00:00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, it's been a while. I am in Nagano. This is Hakuba Station. If you don't know what Hakuba is, you probably are not a skier. This is a place in the winter that is very crowded with people coming here to ski the amazing slopes. I'm going to show you the area map here with the mountains. It's pretty incredible. But today, we're here for camping and this is a cooler place. It's much cooler than Tokyo. Let me pan around the station here. I would say it's a very rural regional train station. Not a lot of trains coming into Hakuba. It's most accessible by bus, I think, if you're coming from Tokyo or from Toyama or from Nagano City. But certainly, there's only like five or six trains a day coming here to Hakuba. But yeah, there is a JR train station and it doesn't look like a JR train station at all. It kind of looks original, doesn't it?

00:01:11 John Daub: You can see it's about a four-hour drive from Tokyo. We rented a car. We drove on the highway. It was like 7,000 yen or something for the tolls. It is not that cheap. But the great thing about Hakuba is that it is really nestled in the mountains here. That's Hakuba Station. You can see it's just surrounded by farms. Mostly, this is covered in snow from November to like April, I think, maybe even May. And yeah, that's really natural, wonderful air here. It looks like Switzerland. It doesn't sound like it with the ambulance going by. But you can see the mountains here, Hakuba 47, 47 ski slopes on that one ski resort. I think there's several other ski resorts here, making it maybe one of the great ski capitals of the world or certainly one of the top destinations in Japan. This is the site of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. The ski jump is here as well as a lot of other events that took place because of those proximities to the Japanese Alps.

00:02:11 John Daub: You can see there's my iPhone there. But yeah, it's four hours from Tokyo and it's a really good drive. And I wanted to take you around here for the next 10 minutes or so. So if you are here in the ski season, you can kind of get a sense of what's here at the station and whether or not you want to actually come here. Buses might let out here. You kind of will get into a taxi right there and then head towards your hotel or resort and you spend most of your time there. There's a Hakuba coffee shop over there. Looks pretty good. But everything is pretty good. Everything is closed until about 10:30 or 11 o'clock. Let me take you over to the welcome to Hakuba sign before we go a little bit up the street. And there's believe it or not, there's this GoPro cafe. And I thought maybe we just have a quick look. See, there's that welcome to Hakuba sign at an angle. So I guess there's that dude there. I don't know. That might be the mascot of Hakuba, which is a mountain peak perhaps.

00:03:20 John Daub: Let's go across the street here real quickly. A lot of construction going on in the area. I guess they do the construction now before the winter season starts because once the winter season starts, you can't do anything because it's just so much snow here. The drive here is really nice. Let me cross the street. I think the GoPro cafe is over here. I thought that's kind of interesting. Not a lot of convenience stores in the area. There's a Yamazaki Daily store across the street from the station. There wasn't anything in sight of the station that was of any value. I think I can show you this is what it looks like inside of Hakuba station. And you can see the train line to get here. There's Nagano, I think it's like 1,690 yen from Nagano Station. Not a lot there. Not a lot of train lines. There's a waiting room. I guess this is where you would stay warm because in the winter it probably pretty cold. Not a lot of people come here by train I don't think.

00:04:41 John Daub: But you can see that's the daily schedule. What is it eight trains a day? Maybe 10 leaving? Not a lot. One express train in the morning. So you're going to want to get here early. There's also a Snow Peak. Like a lot of companies have bases here. So I thought that's really interesting. Snow Peak is one of these massive tent and outdoor adventure company goods. Patagonia has a shop right here. And then there's supposed to be like a GoPro cafe that might be out of business. To be honest with you. I think that used to be right there. Things change hands real quickly. Because there's a Patagonia right across from the station. There's three supermarkets that I could find: a co-op, a Delif Dia, and a Big A. And I went into the co-op and that's got a lot of meats in there. And then the Delif Dia one has a lot of meat in there like some different stuff in there so I thought that was interesting.

00:05:56 John Daub: Apparently the audio is down, I apologize if it's... I'm using a wireless mic so you might not get the best audio from the mic. This is where the co-op supermarket is and actually there's not a lot more here. But here's the ski slopes from here you get a pretty good view of it. That's what it looks like when there's no snow. Most of you are probably watching this because of the snow season here but yeah there you go. Those levels look fine to me so if you're not hearing this well I apologize.

00:06:56 John Daub: All right let me take you back towards the station here. I don't see where there's a GoPro cafe. I guess that used to be right here. A lot of the stuff goes out of business so they're not there anymore. James just says that the audio is okay. Guys, there's Hakuba station. Last time I was here I've been to Hakuba when I was hitchhiking. You can see those videos if you go to the channel page and you want to see another side of Hakuba that you've never seen before. Seriously go to the Only in Japan Go playlist and search oldest first and you'll come up with all of my hitchhiking videos from 2007 and I hitchhiked through Hakuba and we found this amazing monk who is almost a hundred years old. His temple had fallen off of a mountain in an earthquake. He showed me pictures. I believe I live-streamed all of it and he took me to a special carbonated water spot, natural carbonated water coming from the ground, one of two spots in Japan he said. And I was drinking with a bunch of locals carbonated water from the tap. It was pretty cool. I never had anything like that. That's on the playlist here. They're all like 480p because this is before the age of live-streaming and I was something of a pioneer on YouTube with that. Not a place I think people were still using Ustream and Justin.tv and some of the other sites.

