallowed in bare slopes with no sign of any December snow, Niseko had five feet. Locals consider five feet by mid-December a bad start.

Seabass and I looked at the weather forecast for the region, but the weather-folk predicted little new snow. We shrugged off this lame news and felt we were lucky there was any snow at all because of the spare conditions throughout the rest of Japan.

When we got on the hill that Friday afternoon, a crazy thing happened. We found powder. There was sun, blue sky, a beautiful view of a volcano and…powder. It was only ankle to boot deep, and we had to be somewhat adventurous to find it, but sure enough there was powder.

There is a funny thing about skiing in Japan. Seabass and I had heard rumors, but never quite believed it was true until we saw it ourselves. The Japanese don’t like, or at the very least, don’t think to ski in the trees. They stick to the open runs. Yet, as any true powder-whore knows, most often the trees provide the deepest stashes. This meant we could enter a stash in the trees, then return to the same place and find only our own tracks.

And there was something even more special about these tree stashes: they were within bamboo forests. Skiing through the wiry bamboo was mystical, like we were weightless pandas bouncing down fluffy pillows of powdered sugar.

Seabass and I bowed down to Dice and thanked him profusely for his wise choice: Nisicko. We skied into the night, took a hot spring bath, ate Ramen, drank a few beers and crashed.

By the next morning, a new crazy thing had happened, about five inches of it. We threw on our gear; ate a hearty Japanese breakfast that consisted of smoked salmon, miso soup, rice, tofu and vegetables; and then hurried up the mountain for more fresh tracks. All our old tracks had filled in.

We skied hard and by chance ran into a buddy of a buddy of ours who spends his winters in Niseko. Sam serves as a Niseko mountain guide during the Japan winter and makes ski movies in his native New Zealand during the winter months down there (you can link to his videos at the end of this blog). With a grin on his face and on the fattest skis you can buy, Sam opened our eyes to even deeper stashes. Seabass and I started to become giddy. We ignored the fact that this would all end abruptly at 3:45 on Sunday.

We skied into the night and a funny thing happened again. It snowed. It snowed hard. We ate a hearty bowl of udon noodles, drank beers and celebrated. While we did this, it kept snowing.

The next day, we dragged our hung-asses-over to the mountain and reenergized when we saw what awaited us: six to eight inches of fresh snow. And it was still snowing. We skied hard and found the deepest tracks yet, and they continued to deepen throughout the day. Seabass and I asked ourselves how the weathermen could have missed this storm. This wasn’t predicted. Eventually, it snowed so hard that the tracks from the previous run would fill.

At one point, I was skiing out of a run and looked over my shoulder to locate Seabass and Dice. I spotted them but I lost track of my own movement. I had fallen in love with the sight of them floating down the hill through the powder. They were having so much fun. I kept watching. Then everything stopped. I felt pain — lots of pain. Everywhere was pain.

Seabass and Dice found me moaning loudly below a large tree. I still hadn’t fully come to my senses. They helped me take my skis off.

“You lucky sonofabitch,” said Seabass, nervously laughing and shaking his head.


I took the impact with the core of my body. It could have been much worse.

I learned a hard lesson that I already knew, but apparently needed to relearn: keep your vision ahead. After a few minutes I could get up, after a few more I could walk and after that I said the hell with it a decided to ignore the hurt and keep skiing. I would find myself hobbled for several days afterwards, but the snow was forgiving, much more than walking on pavement.

By chance, we bumped into Sam again, along with his Australian friend Jules. They showed us more deep powder lines through the trees, and we surprised Sam by showing him some of our own favorites.

We finished the day exhausted, drank a goodbye beer with Sam, and caught the bus for Sapporo, just as Dice planned, at 4:00 p.m. The clockwork was agonizingly perfect.

Qingdao deep

On a weekend hike, Brusie and I stumbled upon something neither of us had expected. We found a pair of man-made caves cutting deep into a small mountain range, Fu Shan, located behind Qingdao University.

Inspired, we rushed to an insane Fred Meyer-like store, clamored past the dried fish-clam-squid section and bought some headlamps. (This requires multiple store clerks, and several receipts stamped individually by other store clerks, which then must be handed to the original store clerks that give you another couple of receipts and, maybe, your purchase…the remnants of old school Communism).

