Autumn's Here and I'm Catching Up

I started this post a few weeks ago...

Autumn has definitely arrived. The winds that whipped around my bike on my way to Taichi class tonight had only an imprint of the hot and sweaty summer breezes and promise months of more biting cold gusts. So before too much more happens, I should catch up on events of the past few months. I believe I took a hiatus from posting in mid-August.

Back in August, I took a road trip with a few friends to Hokkaido. See the map below.


View Hokkaido Road Trip in a larger map


We left Kanazawa around 22:00 Friday night, arrived in Amori by 7:00 Saturday morning, and after a four hour ferry were in Hokkaido by mid-afternoon. After having an onsen, eating, and buying a tent and camp supplies we headed to the local campground marked on Jeff's savvy in-car navigation system.

We had just enough time to figure out how to set up our brand-spanking-new tent, settle in around our campfire and get a good night's sleep before packing up and heading for the depths of the island the next morning. Biei and Furano, located near the center of the island, boasted fields and fields of flowers. They are particularly famous for lavender flowers, but they bloomed in June and July and were already out of season when we arrived.

Fields of flowers and potato plants in Furano and Biei.

The next few days involved several lakes/bodies of water. We headed to see Lake Masshu, one of Japan's three most beautiful lakes and then to camp at Lake Akan. On our way we stopped at a waterfall and gorgeous teal colored lake. Unfortunately, I can't remember the names of either of the latter two bodies of water.

I think one of the ways Lake Masshu maintained it's beauty was that there seemed to be no way for tourists to get down to the lake shore. It could only be viewed from viewpoints along the highway above the treeline.

As soon as our tent was set up at Lake Akan, we headed for the nearest recommended onsen. This turned out to be probably the most primitive onsen I have been in and one of the nicest onsen experiences I have had. An onsen is a public spa bath. The basic necessities are a changing room and the hot bath, which is about all this particular onsen featured. Normally there is also a place with shower-heads to wash the body before getting into the steamy bath of wonderfulness. This onsen, however, was so quaint that it lacked any shower heads and one was supposed to simply bath using buckets of hot water taken from the hot bath. The local women were extremely friendly and showed us how things were done when clearly the three very naked white girls had no idea what to do in such a rural setting.

There's Maggie nearly bent in half to fit into the changing room.

On our way to breakfast the next day we stopped at a local Ainu craft shop. The Ainu are indigenous people from Russia and Japan. Most of Japan's Ainu population is located in Hokkaido. The lady who owned the shop was lovely and after we made our purchases offered to let us dress-up in traditional Ainu clothing and take a few photos. She and her husband make most of the crafts in the shop, and even carve personalized messages into the wooden crafts.

Also near Lake Akan we visited a very smelly sulfur spring. The deposits around the springs were a really cool shade of green.

Back in Hakodate before we caught the ferry back to the main island and headed home we saw Hokkaido's only National Heritage Site, Goryokaku, a star-shaped fort. The five points allowed guards to have less blind spots and more gunmen than preceding Japanese forts.

Over all the trip was a success. After seven days of living out of a van with four other people though was certainly glad to arrive home and collapse onto my own bed in my own apartment.

Oh, and I nearly forgot this gem from Hokkaido...

Just in case anyone was curious about how to use a squat-toilet.