Tag Archive for 'Japan'

Eastern Hokkaido Roadtrip

Published by Kevin & Cathy on August 1, 2008 in General.   85 views 1 Comment

Eastern Hokkaido Roadtrip - Akanko, Kussharoko, Abashiri, Shiretoko

We took a camping/onsening/feasting roadtrip through eastern Hokkaido- known to have absolutely nothing to offer but breathtakingly beautiful scenery.

We took along with us our friend Michael Tripp who also is a former Hokkaidoite. Our final destination was Shiretoko but we planned on stopping in at many other places along the way.

Massive roadtrip success!

Furano

Lavender ice-cream
Furano
花

We left bright and early on Friday morning. Our first stop was Furano. Hokkaido people live for Furano in the summer. It’s something that you hear over and over for a few weeks each summer: “Have you gone to Furano yet? The flowers are blooming.” Furano is famous for its endless lavender fields and it’s lavender related products, such as Lavender ice-cream.

Akan

we went from Furano to Akanko (阿寒湖). It’s one of the many Ainu heritage sites with lots of Ainu influence. The Ainu are the indigenous people that were in Hokkaido before the Japanese invaded. We camped at the Lake Akan lakeside campground (阿寒湖畔キャンプ場. However, it really isn’t close to the lakeside… The actual lakeside is crowded with hotels and resorts.
We had a good night of Jingisukan (ジンギスカン) and dodging attacks from giant moths and foxes.

Our daily routine for the trip consisted of: camp->eat->onsen->photograph. After waking up and packing up our campsite, we headed into the town of Akanko to see some Ainu arts & crafts. Marimo is very popular here. It’s a green algae ball that grows in the lake. Inspired by marimo is the Marimo-kori which is a green doll with a huge green marimo boner. (no joke) We enjoyed the BEST onsen all 3 of us had ever had at Tsuruga.

Lake Kussharo & Lake Mashu

We made our way to Lake Kussharo (屈斜路湖 ) and Lake Mashu (摩周湖). It was a very foggy drive. By the time we got to Lake Mashu, we saw no lake. Lake Mashu is famous for being foggy. There’s an old myth that if a couple is able to see the lake on a sunny day, they will not get married. That explains how foggy and how rare it would be to see the actual lake. We saw nothing.

グルメ (gourmet)

We did our camping for the second night at a random auto campground. Our initial plan to camp by the water did not work out as it was a weekend and the lakeside campground was packed.

We navigated around the lake on a bumpy old logging road and took us 2 hours to get out. It was an adventure with lots of deers jumping around.

We did our onsen dip in Kawayu (川湯) the next day. This whole area smells like Sulphur. The onsen was a very sulphury one. Our silver rings turned golden under the water. We also visited the Iozan mountain (硫黄山). The direct translation of the mountain is Sulphur mountain. There were yellow patches all over it with bubbling water and steam. We bought an egg that was cooked with the sulphur steam. It tasted like sulphury goodness.

Abashiri

Our next stop was Abashiri (網走). To this day, the name Abashiri to the Japanese is the equivalent of “Alkatraz” to North Americans. There’s a big prison in Abashiri and it sure didn’t look pleasant when we visited the Abashiri Prison Museum. Being right in the blast-zone for the siberian winds coming south from Russia, the winter in Abashiri Prison most be almost unimaginable.

We camped at a free campground at Lake Abashiri. (呼人浦キャンプ場) The breeze from the lake was a bit cold that night but it kept the campfire smoke consistent.

Abashiri microbrewery

We went to another Tsuruga onsen - Hokutennnoka (北天の丘) the next day after our tour of the Abashiri prison. We also tried Milk beer here…. ewwww.

Shiretoko

Shiretoko Goko

We got around 4 hours of sunshine when we were in Shiretoko. The sun shone on the ocean and it was magnificent. We visited the famous Shiretoko 5 lakes but unfortunately we were only allowed to go on the observation tower to (barely) see one of the lakes because apparantly there were brown bears in the woods that day. Shiretoko is famous for massive brown bears. We saw one when we were driving from Shiretoko to Rausu. A little cub was just hanging out in the ditch eating leaves. We contemplated getting out of the car to take some photos… but we didn’t. (phew, dodged a bullet there…) We took a little windy mountain road from Utoro to Rausu, where we had the most amazing fresh seafood in a little shack by the ocean.