Locals had told us the tunnels see little foot traffic nowadays, have various entrances, and serve as useful hideouts for current Chinese fugitives. Yes, fugitives. Not exactly what you want to run into when you are in a pitch black tube 500 feet below the surface.



Brusie and I assumed the Chinese were the ones who built the tunnels, perhaps during loony 1950s under Mao Zedong. However, this turns out not to be the case at all. The Chinese weren’t the ones who built the tunnels (well, the Chinese probably did most the grunt labor), but in fact it was the Germans.

An explanation as to why the Germans built the tunnels requires a somewhat detailed history lesson about Qingdao. Bear with me.

In 1897, Kaiser Wilhelm II (the same bastard that helped brew up World War I) wanted a military base in the Asian-Pacific. The Germans saw the Qingdao harbor as prime real estate. They took it from the Chinese without a shot fired, added to the Chinese military port already there, and built a network of fortresses and tunnels to protect any invasions from the land. Still today, German pillboxes, tunnels and forts sprawl throughout the hillsides and mountains of Qingdao.

The Germans were extremely paranoid another colonialist power would get jealous and take the city judging from how extensive the tunnels and fortresses are. Ironically, they weren’t concerned about the Chinese retaking Qingdao. The Chinese buckled after the invasion and offered the Germans a 99 year lease of the city.

It turns out the Germans were right to be paranoid. In the summer of 1914, soon after the start of World War I, the Japanese decided they wanted Qingdao. They joined with British colonial Indian forces and took the city after a nasty little battle. In fact, the first air battle in Asia was fought over Qingdao.

During their occupation, the Germans left a few marks on the city. The most important of which is good beer. Next is several buildings fit for Hansel and Gretel. And the last is the strange network of military outposts that Seabass and I so eagerly wanted to explore.


The first tunnel entrance was located on the north face of Fu Shan’s east peak. Chinese graffiti sprawled along the entrance walls. Inside, arched ceilings, seven-foot high black rock walls, and a five-foot wide path undulated though the darkness. Rusted rebar hooks poked from the walls every 20 yards or so and drainage pits and square-cemented wells reminded us to step cautiously.

We heard something up ahead.

“Bruiser, you hear that?” I said.

“Yeah, sounds like voices.”

Gulp.

Dim light and soft Chinese voices echoed around the upcoming corner.

Gulp.

“Ni hao.” Brusie said. No response.


With our eyes accustomed to our dim headlamps, the fugitives’ high powered flashlights in our eyes blinded us. The tension was thick as the Xi’an air. We were ready to fight for our lives.

Once they were upon us we could focus on a middle-aged man holding his five-year old son’s hand.

“Ni hao.” they said.

We laughed and sighed in relief. We arrived at a tunnel split, where, approximately 40 yards ahead, thin blades of sunlight cut the darkness. The light spilled through two laptop screen-sized windows, complete with blast covers that could be pulled up in an emergency. One window looked out to the south east and one directly to the south, both towards the Yellow Sea.

We retreated from the dead end of the first cave in search of the bigger cave which was rumored to have several entrances and numerous rooms.

If you were trying to crawl under your desk with cement rubble and exposed, bent rebar protruding everywhere, that would be what it was like to get into this tunnel. It looked as if at one time it was cemented off, then someone tossed a grenade and now its open for business.

After the three-foot high entrance, the tunnel opened up and was similar to the first tunnel we infiltrated. Cautiously winding our way up and down the black corridors, my mind wandered. We, still unaware that the Germans built the thing forty years before the first nuclear test, were assuming the Chinese had built it in case the Cold War went hot. (In fact, you can listen to our historical ignorance in the video.)

The uneasiness of my nuclear paranoia kept me on edge while we explored the maze of tunnels and their basketball court-sized rooms, unmovable cement doors, and concealed entrances. Little did we know that these caves saw real warfare. Germans and Japanese soldiers died in these mountains.


With a premature sigh of relief we decided to exit on the north face of the mountain. We realized in order to get to the other side of the mountain and to get home, we had to clamor our way up 60 meter shear rock face and hope it was easier to get down on the other side.

We crested the peak in the late afternoon. The scramble down was easier than anticipated and our stomachs were growling more than we anticipated. We stopped by a local restaurant, guzzled 30 cent beers, feasted on $2 entrees, and began to plan our next adventure.