Leftovers: Back to Rishiri

It's been a dog's age...again, but I haven't exactly been idle. Two weekends back, Mark Mowbray, Mark Rostrup, Lindsay, and I returned to Rishiri, determined to finally summit the mountain we first attempted to climb in our first September here. It was tough going, but we made it, and there's more of a story to it, but for the sake of expedience, I give you the first cut of our Rishiri Adventure, accompanied by the wonderful Johnny Flynn from his album A Larum:

This is Kamakura

Part two of the Great Tokyo Tour To Heather's Former Haunts!

Kamakura and Kita Kamakura make up a collection of shrines and temples a short train ride out of Tokyo. When she lived in Tokyo three years ago, Heather used to come out to Kamakura all the time. She thought I'd like the place, and with the combination of old-school Japanese architecture and TREES, she was absolutely right.

Alpha Tomamu and Anniversaries

Better late than never...

How was your weekend?

Ours at Alpha Tomamu was a fit of fantasy thanks to our over-generous Japanese teacher friends springing to put Heather and I up in that mad suite with the jacuzzi and the sauna and the three rooms.

Four Points Day 1: Sapporo to Iwanai

Distance: 155km

We kicked off the road trip with all of us meeting in Sapporo at the car rental joint, and we were on our way around 2pm. We made a brief stop in Ishikari to pick up Lindsay's stuff, and then we were off westward in the direction of the Shakotan peninsula, where me and Mark live.

Our goal today was to reach Mark's place in Iwanai with enough time to watch the sun set into the Sea of Japan. We made a further stop in Furubira to pick up my own crap as it was on our way, but the greyness of the day and the late hour we got to Furubira inspired us to take a shortcut across land and skip the shakotan coast as there would be no sunset to see (so the map above lies).

It was a good detour, though, as we got to take a road through the mountains that I'd been meaning to try forever. I'd been told it was a sight to behold in late fall with all the colours, bit even on this cloudy day, the green and mist of the mountains and valleys from on high was pretty spectacular--as was the science fictional things that the Japanese managed to accomplish with tunnels in those high places. Sonomi quite rightly commented that, winding through those artificial, rounded caverns of concrete and asphalt and orange fluorescents and grey skylights, it was like driving through the bowels of alien spacecraft. They must have been built for the snows as we could see their segmented lengths standing out among the forests from the high points in the mountains.

We came down from the mountains into the towns of Kamoenai and Tomari, where the dying light of the day was still bright enough to pick out the mad stone formations of their shores. Though I'm pretty proud of the unique and lonely rock formations along my own coast of this island, Mark was right in commenting that Tomari takes the prize for the most ridiculous coastline on the Shakotan peninsula.

The last of the light died as we rolled into Iwanai, leaving us just enough to pick out the mountains behind the town against the dark sky and the slightly greyer clouds of burning rice paddies drifting before them. The smell on the cool air was one of tatami mats and bonfires, seeming to herald autumn--finally--at the end of this never-ending summer.

In Iwanai, Mark had set us up a barbecue with some of his high school teachers who were eager to meet some other English teachers. He'd clearly been doing a good job plying them with English as we were all able to carry on pretty well in a pidjin amalgam of English and Japanese...or perhaps that was the nomunication brought about by the keg of beer they tapped in our honor. That should make getting up in the morning early enough to make good time to Matsumae a bit of a challenge.

Hokkaido Man, ready for action, mate...or maybe being punched in the face by a Ghost.


The epic ride we failed to secure for our road trip.


The actual ride, rented cheaply from ちょいのり, the Honda Stream. The thing's a BEAST with a third row of seats, and is far newer than we'd expected.


Mark and Lindsay, making our way out of Sapporo.


The rest of the Peanut Gallery in the back seat.


The very wavy Sea of Japan, near Furubira, on this grey day.


Mark, looking like J-Ho, picking up some Special Meat in Iwanai before our Yaki Niku party with his high school teachers.


You'd think they were filming a movie in this place with the tents and lights they set up so we could barbecue in the rain, in the night.


Delicious lamb Genghis Kahn.


Oh, and Neil Gaiman early birthday presents from Mark and Sonomi.

The Yotei-zan Climb

Despite numerous people having cautioning me that Yotei, as a mountain, was hard and steep and tall, I underestimated it a bit. I based my expectations on Rishiri from last fall: a mountain that we hiked a month later, several hundred kilometers further to the north, and which we never actually summited because we were losing light.

In short, though both were sunny and glorious, they were very different climbs.

Mark, Lindsay, Perry and I all met up at Kutchan station at 9:30 on Saturday morning, picked up some food and drink, and then drove over to the Makkari trail head to start our climb at about 10:30.

We broke for lunch at about 1pm at the Fourth Station, which was at an elevation of 930 meters and, I reasoned, about half way up the 1898 meters of Yotei.

However, it only got steeper from there, making Fourth Station feel like it was only a third of the way up the mountain.

The weather was utterly glorious--pretty much perfect--which meant that there was LOTS of sun to make the exertion of the climb EVEN SWEATIER. My current Japananotebook, which had been packed into the pocket closest to my sweaty, sweaty back was irreversibly scarred by the experience and needed a day or two to fully dry out.

