Wild monkeys and mass tourism’s first contact with snow

In order to get another nature experience in the Japanese countryside I took the chance to cross the Japanese Alps along the Alpine Route. The route offers a lot of different transportation methods like funicular, rail-car, cable car, bus and train. The mountain area is the area in Japan with the most amount of snow. Even in early May the snow was still about 4 metres high along the road as you can see below on the picture. It was also quite fascinating to see all those monkeys running around in the forest and all over the streets winding up the mountain. I took alot of pictures with the phone and they did unfortunately not turn out that nice.

Alpine Route

Funnily enough on this remote countryside with small and narrow roads it was the only place along my whole trip where I felt like I was surrounded by mass tourism. The queues in-between the different transportation modes were long and I felt like I was on a bus tour with Chinese and Indonesian tourists seeing snow for the first time.