I feel like whenever we go somewhere new to ski, I find my new favorite place to ski and Tomamu has not disappointed me!
Taking advantage of a three-day weekend, we planned a trip with two of our friends, Rob & Midori, to finally visit Tomamu, a highly recommended resort. Just like Rusutsu, Tomamu was built around the idea of a luxury resort. In fact, after we came back, Midori spoke to her sister about their respective weekends and since Rusutsu and Tomamu both have Tower hotels, they both thought that they had spent the weekend in the same place!
Luckily, we were able to find an awesome pension to stay at with a really great package deal that included our room, breakfast and dinner, a ride to and from the train station, resort and pension AND our choice of full day lift ticket or a ticket to the spa for each day we stayed. AMAZING. Pension Ingu is a gorgeous 22 year old building with beautiful dark wood floors and two huge tree trunks serving as posts in the dining room and entrance. We booked a Japanese family style room, which was very comfortable for the four of us. And to top it all off, our pension hosts were so friendly and kind!
Pension Ingu's food was excellent. It was such a treat to come back to such a well presented and tasty 4 course meal. The specialty of the house was deer meat though I'm not really sure why. It seemed like a random choice but the host did mention something about some number of deer getting runover by trains in Hokkaido a year. Were we eating train-kill? Haha. The highlight of our meals was anything covered in blueberry sauce. Our desserts came slathered in it as well as our yogurt in the mornings. We should have asked what brand of blueberry sauce they used!
So what about the skiing?! Well, Tomamu was kind of a small mountain but it had plenty of wonderful, wonderful powder snow! We even had light flurries on both days. We basically skied everything on the first day and spent most of our time at the top skiing the advanced and expert courses. Yes, that's right! I was hitting those expert courses hard! We even did a little off-piste.
There's one section of Tomamu that's called Powder Heaven that can only be reached by taking the highest lift up and then going on a 300m hike. To go to this area and any of the off piste areas you must register at the resort desk and wear a yellow bulls-eye vest and helmet. Unfortunately we didn't have any time to do this since on the first day we were just exploring the mountain and on the second day we had kind of poor visibility and were very tired from the previous day. We were also told that Powder Heaven wasn't really worth the trouble of hiking. I would love to go back to Tomamu for some all-day off piste adventures though.
Besides skiing, we also did some sledding at the pension. Because we found a pair of sleds in the drying shed we put our skis in we just HAD to take them out for a ride. Of course, there was plenty of snow all around the pension but no hills really. So we had to kind of build our own sledding hill. The pension host helped us out by using his little snow plow and even let me help him drive! In the end we had a nice sledding session and the pension host told us we were like little kids. Haha.
The day that we left I had trouble finding one of my casual gloves and had decided that I would just have to buy a new pair but a few minutes after leaving us at the station, we saw our kind pension host parking his van again. We thought he probably had more customers to pick up but then he ran out of his van waving my missing glove! There was a moment of confusion when we couldn't decide how we would get to each other (we were on the other side of the tracks and would have to run the length of the platform and up and down lots of stairs AND our train was coming very soon). And then suddenly the pension host and Rob had gone down on to the tracks and were making the switch right there. I really felt like he went above and beyond his duty and I really want to go to Pension Ingu and Tomamu again soon.
Enjoy the album!
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