Japan - Day 8

Seeing how well the kids did with the hikes in Daisetzusan National Park, C decided to push them a bit harder today. Namely, the ascent of Mt Rausu - the highest point on the Shiretoko peninsula at 1,660 m. Not so high you might say, only we started at 169 m above sea level. And it was a 13 km return trip. And C was determined we'd finish in under 8 hours.

That's Mt Rausu on the right. We started walking just a little higher than this (but a fair bit closer). See the tiny whitish dot just under the saddle between Mt Rausu and the volcano to the left (Mt Mitsumine)? Keep it in mind.

Not being entirely confident on the 8 hours, though, we thought it best to start early. We left too early for breakfast at the hotel, but they made us some onigiri. After a quick stop at a 7-11 for lunch things, we headed off. Not long afterwards we stopped for a photo, because:

And not long after that for another one:

We were back in bear country - "one of the most notorious places in Japan for brown bear encounters" apparently, so I kept my eyes peeled. No luck on the drive to the trail head though. After a short stop to eat the onigiri, we started walking at 7.30am.

The track went up from the start, through the forest.

Even after 8 days, I still couldn't get over the amount of forest on this island.

I needn't have made C stop the car to get a photo of the deer by the side of the road:

This little cutie was with his mum. He was a bit nervous, but his mother just kept on munching leaves with barely a glance in our direction.

After about an hour and a half we reached the first stop, at the site of a natural spring.

My goodness was that water good - cold and delicious and very much appreciated in the heat, both to drink and tip over ourselves. Then we were off again.

We met quite a lot of people coming down - I guess they'd gone up to see the sunrise from the top. They were all completely covered from head to finger tips to toes: hats, gloves, trousers and long-sleeved shirts. We think they were protecting themselves from the sun, but couldn't understand how they could stand all that clothing, it was so hot and humid. 

After around another hour and a half we came out into a gully.

There were lot of flowers - and not bees this time, but butterflies.

Remember the tiny whitish dot I said to keep in mind? It was a patch of snow:

Micheline and Jean-Pierre stopped soon afterwards, and the rest of us kept going up through the gully to a saddle between Mt Rausu on the right:

And Mt Mitsumine on the left: 

Actually we'd already left the saddle in the above photo, having turned right to start the final ascent of Mt Rausu. It was a gentle climb at first...

... which soon got steep.

The streaks on Mt Io, in the background, are sulphur - which is what this volcano erupts. Liquid sulphur!  

C had wanted us to be at the summit by noon ... the boys all made it easily but I was behind by a couple of minutes. I blame the photo-taking. :) 

Looking towards Hokkaido (west), from the top. The north side (where we had come from) was clear but the south side was covered in cloud - which we later discovered is normal for summer. In winter it's the other way around.

Looking along the peninsula (east) from the top.

And looking down to the northern side. That's the Sea of Okhotsk at the bottom.

Even more incredible than the view, was this critter:

It was huge! The body was something like 3 cm long! There was another, even bigger one, though not as pretty:

We couldn't linger too long if we wanted to be down in 3 hours - and so meet C's goal of doing the whole hike in 8 hours.

No, not that way down...

...the other way.

The kids pretty much skipped down the boulders, Lukan just needing a bit of a hand for the larger ones. My descent was a bit less graceful, and quite a lot more heavy footed.

The path down was the same as the path up. So basically, once we got off the summit and down the saddle and gully, there were trees.

Lots of trees.

We made it down to the spring in pretty good time, where again the cold, fresh water was very welcome. C was very hopeful we'd make it back to the car in the 8 hours... and in fact Chabolz and Andy did, but my feet started killing me near the end. Lukan slowed down too, but I was the last one to hobble down. Which I guess means I'm now officially the slowest walker in our family. Oh well. 

Did you notice the lack of any bear photos? Yeah, no bear sightings. Oh well again.

After taking off our shoes - bliss! - we set off back to the hotel. Yoko had spent the day with her and Chabolz's friends from Switzerland. We came across them on the way, splashing in a river. We joined them - the water was lovely on the feet. But not as good as the onsen.

More bliss for my achy feet and legs.

