Hakuba
How we booked
We organised our trip through the amazing Shona Bracey at Amped who are ski adventure travel specialists. We’ve booked a number of trips through Shona who always provides great advice and recommendations.
Where We stayed
We stayed at Mountainside Lodge which is at Happo One, directly opposite the Kokusai lift. Mountainside is a great place to stay and we highly recommend. This ski in, ski out accomodation is made up of multiple three bedroom apartments, each with their own kitchen, living and dining with ski lockers below. Highlights included:
All three bedrooms are pretty equal, each with their own ensuite.
Mountainside offers it’s own conceirge service, connecting you with their team via Whatsapp. They were super helpful making resturant bookings, organising taxis and everything else you could need.
Mountainside has it’s own shuttles with are available free of charge from 8am - 11am and 3pm - 7pm each day. We used them to go to the ski fields, supermarket and resturants.
where we skied
Hakuba is made up of a number of ski fields that are very close to each other (some of them even join up to each other and you can ski from one to the other). It’s very easy to ski a new field every day and to get around by private transfer, taxi or the free buses. Click here to find out about the fields we skied.
Information on the fields, including weather reports is here.
getting around
There is a HV bus service that you can use for free with your bus pass to travel between the fields. You can find details and the timetable here.
Happo One is one of the largest fields and has it’s own free shuttle service to get around during the day. You can connect to this from the HV bus at the Hakuba Bus Station. The route and timetable for this service is here.
where we ate
We were a bit later in the season and found some places weren’t open every day. It can also be quite busy so booking is a good idea. We found it hard to find booking websites, but many of the places we booked used Table Check. Below is a list of where we ate.
Five minutes walk from Mountainside.
Good variety of Japanese food.
We ate here when we messed up our booking for Izakaya Kaz.
Also very close to Mountainside.
Casual dining with great burgers. Can’t book, but quite big.
Small resturant serving genghis khan (cook your meat on a hot plate) and sukiyaki (cook your own soup thing).
This one was a highlight with some delicous food. Very small resturant with somewhat officious service.
I booked this via Facebook Messenger here.
This is a busy bar/resturant. Not a bad place for a drink. I see they also have a bar in Bali.
We had good food here, but the service was average and having booked a table we were put right under a speaker for the live singer which wasn’t ideal.
Another place that also has a bar in Bali.
Great place for a drink in a buzy part of Hakuba. We didn’t go, but apparently the Holy Smokes round the corner is good later - you enter through a cigarette vending machine.