Hakuba Japan

Another adventure in the rains.... this time near Nagano, Japan, home of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Smooth travels to Narita (Tokyo), and then a long 6 hour van ride through Tokyo and up into Northwest country. We are staying in the small village of Hakuba, which is about an hour west of Nagano.

On Saturday I flew over the Olympic ski jumping venue which was constructed for the Nagano Olympics. It's a beautiful site which looks good for racing if the weather decides to cooperate. About 95 pilots in attendance from 18 countries.

Sue and I are staying just above the village and are just a short 10 minute walk from the gondola which takes us up the mountain. The paraglider launch is just a large ski slope area and is quite nice and wide open. Sue and I both had nice flights on Saturday, which was the official warm up day. Sue had her brand new Gin Sprint which she really likes. When I launched she had already climbed up above the launch altitude but was having some issues with her harness so decided to head out to the landing field. The sun had just come out and conditions were rather active at 1pm when I took off. I was quickly reminded of the glider I was flying and had my hands full for a few minutes but then fell into the groove. Looks like I'm going to need to load up on some ballast to make this glider behave.

Flew for over 3 hours and went down the range and then across the valley towards Nagano, and then back across the valley again to Hakuba. The reach of this glider is just amazing. I'm easily cruising at 65kph accelerated when the air is not too rough. Climbed out again to almost 3000 meters and took some pictures and then just boated around until I was tired of flying and came in to land. The lz for the site is small and kind of squirly with switchy winds.... and surrounded by rice paddies. I found some major sinking air as I was making my last turn to land and almost ended up in a rice paddy. I'm still not used to how this glider turns after so much time on the Boomerangs which love to come around so easily. Sue was there of course taking pictures of me with my lines a little tangled up at the edge of the lz....

The first two days of the comp were seriously rained out with one to two inches each day. The rivers are very swollen with rain and snow melt. Today the organization took the non-Japanese pilots on a sight seeing trip to a famous temple in Nagano. Nagano is on the other side of a range of mountains and the weather was cloudy but dry so that was nice. We did a good job at playing tourist and really enjoyed the temple and gardens.

We did some shopping at a mega electronics store and then stopped for sushi at a sushi restaurant unlike anything I've ever seen. You sit down at a table, and there are conveyor belts running by the end of the table with all kinds of sushi pairs on them. When you see something that looks good you just grab the plate and chow down. If you want something that's not on the moving conveyor, you can just use a touch screen menu mounted also at the end of the table to order up whatever you want. A couple of minutes later, this little mini Bullet train pulling plates with your order behind comes by and stops at the end of your table on a different track. As soon as you lift off your plates, it heads back down the track to the kitchen. Crazy but quite efficient and very inexpensive. When we were all done we pushed the check out button on the touch screen and someone came and just counted up the number of plates we had collected. They were only 90 yen each (about a dollar) which is a really nice treat if you're a sushi lover like we are...

Tuesday, day 3 is calling for some sun but probably gonna be too windy to fly. Next day is calling for rain again but right now the end of the week looks like we might be lucky.... Sue and I are enjoying our time together and I'm really glad she decided to join me. It makes passing the time much more enjoyable....