We had to wait a bit for dinner, so let the kids turn on the TV. They found some kind of talent show with celebrity judges... and of course a Japanese twist. Namely, instead of just buzzing the contestants off, the judges would open a trap door in the stage through which the performers would fall, into a pool of water. Hot water. One guy couldn't swim. Another, smartly performing in swimmers, somehow unsmartly lost them while desperately clambering out. The last one we saw, had the trap door opened after he had leaped into the air. Good grief, it was cruel.

Even after the hot soak I was still hobbling. I was even more happy than usual to lie down in bed that night.

Pondering the unanswerable

Why is that the only time - the ONLY time - your child will put his dirty plate and cutlery into the dishwasher and not just leave it all in the sink, is when everything in the dishwasher is clean?

Japan - Day 7

Feeling a little achy when we got up, we had another hot bath before a leisurely breakfast... and then it was into the car for a five hour drive east to the Shiretoko peninsula - a chain of volcanoes jutting out into the sea, the southernmost point for sea ice, mostly wild, "the end of the Earth" in the Ainu language.

At around the 1 hour mark we stopped at a small aquarium featuring the local fish.

What do Japanese people say when they visit an aquarium? "Yum!!"

The fish say the same thing.

There was a huge souvenir shop, filled with Ainu-themed and other awful wood carvings.

Who buys this stuff? C did find some nice handkerchiefs, which he bought with the intention of transforming into pocket handkerchiefs - a new fad of his. Sorry, fashion! The new fashion! And Lukan found a bear claw back scratcher that he insisted on having.

After cold drinks and ice cream we set off again. A couple of hours later we stopped at a Bento Box - a take away food chain, where the food is actually good. The idea was to find a nice place by the side of the road for a picnic. We drove and drove... nothing. Eventually we pulled into a kind of truck stop - a huge dusty parking lot, with a row of drink vending machines and stinky toilet. There was a bit of grass on the side in the shade, so we settled in there. I took a photo...

... and was about to sit down myself to tuck into my tempura, when Téo spotted a tick on my leg. We hastily moved away... into the hot, dusty parking lot as there was nowhere else. Oh well, at least the food was yummy.

We finally made it to Shiretoko in the late afternoon. After a short stop...

... we headed to our hotel, where I discovered who buys terrible Hokkaido wood carvings. Multiple, terrible Hokkaido wood carvings.

Shabolz and Yoko's friends - the ones we'd had dinner with on day 3 - were staying at the same hotel. The six kids ran around playing spies outside, and claimed to have seen a snake. C went for a hot bath, but it was too hot for me - a cold shower was more welcome.

The hotel was old and nothing much to look at, but dinner was delicious.

I know it looks the same as other meals, but it really was particularly yummy.

Apart from dinner, the evening was taken up with a much-needed session of clothes washing and drying. Shabolz and C took care of most of it, letting Yoko and I enjoy our beers and lemon sours. As we said to Jean-Paul when he remarked on this turn of traditional roles, we chose our men well!

Japan - Day 6

After a traditional Japanese breakfast - i.e., not so different from dinner the night before, except that it came with a salad - we left the hotel to walk back to Sōunkyō onsen. Well, not the whole way, we took the cable car back up to where we'd ended the walk the day before - and no nonsense with scenic routes, today we walked along the road to the cable car.

My big wish had been that we would wake to blue skies, and so get a look at the fumeroles we'd heard but not seen yesterday at the base of Mt Asahi. It was cloudy though when we got up. I'd resigned myself to another day of mist... but then as we rose higher in the cable car we saw steam! Huge plumes of steam whooshing from the enormous rent in the volcano! Woo-hoo!

The plan hadn't been to walk back up to the fumeroles but rather head around Mt Asahi lower down, but how could we not go see them? 

(You can click all photos to see them full size)

Yes mum, I know you told me to take panoramas as portraits. I won't forget again. (The path on the right is where we had come down the day before.) 

Closer...

...and even closer.

Once every possible photo had been taken from every angle and distance, we finally set off on our walk ... around Mt Asahi, back up to the rim of Ohachidaira caldera, around the other side, back over Mt Kurodake and finally down to the chair lift and cable car to Sōunkyō onsen.

The pink in the 3D version is our route, more or less - you can't see the caldera. Mt Kurodake is again marked with the red arrow.

It turns out that more photos could in fact be taken of fumeroles. But look! As we walked around Mt Asahi we could see more of them!

And there was another pretty lake for a foreground!