00:08:36 John Daub: In this direction there's some camping spots. We are camping here actually. The drive over is really nice. Check it out, it's pretty easy going. So if you rent a car leave a little bit of a distance from Tokyo and you get something like this, pretty relaxing, not a lot of traffic and just follow the roads and go straight. Let's see if I got some more driving shots here. In the winter of course it's a little bit more challenging because of the snow but really beautiful here. And again this is why I drove out here. It is four hours just from Tokyo but it's so worth it because it's a natural, it's really a supernatural place to come. Loads of cafes and because there's a lot of skiing in the winter a lot of foreigners have come in here, like non-Japanese internationals have set up businesses so there's a lot of English in here. A lot of Australians come to ski apparently and there's a lot of Aussie businessmen.

00:09:41 John Daub: This was actually shut down. I don't know what it is at the moment, maybe just because of the low season. There's a michi no eki (roadside station). So if you can't get soba, if it's after 3 p.m. just make a note of this: everything for lunch stops at 2:30 and then the shops close at 3. But if you want to get something and you have a car between 3 and 5:30 for dinner you can go to the michi no eki and they always have a food court from morning till night so that's the one place where the cafeteria doesn't shut down. You can get some pretty good soba but they also sell out of soba as well. I thought that was really unique. Here's a shot of Hakuba station across the street in the snow or in the autumn believe it or not. When you're not coming here during the snow this is a great place for camping. I really like the spot that we have. We can hear the river but it's also too close to like a train track. The train track that's not much of a problem but the cement trucks going by from a cement truck factory not far away, a little bit loud but nevertheless it's a good spot for camping. I'll take you there live tomorrow before we go back to Tokyo.

00:11:11 John Daub: There's Hakuba station. The navigation system in English they call it Hakuba. I'm looking at Kanae, we're just cracking up like what the heck is Hakuba? Hakuba, Hakuba ha ha. It's kind of not, you know, Hakuba if you don't pronounce it correctly sometimes Japanese won't know what you're talking about. It's just kind of funny. Again a lot of this stuff isn't open yet. It closes, it'll open up in about an hour from now. All right I'm gonna get going but I'm gonna take you to another couple of spots today because it's been a long time coming. I haven't done a live stream in a few days. We had some bad signal in Minami-Funabashi. I wanted to show you that. I also wanted to show you a couple of other spots, just it didn't work out but we're back. Here's the rental car for today. Leo you want to say hello? He's very deep in focus, he's studying. You're not gonna get a chance to, could I sit in the back with Leo to entertain him? He's still like he's still three years old, it's still really young but we're giving him a lot of different kinds of experiences so he's off from school today and tomorrow so that we could come out here.

00:12:45 John Daub: I had this on the books for a long time. I have a square watermelon, let me see if I could show it to you. I've got I have a square watermelon video I was supposed to release a couple of days yesterday but I just didn't get the time to put it online. I just ran out of time. Yeah I felt kind of sick leaving in the morning but it was a hard stop I had to get out of there. Let me see I had the thumbnail. It's a super interesting video to go in and see. Why don't I have the thumbnail there? Certainly should. Super interesting episode. Hold on you can see I was there for the harvest. That's the whole harvest in front of you right there for the square watermelons. This will be on the main channel. School kids come in here to check them all out so there's about 200 and some watermelons and these are the ones that'll be going. Look at the way that they fit in the truck, isn't that just amazing? There's something really cool about these square watermelons.

00:13:55 John Daub: I don't know I'll show you the thumbnail picture in a couple of minutes. I have it, sometimes it doesn't save in the same spot but there's something really, I don't know how should I say it, kind of like it's a microcosm of Japan these square watermelons because they're so unique so weird. It's like something that only Japanese would come up with right? So in that sense yeah this is a, here it is. I don't know sometimes I don't know why these thumbnails are so weird but I'm gonna show you the thumbnail. Here's a thumbnail so this video will be going up in a couple of days. I really do apologize about that. I wanted to get this up before I left. I'm a little bit mesmerized by the square watermelons, trust me I'm something of an expert on these things right now. Aloha my brother from Michael's asado. Weather looks nice there. Early morning snack, you know Michael we're gonna go and take this to the cafe we're gonna go to now. Alright we're going up to the mountain view after we've kind of look around here and we'll take you up there and if there's a signal we're gonna share that with you. If that's a good idea we're going to insert it into another live stream so hopefully we can bring you along on this trip a little bit as I try to get some R&R as well and kind of get out of the city. I'm just stressed out when I'm in Tokyo too much so this is a good change, it's a very good change.

00:15:26 John Daub: Thanks guys for watching. I'll see you in another live stream later on today and certainly tomorrow morning as I show you our camp spot. Um it's kind of nice but if you're coming to Hakuba I love this place. I've been here maybe four or five times, not a lot but I think I gotta come back for the skiing. I gotta be honest with you, it's a really nice place. All right.