A Regular Post

Hello,

As I now have access to a computer with a decent keyboard, which doesn`t cost me anything, I decided that I could follow up yesterday`s picture-post with another post. This time, text interspersed with pictures.

First of all, I`m going to follow up on that cliffhanger a few posts back. After Asahidake, we went to Wakkanai, and from there to the rather small island of Rebun-to. A really nice place, with many different kinds of flowers covering the hills. We took some photos as can be seen to the right. We walked from the ferry-terminal to the southern edge of the island, then backtracked a bit, and went to the west side, where our hostel was. And it`s the hostel that was something of an oddity. We`d called them directly from the ferry, and after a while they picked up our backpacks and gave us maps of the island. Our hike ended, as said, at the hostel, where there was nothing else than said hostel, and the ocean. Really secluded and nice. The people working there, well, they were undoubtedly nice, but somewhat... special. To say the least. All the men working there had really hoarse voices, which we didn`t understand at first. Then we understood. Every now and then, they would shout, at the top of their lungs, into microphones or just out loud, with different messages concerning the events at the hostel. Like when it was time for food and such. And I really mean shout, as loud as humanly possible, all day long. And if you took the popular 8-hour hike from the top of the island back to the hostel, they stood outside the hostel waving you goodbye for maybe 15 minutes, dancing, singing, and of course, shouting. When you got back, they stood on the roof waving a japanese war-flag and shouting "Irasshaimase!" (welcome back!), and more singing. And in the evening, they had a kind of "theater", I guess you can call it. They also informed about different hikes and stuff about the island. It went on for almost 2 hours, with loads of singing, dancing, shouting and other, weird stuff. One guy, called `Mannequin`, dressed up as Doraemon (a famous japanese comic about a robotic cat from space) for example. I videotaped some of it with my digitalcamera, so I`ll try and upload it here for your viewing pleasures. It`s not long though, the memory was full.

And it doesn`t end there, no. After the theatre, everyone went to bed in their bunks (the place was an old fishermans`s house, really cool) and they turned of the lights at 10. Then you had to sleep. And oh yeah, they had their own time. All their clocks were set half an hour before actual time, for some reason. That made it easy to understand when the ferry left next morning.

Anyhoo, the wake-up call was, of course, nothing you experience every day. At precisely six `o clock, they turned on some old japenese song with a woman singing at an extreme soundlevel. It felt like being waked up by a bomb. And the song was long.. They were also (surprise surprise) shouting in the microphone "Ohayo!" (good morning). Nothing for us sleepyheads exactly.

Then, it was cleaning time for the ones who stayed behind and didn`t go on the 8-hour hike (that included us, yes). They made it into a weird contest/game where there was no price except clean rooms.

The whole experience was something we won`t forget for a while, we can easily say.

One last thing; when they drove us to the ferry in the morning, they stayed behind on the port and waved flags, and sang (shouted) goodbye songs while dancing. Quite extraordinary.

The picture below is of the hostel.

Well, enough about that. I mentioned before that we were going to Osorezan, the Mountain of Dread. Now we`ve been there, and it was rather cool. The sun was shining brighly so it didn`t feel so ominous; except for all the coins on the ground left by people praying, and the many, many spinwheels left by parents for their deceased children. I took some photos there, which you can view below. The first is of the temple there, the second is a sulphurous vent full of coins.

Now, let`s focus more on the present, instead of the past. We are now in Sendai, the largest city in Tohoku (Northern Honshu), with over one million inhabitants. We`ll be here two nights in total, so tomorrow we`re heading some place else as we`ve already been here one night. Haven`t really decided where yet. We`re thinking Matsushima. Anyway, Sendai is quite nice, it`s called "The City of Trees", and I understand why. Parks everywhere and trees line the roads.

The main-reason we travelled here was to visit Zuiho-den; the mausoleum of the great feudal lord, Date Masmune. For Final Fantasy afficionados like myself, his name is quite famous, as the strongest sword in the different games (the former more than the latter) was often called Masamune. That is also the case in Chrono Trigger, the best game for the Super Nintendo in my opinion. Well, less with the nerd, more with the pictures.

