Seeing Snow Monkeys in Nagano

During the winter vacation me and Emma went to Nagano. Nagano is about 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, quite a bit above sea level. It’s the place where the winter olympics was held a while back, and you could see that when you got there. In a bunch of places there were old olympics symbols and buildings and stuff that seemed to have faded a bit with time.

We stayed at a pretty nice hotel, the Japan Airlines hotel in the centre of town. We got a big room with a great view on the 12th floor with fridge, king size bed, a table with a couple of chairs and a big bathroom for like €90 per night or something like that.

The main reason we wanted to go to Nagano was because of their famous snow monkeys. They are completely wild monkeys that hang out in the forests in the mountains. There is one place in particular that has a lot of tourism where they’ve made an artificial hot-spring pool for the monkeys and they seem to really love spending most of their days in that pool during winter. The monkeys are wild but they’re clearly accustomed to human beings, they weren’t afraid and they weren’t threatening. They’re used to us but still, no one is feeding them or taking care of them or somehow making sure they won’t attack visitors, so in that sense they really are wild. It was kind of freaky to walk around amongst them and getting really close. A little scary but mostly very strange, I’ve never seen monkeys up close like that and it feels like you’re not supposed to be able to do that.

There was a huge temple in the middle of Nagano too that we went to visit on the first day. I like temples and I liked this one especially because it wasn’t just some old relic, it was an actual active temple with monks walking around inside. There was a main temple building that was really impressive but then there were a bunch of temple buildings spread out around it that made the whole thing feel very grand.

All in all the trip was very entertaining. The walk up the mountains in the forest to see the monkeys was really fantastic with awesome views and wonderful nature. It was especially interesting to sit on a train for a little while and go from 10°C in Tokyo to -2°C in Nagano. There are a lot of places that are just a very short trip away from Tokyo to get to a completely different environment, that’s one of the things I love most about Japan.

When I was in Nagano and taking a bus from the station near the hotel to get up the mountains to the forest I wanted to write everything about the trip, which bus to take and where to walk and which hotels seemed to be in good locations (the JAL hotel was in a really awesome location btw) and all that jazz. Now a week or so later I don’t remember everything and I’m not entirely convinced that it would be all that interesting. Instead, I’ll just leave you with a bunch of pictures. This is just about a fourth of all the pictures from Nagano though so if you want to see the rest, head over to flickr by clicking this link.

View from hotel

Visiting Nagano Temple

Visiting Nagano Temple

Visiting Nagano Temple

Visiting Nagano Temple

Visiting Nagano Temple

On our way to the snow monkeys

On our way to the snow monkeys

On our way to the snow monkeys

Funny sign

On our way to the snow monkeys

Coke vending machines in the middle of the mountains

Beautiful scenery

Wonderful scenery

Snow monkey

Snow monkey walking past Emma

Baby snow monkeys playing

The monkey pool

People are really close to the monkeys

Wet snow monkey

Monkey relaxing

Japanese photographer getting _really_ close

Ey, whats up?

So cute snow monkey baby

It's soooo good to be a monkey

Baby and adult

Finishing off with one of the best Ramens ever