Snow Monkeys!

On Wednesday 21st December we took a shinkansen for an hour and a half northwest to Nagano. I had booked us into a hotel just a couple of minutes walk from the train station for the night so we dropped off our bags, then returned to the station. From here we caught a bus to Jigokudani. We were here to visit the snow monkeys which I have always wanted to see since reading about them in a travel supplement many years ago. These are Japanese macaques which are the northern-most living primates (aside from humans!). A troop of them have taken to visiting an onsen (hot spring) to keep warm during the colder months.    

Once the bus drops you off you need to walk for about 30 minutes on a very well-marked trail in order to reach the hot pool. There is a camera set up over the pool which captures a still shot every hour and puts it up here. There weren't many monkeys around when we arrived, but I made sure we were in camera shot at 1pm. I had given my parents a heads-up, so it was very cool that they got to see us 'live' from their computer in Hamilton!  

We were also the 2pm shot, below. At least a few monkeys had turned up by then.

The monkeys were great, we ended up spending about 3 hours there just watching them. Cue loads and loads (and loads!) of monkey pics... I think we ended up with over 500, so whittling it down to just a 'few' pics to put up here was tough-going. It was freezing cold, and with the steam coming off the hot water it wasn't the best environment for taking photos, but we did our best.

Monkeys look very odd when dripping wet!

Here are a few more pics...

And to finish, some pics that actually have us in them (as well as monkeys)!

So, that was another thing ticked off the bucket list. It was well worth the effort to get there. The next morning it was back to the train station ready for our trip to Takayama.