The first two are of us with the city of Sendai as a backdrop (duh), the third is a statue of Date Masamune, then a picture of his mausoleum and last is a replication of him, with his distinctive armor. Enjoy!

A `Just Pictures` Post

Hello,

As I promised on the last post, I would follow up with some pictures.
This post will only contain pictures, almost. Me writing this does not count as `just pictures`.

Anyhow, on with the pics.


Firstly, we have Asahi-Dake (and views from it).

Us on top of the highest peak in Hokkaido. And what do you find at the absolute peak?

That`s right, an Alandian Flag.

Next, by popular demand, the Zoo. (Didn`t take so many pictures though, mostly videotaped it all)

The greatest animal in history; the Capybara.

And finally, the prison museum. Don`t really have much to show from here, as I here too, mostly videotaped instead of taking photos. Just a really small cell (you can basically see it all in this picture: it doesn`t extend further really) and a resting/sleeping space.

Well, that`s all folks. Hope you liked it.

Cheers.

Warning: This Post Contains No Pictures

Hello,

We are now, once again, back in Sapporo. We know the city, and it`s a good place to start traveling south, as we are to do tomorrow. We will travel to Ominato, and then via bus to Mutsu on the Axe Peninsula (look on a map and you`ll know instantly where it is). There is one of Japan`s most important spots if you`re a buddhist (which we are not); Osorezan-san (which means something like The Mountain of Dread). It`s a mountain (surprise surprise) which is supposedly surrounded by ravens and hissing sulphrous fumaroles. Sounds nice.

Well, once again I`m sitting here discussing things that have yet to happen, so I`m going to wait on the depiction of Osrezan `til we`ve actually been there.

Since the last post we`ve re-visited Abashiri and this time actually had time to see the prison museum. It was quite cool to see how miserable and odd the original prison was, and although it was very tourist-y, it was rather fun to see mechanical prisoners chasing a mechanical mail-pidgeon.
I bet you all are thinking `on with the pictures, man!`, but as the title hinted (or flat out told), there are no pictures on this post, since this youth hostel`s computer ain`t really the best there is.
Anyhow, I`ll probably post a `just pictures` post sometime after this one, so you can see and not just read. But that`s later.

After Abashiri we went to Asahikawa Zoo, which apparently is Japan`s most popular. The DVD-suply for my HandyCam took a real punch there, as I filmed more than an hour I think. Took some photos too (bet you wanna see `em; who doesn`t love penguins?), but alas, no pictures. We saw, as mentioned, penguins, but also polar-bears, brown-bears, tigers, lions, panthers and even a gigantic rhino. Of course there were more animals, but I ain`t going to bore you with a list of zoo-creatures. It was really nice, and although my save-animals-from-cages instincts came on, the animals seemed to be living a rather good life.

After that we went to Asahidake Onsen; an onsen resort consisting of about 10 hotels (nothing more) at the foot of Hokkaidos highest peak, measuring 2291 meters. We climbed it, which really wasn`t something fit for our physique. As the air got thinner, it got a lot harder. It took us some three hours to climb from the ropeway-station at 1550 meters to the top (we climbed from the ground to the ropeway-station the day before in one and a half hour, so we thought we deserved to use the ropeway the next day). The view from the top was nothing short of spectacular; so it really paid of. The hike down from the top to the ropeway-station only took us some 55 minutes though, which we found quite funny. Our shoes took a beating though; as we skidded down fast through almost razor-sharp volcanic rocks. We actually had an excuse for the rush, besides wanting to get to the onsen at our hotel: we didn`t want to miss the last ropeway, since that would mean hiking down through the forest at nightfall in bear-country. Which would not be nice.

