Day 3 - Teine Ski Resort and Otaru Light Festival 03 Feb 2012

Made our way from Sapporo JR Station to Teine JR Station. It was a short 20-30 mins train ride. Reached Teine JR Station at about 8:45am. There was already a long queue of people waiting at the bus station for bus 70 to go to the Teine Ski Resort. Luckily managed to get a seat nonetheless. It started to snow while waiting for the bus and this snow continued till we reached the bus station at Olympia House.








Took the Olympia Shuttle bus from the bus stop to the Olympia House, a 30 second bus ride just up a short slope. This is where the ski rental, ski lesson registration and lockers are. The counter staff can't really speak English so it is most helpful to get a printout of the lesson details (from their website) to show them so that they know exactly what you need. After that it is easy, they will "ask" you to fill out a registration form, make the payment and try out the ski boot and its pretty much done. They will advise you to take the " yellow trainee ID arm band" to tie around the arm and head to the ski area. Before that, of course we will first need to change into the ski boot and keep our belongings in the locker (go up to the second floor).




Here's the locker (2nd floor) where you can keep your personal belongings and shoes after changing into the ski boot. It cost 300 or 400 yen (remember exact) for one of those locker beside the vending machine



The person in red is the ski instructor, Mr Hori, who is really a good instructor who can speak English pretty well. We were lucky to be assigned to Mr Hori and we managed to learn to ski reasonably well within the morning 2 hours session.














This is the cafe building at the Olympia base area where we took our lunch of simple curry rice with a cup of hot green tea.




Continue with the afternoon 2 hours lesson at 1pm. By now we were ready to take the gondola up  the mountain to ski down the longer beginner slope. This beginner slope is really fun and exciting, and we did this slope quite a number of times. In final conclusion of this ski lesson at Teine, I think it is extremely well value for money at 7800 yen all included (except transport and lunch of course).


















There's only another bus at 5:42pm leaving the ski resort for Teine JR Station. Reached the train station by about 5:50pm which was already pitch dark.




Took the 5:55pm train to Otaru for the Light Festival.























Overall, I think the Otaru Light Festival is an interesting attraction worth a visit as part of the Otaru trip if you happened to be there at the right time of the winter season, but not necessary to plan your trip around this period intentionally, as this period in early February is usually when most snow festival events are held and the hotel rate is generally higher than usual (I think still within acceptable price range considering that it is somewhere we will not get to visit that often).