Two Points Tour of Hokkaido

Note: I'm retconning this one as it really SHOULD HAVE been posted in September, closer to the end of our epic road trip

Well, our Two Points Tour has come and gone, and despite whatever hang-ups we ran into, it all kind of figured itself out in the end. A huge, epic, fluid tour it was not, and it more resembled a bit of a haphazard run from the south to the north of Hokkaido, but I fully believe some old, smiling, Japanese Fox God wanted it to happen. I say that because the whole thing involved a good deal of luck.

The luck of David driving down to the Southwest JET camping party in Onuma Koen, then on to Hakodate, and him offering us all a ride down to both.

The luck of having Wesley the JET put us up in Hakodate and show us around for free, and the luck of having two random Japanese ladies lead us through a labyrinth warren of closed onsen (Japanese hotspring spa) hotels to the one that was still open in the middle of the night—that one onsen that was little more than a large bathtub in a back room and that may go on as the hottest bloody onsen I’ve ever been in.

The luck of us hitting the broad, flat areas of Hokkaido—with its sandy beaches and grasslands that harkened to the Canadian prairies—just as the conical, once-volcano island of Rishiri lay off our left shoulders and the sun was setting over it.

The luck of blindly booking a youth hostel in Wakkanai for a night, only to arrive and discover that our room was a private suite with an impressive view of the town below.

The luck of making it up Rishiri mountain, and then making it back down to the road just as the sun dipped below the horizon and made the wooded trails we’d been walking impassible.

The luck of arbitrarily picking the campsite on Rishiri island that was across the street from a phenomenal onsen spa and restaurant.

The luck of catching a perfect sunset off our right shoulders over the Sea of Japan just before we rolled into Tomamae on the last day of our road trip.

And, on that same day, the luck of, once again, blindly booking into a palace in Tomamae, complete with onsen, full-course Japanese meal, and a bloody treehouse bedroom in our beautiful, seaside lookout suite.

Seriously. The more I think about it, the more I realize that for all our epic plans, we went into this adventure flying by the seat of our pants, and fate or destiny or luck took pretty good care of us. The realization first donned on me as Mark and I lay on cool asphalt in the shadow of trees at our campsite on Rishiri, in our post-onsen state, looking up to the wide spread of stars and talking about the women we’d loved and lost along the way. At that moment the trip was perfect, and as a thanks to whatever clever little Fox God was looking out for us I poured out some of my beer onto the mountain—a toast to our guardian Kami.

Sorry. That’s all rather broken up in terms of an epic chronicling of our road trip adventure, but doing something more coherent seemed forced.

If you’re looking for something like that, though, I did a pretty good job in the captions of the pictures I uploaded along the way to my Japan as it Happens Flickr set. Also, I’ve now uploaded my proper photos to Flickr, and they’re the ones I’ve sampled in this post. More can be found in Points South (Hakodate to Sapporo) and Points North (up to Wakkanai, Rishiri, Cape Soya, and Tomamae).

Next, we'll have to make a trip out to Shiretoko to see the far east of our island, but I don't think that will be for a while yet.