Anyhoo, I just remembered a fun thing that happened that happened when we first arrived at Asahidake Onsen. When we arrived at our hotel there were three people in front of it talking, so we were polite and said hello. We started talking (in english) and after a while the conversation went something like this:
Me: "So, where are you from by the way?"
The Tall Guy: "Ehm, Sweden."
Me: "Oh! Well then, hej!"
(Our maternal language is swedish if we haven`t mentioned it, and "hej" is hello in swedish). That was some surprise, and the two swedes turned out to be really nice (the third guy was some american they had just met, who had lived in Japan so long he had forgotten how to speak english). The guy`s name was Samuel, and his girlfriend`s (wife? Don`t really remember the specifics) name was Liang Liang. She`s originally chinese, now living in Sweden, but working for Volvo in Japan, if I understood it correctly. Quite international. Anyhow, we ended up sitting in the lounge at the hotel drinking some beers and having a good time till rather late. It was a fun evening. We gave them the address to this page, so if you (Samuel or Liang) sees this; please comment so people don`t think we`ve made you up.

This post turned out to be really long, so I think I`m going to break it up and post the rest later. And that`ll be a post that requires pictures, if not video, becuase it was strange to say the least.

And on that cliffhanger, I bid you adieu.

Nothing Important Happened Today

Hello,

The title is somewhat misleading today, as we`ve actually seen some nice things, but that`s the title of a really good X-Files episode, which I started to think about today.

Anyhoo, we`re now located in Mashu (Masyu) in Akan National Park, which is nice since yesterday nothing really happened (which I suppose would make the title Nothing Important Happened Yesterday, but that doesn`t really have such a nice edge to it). The only thing we really did yesterday was to sit on different trains. We went from Furano at about 10 am and were going to Abashiri; only it took 6 hours, so when we finally got there, things were about to close up. We rented some bicykles and tried to go to the main attraction, the Prison, which to the Japanese is like Alcatraz is for the Americans, only this prison is still in use. But we got lost on our way and the prison closed at 5, so we headed back to the station and waited there for 2 hours or so to travel here to Mashu (there weren`t any cheap places to sleep at in Abashiri).

We made a good choice though; since the hotel we`re staying at now is really nice. Big comfortable rooms, free bicykles and they even picked us up from the trainstation yesterday evening. We`re thinking if going back to Abashiri tomorrow morning though, as it only takes 2 hours from here, and it would be nice to see the prison. We`ll see how it goes.

Well, I should focus more on the things we`ve done here in Mashu, as that`s really the only thing new that`s happened since our last post. This morning we went on a touristbus that passes all the major sights here, and since the weather`s not all so nice, we decided that was the way to go.

We first "saw" Mashu-ko, a famous lake that once held the worldrecord in waterclarity (35m), but it was so foggy you couldn`t see anything, hardly even the bus that stood some 20 meters away. We then saw (for real this time) Izo-san, another vulcaneous mountain, which was very rich in sulphur (or phosphor, don`t really remember) as you can see in the picture. It had a lot of steam coming up from it too; there were even people selling eggs that were boiled in the steam. They tasted like regular kitchen-boiled eggs, but it was fun to try.

We then went to Kussharo-ko, I believe its name was, a much larger lake (57km around) with volcanically warmed sand around it (though it was so cold in the air you didn`t really feel it. The scalding hot mini-onsens here and there you still felt though). That lake, by the way, has its own version of the Loch Ness monster, called Kusshi (Kesshi, I forget the name). It looked like a blue Nessie (well, the souvenirs of it did, sadly enough we didn`t see it).

After that it was pretty much done, we took this photo of us with two of the other tourists from the bus (they asked us), and since then we`ve only been at our hotel really.

Well, this post was maybe a bit scarce, but it`s still something to read for you die-hard fans out there (just kidding). Anyway, see you!

Sitting in Sapporo Once Again

Hello,

Been a few days since our last post, but since we are up in Hokkaido and travelling here and forth in the countryside, it`s a bit hard to find internet.

Anyway, since out last post we`ve had the time to explore Sapporo quite a bit, been to southern Hokkaido to Toya-ko Onsen and also Noboribetsu Onsen (the latter was today even), and (apparently) experienced a rather massive earthquake. Once again terror lashes upon Japan and we don`t even notice it. Although this happened something like 40 km north of Tokyo, and we were something like 400 km north, so at least we have a good excuse. We didn`t even hear about it till our relatives called and asked if we were okay.