Shiretoko

The second day we woke up to a beautiful view of the ocean, onsened on the cliff overlooking the ocean and drove home.

Really, it was a fantastic trip.

How many trains does it take to get to Tokyo?

Published by Kevin & Cathy on January 5, 2008 in Japan.   546 views 2 Comments

16.

silly hats

Cathy and I had been tossing around the idea of where to go for Christmas / New Years for a few weeks. We had considered going down to the tropical southern part of Japan, Okinawa, or maybe driving around Hokkaido, soaking in the wintery goodness. We ended up deciding on something very much in the middle (both on the map and the thermometer), Tokyo! Seeing how we live in Japan, it’s almost necessary to visit Tokyo.

Looking into our travel options, we found a hidden jewel of the Japanese rail company: the Seishun Juhachi Kippu, or youth 18 ticket. (in Japanese, 青春18) The Seishun Juhachi Kippu allows for 5 days of unlimited rail travel in Japan with a slight (maybe major) catch - only local trains. Each day runs from 00:00 to 23:59, and costs ¥2,300 - or just under $20 CAN. As an added bonus, we can both share the same ticket by stamping twice per day.

We spent a few days simultaneously laptop’ing. Cathy was booking hotels in all the best spots in Tokyo (not an easy task as they were nearly all fully booked, and most Japanese online booking systems don’t offer an immediate response on whether or not you’ve managed to book the room.) Kevin was furiously plugging-in individual train schedules into an online trip calculator to find out how on earth we would snake our way down Japan using only local trains. (After all, Hokkaido is a separate island up north.) After a few days of grunting and complaining, we succeded on both fronts and decided on a change of pace for Christmas eve, put our computers away and went outside.

We stayed home for Christmas and had a nice relaxing morning eating breakfast, drinking coffee, listening to christmas carols and opening presents. We had video chats with both our families thanks to iChat / Skype and then we ventured outside to start preparing for our trip to Tokyo. We were to leave the following morning on the first train out of Takikawa, the 6:35 local train to Sapporo.

-15°C

The next morning, we enjoyed a sobering -15°C walk to the train station at 5:50 in the morning, got our first 2 ticket stamps and boarded the 6:35 local train to Sapporo through Iwamizawa, all before the sun came up.Our (ridiculous) schedule looked like this:


—— Dec 26th
06:35- Takikawa -> Sappro
08:28- Sapporo -> Tomakomai
10:07- Tomakomai -> Higashi-muroran
13:45- Higashimuroran -> Oshamambe
16:16- Oshamambe -> Goryokaku
19:37- Goryokaku -> Kikonai
21:10- Kikonai -> Kanita
—— Dec 27th
05:16- Kanita -> Aomori
06:12- Aomori -> Hirosaki
07:00- Hirosaki -> Odate
08:09- Odate -> Akita
12:12- Akita -> Sakata
14:30- Sakata -> Shibata
18:06- Shibata -> Niigata
23:35- Niigata -> Omiya
—— Dec 28th
05:50- Omiya -> Ueno (Tokyo!)

47 hours, 16 trains and 2 very sore bums.

cheeky traveler

In reality we had a few hiccups (actually, one big one) on our connection from Goryokaku to Kikonai and blew our schedule. We made it to Kikonai that night and decided to find a hotel. (Our original plan was to hack it in the train station in Kanita, but our missed connection made us strung out and cold.) We somehow communicated to the station manager that we needed a hotel that night. He took it upon himself to call around and he found us a cheap hotel above a small soba shop and convinced the owner to drive to the station in his pyjamas and come pick us up!

Toot toot!

The next day, we finally made it off of Hokkaido and with a bit of trickery managed to get ourselves back on schedule. The following night we slept on a train called the Moonlight Echigo that runs overnight from 11:35 to 04:28 that provided us a crappy, uncomfortable sleep.

Takikawa -> Tokyo

We pulled in to tokyo on Friday morning on the 5:50 to Ueno station and found ourselves crammed inside a stuffy train in the middle of the busiest rush hour we’d ever seen.We looked at each other and said: “Hey- We’re in Tokyo… cool.”, found a McDonalds, curled up in the corner booth and napped.

to be continued…

Sapporo White Illumination Festival

Published by Kevin & Cathy on December 5, 2007 in Japan.   442 views 6 Comments

Konnichiwa!

