*Wide angle view. I put a 17mm lens on the ground right in front of the monkey in one of the pathways through the snow and it skipped over the top of it.*

Traversing Tokyo’s rail network in order to get to the Snow Monkeys saves a lot of time compared to a long bus journey, once you have survived the complexity of buying tickets, humping and lumping all your kit up and down various escalators and then working out which queue to stand in at the platform – they are all clearly marked so there is not scrum getting on and off trains and some of the Tokyo metro even has automatic gates on the platform itself so the trains can speed in and stop more quickly, before the gates, which are perfectly in line with their doors open! Oh, and then there also is a unique electro music jingle for every station! We were fortunate to see several Shinkansens coming and going before ours, including a pink one! Like missing a fly-by rare bird, I was disappointed not to get a photo of it. Travelling by bullet train was another quintessentially Japanese experience, boarding was very efficient, as to be expected and before long we were whizzing through the Tokyo suburbs at around 260kmph. Part of the world’s largest metropolitan area and home to around 38 million people, it is also one of the most densely populated. Apartment blocks stretch as far as the eye can see, within touching distance of one another but all looking modern, new, clean and well maintained. I have never seen anywhere like Tokyo. In under two hours we were far away from the city and in the heart of the Japanese Alps.

*Shinkansen! A not-to-be-missed, quintessential Japanese experience. Slow shutter speed to blur the train approaching the platform.*

Alighting at Nagano, proud host city of the 1998 Winter Olympics, we then made the short drive to the spa/ski resort town of Yudanaka, our base for the next three nights. We arrived in good time to spend the afternoon at the Snow Monkey Park. It is easy to forget that this is not actually a safari park and the Japanese Macaques (AKA Snow Monkeys) are of wild origin and are free to roam as they wish. However, with their free open-air hot bath and food supply, why would they want to stray? The monkey park entrance is around 20 minutes walk along a snowy contour trail from the nearest car park, involving a total of 81 steps, 31 at the start and another 50 near the monkey park entrance itself. Our first afternoon in the vicinity of the monkeys’ onsen produced some nice portraits, with a few flakes of snow in the air from 2pm onwards and some action shots of the monkeys walking along the rim of their hot tub but it was on our second day that things got really interesting.

*Using a bank of snow to blur the foreground. This style is very popular these days.*

For the first time in 90 years there had not been any snowfall in this region during the month of January, so imagine our delight when it started to chuck it down within hours of our arrival. With snowflakes falling steadily on my head while I was up to my neck in the 40 degrees warm water, the outdoor onsen at our hotel was very nice. Just like what would be happening to the monkeys the following day. No wonder they like it so much. We had lots of great possibilities in the snow. For a start, those who wanted photos of monkeys in the pool itself had plenty of opportunities but in the extreme cold there was a lot of steam too. There was a lot of activity around the pool as animals visited it in sometimes horizontally blasting snow. I tried for something different to the stereotypic monkey-in-a-bath photo, with a combination of fast and slow shutter speeds, either freezing or blurring the snowflakes into streaks across the image, with some great expressions on the monkeys faces. The snow also offered blurred foregrounds with which to partly obscure the monkeys as seems to be the fashion of the moment. The monkeys were so habituated they would walk right through a crowd of tourists and even hop over my camera when I stuck the lens in their way for an extreme close-up, wide angle view. We spent all day at the monkey park, with a break for a much-appreciated simple and very tasty hot lunch of Sansai Saba (= Mountain Vegetable Noodle Soup) followed by Chimaki (triangular rice cakes, wrapped in moist bamboo leaves) at the nearby onsen. The onsen itself here is sometimes shared by both human and monkey bathers! The snow continued to fall on and off all day and the monkey action kept some of us occupied right until closing time when the light turned blue again as evening shadows crept up the sides of the narrow valley in which the park is located. It was also a pleasure to meet ‘Mr Birding Japan’ himself, Mark Brazil, here. ‘Where do you usually see serow?’…’Oh there’s one right now’. How’s that for skill? Happily, it stayed long enough, lumbering up the snow-covered slope opposite the visitor center, for all to catch up with this weird-looking goat-like creature. Otherwise the cold, snowy forests were very quiet, and I only managed a single species of bird all day, a flock of Eurasian Nuthatches.

*Over-exposed in processing, to isolate the subjects, a mum carrying her little one through deeper snow.*

*Slower shutter speed to turn the snow flakes to streaks giving an impression of the blizzard.*

*Eye contact. I tried to avoid taking the same photos as everyone else but it’s hard to avoid at least a few monkey face portraits!*

Our second full day at the monkey park was bright and sunny and much of the snow that fell the previous day melted. The monkey activity was different too, many of them spent the majority of the day on the sunny slope opposite the visitor center, only descending briefly at feeding time and again towards the end of the day, when they mostly gathered on the opposite bank of the stream. Some activity continued at the monkey onsen all day though. We added both Sika Deer and Wild Boar to our mammal list, both apparently very infrequent visitors here at this time of year! Sunlit portraits were available today as well as action shots of groups of baby monkeys playing together across the river as well as a disturbing incident when one apparently psycho female tried to injure several tiny babies, biting them viciously before being fought off by their guardian mums. We very much enjoyed our stay in the mountains, with some great photo opps with the monkeys and some really wonderful food. The hotel even broke out their very stylish US$15 Japanese chopsticks on occasion, so fine you could pick up individual grains of rice with them… and did I mention the onsen? This one was voted the best of the tour, although it was a shame not to save the best ‘til last. At first it feels a bit weird to bath naked in the same pool as strangers but the relaxing experience of the geothermally heated, mineral-laden water made it worthwhile. I also figured out that to avoid the jibber jabber of the noisy gaijin ski-ers that shared our hotel, a late visit to the onsen after our evening meal was usually much quieter (although it is customary to go to the onsen before your evening meal).

SNOW MONKEYS OF NAGANO