Well, enough about what we didn`t experience, and more about what we actually did experience.

After our last post we stayed in Sapporo for three nights, and had time to explore it more. We went to see the famed Sapporo TV-Tower (the eiffel-tower look-alike in the picture), where on the grounds beneath it was a Fairtrade-festival\gathering of sorts. They sold organic things and played traditonal Ainu-music amongst other things.

We also visited the American Phred and his Beer-Inn (the picture below is of him), where we gave him two beers from our homecountry The Aland Islands (in Finland). He was grateful and even bought us two (delicious) beers. It was nice to talk to someone who could speak english in it`s proper form for once. But we also talked to two of his friends for quite a bit, whom also were nice, and were then joined by yet another two people. They were two women working for the Sapporo City (if we understood it correctly. I`m sure at least the one nearest me did). They were really nice and we ended up talking to them until we had to go, since our curfew at the International Youth Hostel was early. Phred, by the way, had more than 5000 beers on display, and more than 300 for sale. I highly recommend the place.

Well, that`s about it for Sapporo, and since I`m in somewhat of a hurry (every 10 minutes costs me 100 Yen) and we want to go to sleep early, I going to make this post in a haste.

For your information we are now back in Sapporo for the night, since there weren`t any cheap place to stay in Noboribetsu Onsen, so we just took the train up here again and are travelling to Furano tomorrow morning. It`s nice to have a JR-pass.

Well, after Sapporo we went to Toya-ko, as mentioned. A really nice, really volcanic little town, which displays 400 fireworks every night from the huge craterlake besides the town (the town is on the south side). We went up in the volcanoes via ropeway and hiked along a mountaintrail for a few kilometers. It was really nice, but extremely tough, since the sun blazed and there were fumaroles everywhere (volcanic vents that release gas, sometimes poisonous, although not the ones we went by). I`ll post all the pictures at the end later.

After that we went, as said, to Noboribetsu Onsen. The most famous Onses Resort in Hokkaido apparently (onsen=hot spring). We went to a really luxurious Onsen-hotel and paid 2000 Yen there, where we stayed for three hours enjoying the more than 15 different, mineral-rich, onsens. And the 82 degrees celsius sauna with a freezing cold onsen right nest to, so it almost felt like Finland again. We didn`t take any pictures there, since it wouldn`t really be appreciated by all the naked people.

Anyhoo, I`m feeling extremely rushed right now, so I`ll just upload the pictures and maybe write a more fulfilling post when we acquire internet again.

Enjoy!

A few of the many beers on display at Phred`s place.

Our room at the Youth Hostel in Sapporo where we stayed a night (after that we stayed in a Capsule Hotel)

Sappory city itself.

A huge botanical garden we visited.

A beer-museum we visited in Sapporo, really nice.

One of the volcanoes in Toya-ko, which was apparently dangerous. Called Uzu-san I think.

A huge crater in Toya-ko with a huge fumarole. Very nice views.

Me with lake Toya at the left and Mount Uzu on the right. (Nice hat, eh. Had to keep the sun out..)

The mascot of Noboribetsu Onsen. This guy was everywhere.

Well, that`s it for now. Hope you liked it!

Eleven Hours on a Train

Hello everyone,

As you might have expected from the title, we`ve travelled somewhere. We are now located in Sapporo, Hokkaido. We went from the last town that we were in, Urabandai (I`ll write more about that later), at about half past 2 p.m., and we arrived here this morning at 06:10. We switched trains a couple of times, so we had to wait at the station for maybe 10-20 minutes, and one time even 3 hours. However, the last train, the one from Aomori to Sapporo, took from about 22:50 to 06:10. That was rough, since we didn`t have proper sleeping-cars, just fully reclined chairs, and the noise it made could have vanquished demons. That wasn`t maybe so nice, but when we got here some 6 hours ago we "checked in" at a mangacafe and went to sleep (it`s from that cafe this post is coming to you folks). It`s a room with a small sofa, two japanese floor-chairs, a table, TV, PlayStation 2 and of course a computer with internet. It only took us back 2000 Yen each ( ca 14 euros) for 9 hours "accomodation", oh, and there`s thousands upon thousands of mangabooks to read, all in japanese of course. Though we`re leaving this place in a couple of hours, I`m a bit tempted to grab Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix and just play it for the rest of the day, but I won`t.