We took a trip to Sapporo last weekend with our gaijin friend Matt (We’ve only known Matt for a few weeks, but he’s been around to help us with many things, as he is the only foreigner who A) works at city hall B) is fluent with both English and Japanese). The purpose of the trip was to go to the Apple store in Sapporo to make Steve Jobs happy by purchasing an Airport express (Which has apparently now been renamed the Airmac express, odd.) It’s interesting that every single wireless router we found here is significantly more expensive than we expected/could have found in Canada. Japanese-made items/electronics are definitely of high quality but I suppose that comes with a high price as well.

Sapporo is just a 50-minute express-train ride away from Takikawa. The train we take is called the “Super Kamui”, and is also the same train we took when we first came in from the Sapporo Chitose Airport (CTS). The train tickets came to around 3000+ Yen each for the weekend rate (around $28 CDN). We also bought RailMate cards. With the RailMate cards we will get discounted rates for our future train rides.

Strangely, Sapporo had no snow at all. In fact, it started raining shortly after we arrived! (Takikawa has been covered with a blanket of snow for over three weeks.) We walked around near Hokkaido University and bought some nice winter stuff. Winter is hitting us harsh and fast. Walking in knee-deep snow is awesome fun these days…

We went to the Odori area in Sapporo, which is the busiest part of Sapporo. It’s pretty much the central street, with a big radio tower and a giant park. The Sapporo White Illumination Festival was happening just as we were there over the weekend. Trees were covered with Christmas lights and people were drinking hot wine while listening to bad karaoke and staring at white santa. (as oppose to asian Santa, not that there’s anything wrong with an asian Santa…)

We fed our hunger for Apple products, took the Super Kamui back home to find our car buried under a foot and a half of snow.

Back at home, we cooked up a delicious shabu shabu dinner with the Sukiyaki grill we bought 2 weekends ago at the local second-hand shop called the Oki-Doki.

Sapporo is very fun, and just far enough away from Takikawa to be a “going to the big city” adventure. Soon will be the Sapporo Snow Festival, so we will be back before too long. For now, we will enjoy wireless internet, shovel the car daily, and eat good food in our humble apartment in Takikawa.

Cheers!

-Goodfishies

We live in Japan!

Published by Kevin & Cathy on November 19, 2007 in Japan and Video.   526 views 4 Comments

Well- we made it!
After more than 6 months of planning, freaking, packing and stressing, we finally made it to Japan! (On top of that, we flew business class from Taiwan to Japan… in case you are wondering)

If we’ve kept you horribly out of the loop, we are living in a quaint little town of 45,000 people called Takikawa, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It’s 45 minutes away from Sapporo by driving. We are here to teach English to a group of students of all ages. It’s a private business / freelance job and it has been going on for 17 years. Every year, a new couple comes over and takes over the apartment, car, fish, and everything else.

Hokkaido is famous for many things including its dairy and Sapporo beer, but perhaps most notably its vicious winters. We had been here for only 5 days when the famous Hokkaido winter started in full force. It has snowed every day since Thursday and it’s now currently -7 deg C outside with no signs of breaking above 0 in the coming week. Sweet. Apparently in the winter it can snow taller than Cathy in one night. (though she is really quite small)

(A little white air-born bug called the snow bug showed up right before it started snowing, apparently it’s a very Hokkaido thing as well)

Our first week here has been a little nuts. Our predecessors, Samantha & Rafael have been super helpful in getting us settled in and making us feel at home, but with only 2 weeks of overlap between us, there’s a lot to get done and learn. We’ve transferred ownership of the car and purchased our car insurance, transferred bills & account names, applied for our “Alien Cards” (mandatory I.D. for long-term foreigners), purchased our Hanko (stamps of our name) - important documents are usually “signed” with a seal in east Asia - and we have started our lessons and met all our students.

Between the two of us, we have over 50 students, not including our City Hall classrooms or our Youchien kindergarten classes! We have been learning our student’s names, their abilities, their workbooks and much much more. We are getting to know the town we live in. It’s quite a small town. The people here are very nice and generous. When we were at the photo place having our Alien card photos taken, the old Japanese photographer gave us a giant bag of mandarins. (which were amazingly delicious by the way)

It has been snowing hard and it’s looking like that the snow is here to stay….

Attached video of us on our way into Takikawa after landing in Sapporo Chitose Airport.