If you plan to ski in Shiga Kogen and you’re wondering where to stay, you have to answer a first basic question: do you stay in a contemporary hotel up on the slopes, or down in the valley in a traditional Japanese ryokan with an onsen fed by natural hot springs? This review is a recommendation to go for the ryokan experience, and specifically for the Shibu Hotel in the village of Yudanaka. To understand the Shibu’s charms I’m prefacing my comments with what I think is important context and useful info. Shiga Kogen is a vast ski area of 18 interlinked resorts. The resorts are located on the slopes of the mountains at about 1400 meters (4600 ft). Many appear to have been built in the 1990s for the Nagano olympics. Many of them are ski in/out. We did not visit any of them, but as best we could tell there are few if any restaurants, bars or convenience stores that aren’t located inside a hotel. These are resorts. The resort experience is probably great. There are so many lifts and gondolas that we literally did not have to wait in line once. There are so many trails that we never felt crowded. There were even times we had an entire piste to ourselves from the summit at 2000 meters to the gondola station below. In five days skiing we managed to explore a fraction of the Shiga area. It’s fabulous. If all you want to do is shred, ski out at 8:30 and ski back in at 4:30, this is the place to do it. You can ski till you drop. But if you also want a bit of the Japanese cultural experience, you should stay in Yudanaka, an ancient little village built around the Shibu Onsen hot baths whose history goes back more than a thousand years to when it was the place for a bath and a rest for pilgrims on their way to the Zenkoji Temple. Yudanaka is the last stop on the Nagano Dentetsu electric rail line. The main village lane is a charming narrow street cobbled with small pavers and lined by traditional wooden ryokan and small stores (one converted to a free public table tennis hall), interspersed by skinny alleys that lead up the hillside to who knows where. There are also little restaurants -typically seating no more than a dozen people- next to shrines, old carved-stone, spring-fed foot baths and, of course, the onsen. There are nine onsen in Yudanaka. Each taps a different hot spring in the mountains above - each is said to deliver water with slightly different mineral properties, to treat different types of ailments. Some people buy a commemorative junyoku on which to collect a stamp from each onsen. All guests staying in the member-ryokans are welcome to use the onsen for free (non guests pay a small fee). So foreigners and Japanese both walk the village lane, wearing their yukata and geta, more about which later. These nine public onsen are maintained by a group of village ryokan owners. We stayed in one of these inns called the Shibu Hotel. It was one of the most charming travel experiences of our lives. Management of a ryokan
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