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By the next morning, I was recovered enough to thoroughly enjoy the hot springs - both here and in the rotenburo outdoor bath. - though the water was so mineral-rich that the bottom of the bath was covered in a crusty white precipitate that made you want to watch where you stepped. Yes, that IS snow outside the window; we (OK, I) enjoyed rolling in it between hot baths.

So all we had to do was get up the mountain. At that point, things got interesting. I had borrowed a mountain bike to do a superb offroad section from Shiga Kogen, the big ski resort, to Nozawa Onsen, the popular hot springs. The first day's climb was no problem - but the bike had no bottle cage on it. The inability to get fluids when needed, combined with a mild case of food poisoning, I suspect from convenience store sushi (though I can’t prove it) combined to totally wipe me out and delay our arrival at the 1900-meter turnoff till after dark. There we found the road covered with snow - enormous drifts in some places. For the next two hours, one person went ahead with our brightest headlight to try to find the road, while the other two followed behind. That was a good decision; in two places we might have gone off the edge of the cliff otherwise. At that point I had NO reserves of strength left, but managed to slog along through the snow or ride along brief bare patches of the 7km stretch of road until we finally arrived at Manza Onsen and our lodgings.