Great travel post! It describes the character of a part of Japan that I haven't been to before, but now want to visit! I've mostly been to the super urbanized areas like Tokyo or Kyoto, which I imagine you've also been to, which are amazingly lively urban centers with a lot of historical character. But your description of Hakuba brings out the winter, more wild, parts of Japan out, and it's a great thing to read about!

While I've seen pictures of the macaque doing antics on tourists before, I hadn't seen them using the onsen themselves - that's hilarious and awesome. It must be pretty relaxing to be in there with all that fur, no wonder why the alpha guards it so jealously. I guess they don't mind tourists watching them too much, it's not like they're completely nude what with all that fur they have. It's pretty cool how animals adapt to where they are, though I wonder where they get food - presumably tourists aren't allowed to feed them otherwise they might get aggressive with begging.

Skiing in this area must be fantastic, after all as you mention a winter Olympics was hosted here. Although I guess it's hard to take a lot of pictures when you going downhill really fast, haha - sorry, I kind of lose track with all these adsactly posts but I infer that you normally live in Thailand since you comment that it's hard to ski there?

I look forward to your next travel posts, and also hope that you (and I and many others) can visit and enjoy the snows of Hakuba some day!