The whole park was meant to be riddled with chipmunks, but we each only saw one or two as they darted across the path. This was the only one well behaved enough for a photo.

Just once the cloud cleared from the top of Mt Asahi:

You'll be happy to know this was also our last view - and so last photo - of the fumeroles. 

Not liking salad, fish or miso soup for breakfast, Lukan had just eaten a little rice - so was a bit grumbly. Frequent stops for peanut butter sandwiches fixed the problem though.

Still walking around Mt Asahi. The rim of the caldera is ahead of us on the right.

After a couple of hours of walking and sandwich stops, we reached a gully that had a hot spring running into the cooler stream water - an outdoor onsen!

We stopped here for lunch. C and Shabolz weren't keen on foot soaking, but I wasn't willing to give up this opportunity.

Téo decided to join me...

And the right at the last minute, Lukan too.

It was very nice... only then Shabolz mentioned he hadn't done it as he didn't want to risk softening his feet and getting blisters. Oops, hadn't thought of that. Thankfully though, it seems both the kids and I had feet so calloused that a bit of a soak didn't mean blisters later.

The track took us up the side of the gully to the top of the caldera rim. We passed a couple coming down, who said they'd seen a bear on the mountain slope across from us. A bear! I really really wanted to see a bear, even more than I had wanted to see the fumeroles! I stared and stared but alas, it had moved into the vegetation and wasn't coming out.

The view from the rim today was truly spectacular.

Mt Kurodake (the first mountain we'd climbed yesterday, and where we were headed today) is hidden in the cloud behind the caldera a bit more than 1/3 along the photo on the left. The rim directly across is where we'd walked yesterday, up to the high point on the right. Mt Asahi is behind this high point, but back in the cloud. 

We headed off around the caldera, me lagging behind taking various panoramas.

Me at the bottom...

...taking different versions of this. 

Just as I finished taking the photos for the panorama above, Téo - who was already at the top of the little peak - started screaming BEAR! MUMMY COME QUICK THERE'S A BEAR! I couldn't see it in the caldera from where I was so ran up as fast as I could (admittedly not very fast), but by the time I got to the others, the bear - possibly disturbed by all the excited screaming - had lumbered into a thicket. I waited a looooonggg time for it to come out, but no luck.

The bear, as photographed using the highest magnification on C's phone. It's the black dot on the right. You can click the photo to see it bigger, but it doesn't make much difference.

Oh well, there was at least a good view of the hot, sulphur-y part of the caldera. One hiker and one bear have apparently died down there in the past decade.

On we went around the rim.

 Shabolz and C did a quick detour up the peak on the left. 

The kids were absolute champions - apart from Lukan's grumbling when he was hungry this morning, they walked happily and without complaint the entire time, even in the cold and wind and mist yesterday. It really was a pleasure to do this hike with them.

We came down a bit to our final view of the caldera:

(Click for full size)

Then it was back across to Mt Kurodake...

More pretty alpine plants on the way

... up over the top and down to the chair lift. The same little bird from yesterday met us and followed us down, beak still crammed full of insects. This time it even landed on my shoulder and the camera bag strapped to my waist - clearly it must get fed by people to be so tame, but again I couldn't see how it could have fit anything else in its beak.

Yoko, Jean-Paul and Micheline met us at the hotel. A big huge thank you to these lovely three for their patience in letting us do the overnight hike - we hugely appreciate it! Especially as they had to eat the same buffet dinner three nights in a row! (Our kids though were super happy to have edamame and ice cream for dinner again.)

We had a later slot for dinner than two days previously, so could have a nice soak first.

Ahhhhh. There is truly nothing better after a long day of walking, the hot water does wonders for tired muscles and sore feet.

The kids were determined not to miss the fireworks tonight. We thought they would start later so were taken a bit by surprise when we heard them as we left the restaurant. I guess other people were too as there was a general rush out of the hotel - with everyone wearing their hotel yukatas and hotel slippers. This was just wrong! Hotel slippers are inside slippers! But since everyone else was doing it, we did it too. It wasn't worth the effort of walking up the road though.

It's a crappy picture, but that only seems right given that they were crappy fireworks. Plus the wind was the wrong way so it wasn't long before they were completely obscured by smoke.

You know the drill by now, right? Bedtime for kiddlywinks, and soon after, bed for our weary bodies too.