Since we have only seen a few blocks of Sapporo yet, I won`t write about this place, except that it`s one of the newest citys in Japan, and therefore is built western-style (i.e. square-grid, like New York for example), which makes it a lot easier than Tokyo to navigate in, since that town was built entirely random.

The main reason we went here is to avoid the rain-season in the south right now, but also to drop of two bottles of Stallhagen-beer to a guy named Phred; an american running a beer-bar here. That will be nice since they do carry their weight.

Before we went here, we went out in the Japanese mountains for a couple of days. More exactly, we went to the town of Inawashiro, and from there took a bus to Urabandai (Bandai Plateau, Japans second largest national park). We went there to see the Goshiki-numa; the five-coloured lakes. They`re called so because they have different colours, logically, but the reason is more cool. In 1888 (gather round, children) there was a huge volcano that erupted, people say that it took of 600 m of it`s top and, as a result, the landscape was completely altered. Different minerals gathered in different places, and therefore coloured the lakes that formed there. The biggest, probably most famous lake is blue (coppar maybe?), and it really is blue. Not "The Beach"-blue-lagoon-paradise, no, this is Slushee-coloured-blue. You can see it in the picture above, though it looks better in real life. The other lakes weren`t as magnificent, there was the red lake, which was really greenish-yellowish with darkred edges, but I didn`t get a good photo of it, so you`ll have to make do with just the one.

The town itself of Urabandai (we think that`s its name) was really nice, it looked really Canadian. Jeeps everywhere, pinetrees, many log-houses and treehouses in general, and almost all signs were in english, oddly enough. They even had rangers instead of police. So, to me, it felt Canadian (look at the picture at the top of this post). Everyone there were really nice, and the hotelmanager at the place we stayed (also a log-cabinish place) picked us up from the busstop, and made us a huge breakfast (for some money true, but we`re pretty sure we got it cheaper, because we thought the price of lodging and breakfast woulkd be 5400 Yen, but it was only 5000, 32 euros). When we left the day after he even gave us a lift to Inawashiro where the trainstation is, which is a good half-hour away. He was really nice. So if you ever go see the Goshiki-numa (which you should, `cause it`s awesome), you should stay at the Pension Chalet. We briefly met this other gut at the pension, whom also was nive. He took this photo of us, and the next we took of him.

The Below picture is of our room there.

The big blue lake was, by the way, thick with carp. And they were fat; really, really fat. The biggest fish I`ve seen in real life (except sharks). And here`s a pic of one:

Another really cool thing we experienced (as we are nerds), was that we found the Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary Special Potion. It`s hadn`t passed it`s expiration date yet, so we could drink it, and it was good. It tasted like the swedish soda Tropicano. And; I regained 200 HP, so that was also nice. Here`s a picture, (of the many, many I took):

That`s it from the backroads of Japan, back to Tokyo for a bit.

The day before we started travelling north, we went to the Tokyo Tower. 333 m of metropolitan vistas. The first view-station was at 150 m, and the second (more expensive one) was at 250 m. It was really nice though, since you could se the worlds biggest city at your feet. There were also parts of the floor which was glass, so you could look directly down (not something for people with vertigo, which I have myself quite a bit). I took a photo there, as you can see.

And the last thing worth mentioning from Tokyo this time around is really just another picture, we found this temple-gate besides a large park. It was quite nice I must say.

That`s it for this post. We don`t really have any plans today since we`re so tired, only to find a hotel or hostel or something; somewhere to sleep for a few nights basically. We will probably go and vouyer the town for a bit and then go to sleep early.

Well, see you!