That being said, all of the exhaustion and water rationing were definitely worth it:

(that's meant to be a panorama, but the blog munches it. Best to click it and check it out on Flickr proper.)

We reached our destination, the Yotei mountain hut or Yotei hikers cabin (I'm not sure what it's actually called) above ninth station somewhere around 4:30pm. This was where we were planning to spend Saturday night. It's the only building on the mountain, and for the very cheap 900円 you can have a blanket and a piece of floor to sleep on at an elevation of something like 1600 meters. All four of us bunked on the second floor of the cabin, along with 20-30 other Japanese folks. Mark had been told that the two floors of the cabin could hold as many as 100 people, but, having seen the cabin, that number seemed like the product of optimistic creativity. I would have guessed 75 souls at a tight squeeze.

Such fanciful capacities would also have to worry about overflowing the long-drop toilets provided in the cabin. You were meant to click the counters hanging on the walls to give the cabin manager an idea of how full the tanks were getting (0ne click for Number 1, two clicks for Number 2), but a quick peek into the squatters to see how short the drop was getting told me that there weren't many clicks left in the tanks. The whole thing was presided over by one fat old fly who would lazily hover up out of the toilet when you lifted the lid. He'd buzz annoyingly around your head while you did your business, like a particularly malicious and disease-ridden washroom attendant, only to return to his moist, warm cave when you closed the lid on it once again.

Despite the facilities and the lack of drinking water for anything other than emergencies, the mountain cabin was fantastic--particularly when we got to eat our modest dinners (dried sausage, onigiri, soyjoy bars, caloriemate, and an apple for me) outside on a slapped-together picnic table, overlooking the most ridiculous, clouded-over setting sun.

Once the sun had gone down, the mist had rolled up, and a chill was starting to set in on the shoulders of Yotei, we headed inside and made a poor attempt at playing the world's highest game of Settlers of Catan by headlamp light (the board of which was another of my sweat-damaged items).

However, we all joined the chorus of snorers around us before it had gotten much later than 7pm. Between the blanket-padded floor, our rudimentary pillows, and the ever-changing collection of night ruminations around us (seriously. I heard more types of snores in that one night than I have in my lifetime. I should have been recording them), the sleep that came was fitful, and it wasn't long before my alarm was going off at 4am, beckoning us to start our climb to the peak for sunrise.

We achieved the peak somewhere around 5:30am on Sunday, but, sadly, there wasn't much to see:

The conditions for our climb down were much the same, but all of the clouds and fog made for a much less sweaty descent.

Also, there are certain other-worldly benefits to climbing down through the grey.

Destination: Yotei-zan

This weekend, Mark, Lindsay, possibly Perry, and I are finally going to get off our collective butts and climb one of the prettiest mountain in this place: Mount Yotei.

An active volcano (well, not since like 1050BC) with its crater rim at an elevation of nearly 1900m, Yotei is sometimes referred to as "Ezo Fuji," or "Hokkaido Fuji" due to the way that its conical shape mimics the iconic image of much larger Mount Fuji down in Honshu. Yotei has been staring us in the face all winter as we boarded on neighbouring Niseko An'nupuri, and its shape was clear on the horizon both when we all climbed Sapporo Dake in May, and when I climbed Shakotan Dake with my boss in June.

Long story short: It's about effing time we got up that mountain. We're planning to make the ascent using the Makkari course on Saturday morning, stay the night in a mountain hut at the summit, then come down on the Sunday in time to make the town festival in Makkari.

Wish us luck...particularly now that I've learned that Hokkaido may be expecting a typhoon this weekend!

The Four Points Tour Mk2: Four Points RETURNS!

…or Rebooted, or Reloaded, or Re-energized. Or some other REhash permutation that Yahtzee may have touched on here. Whatever we’re calling it, the Four Points Tour is back and going strong. If you were keeping up last year, you may have heard my mad blather about wanting to drag Mark and Lindsay around Hokkaido on a road trip meant to circumnavigate the island. Fortunately, I’ve still got a map kicking around:

View Larger Map

That’s about 2,200km of coastal road. It was madness last year when we planned to do it in the nine days of vacation we managed to rangle out of the Japanese National Holiday known as Silver Week. Unfortunately, the car I was meant to be getting from my predecessor in Furubira turned out to be a junker, and we were forced to scrap the Four Points Tour along with the car, resorting to the far-more-modest, rental-car-enabled Substantial Yet Notably Diminished (Due to Logistical Concerns of Space and Time) Two Point Five Points Tour of Fun.

She was a good roadtrip, taking us to previously-unexplored corners of the island like Onuma, Hakodate, Wakkanai, Rishiri, and Tomamae. However, the promise of what could have been lingered in Mark, Lindsay, and I like a hungry void (okay, so maybe it only lingered in me like a hungry void).
It wanted adventure, space, and the open road.
It wanted to explore the far-flung corners of our new home.
It wanted ridiculously spicy, volcano-ring chips and delicious Seicomart fried chicken.

Now, with Silver Week once again approaching, and with the open road around this island lying before us, more pregnant with possibility than any strip of asphalt has the right to be, The Four Points Tour has been REBORN! Watch this space for more information on how we intend to bring this island to its knees with the mother of all road trips!

Or, you know, something a little less highfalutin’.

Happy Japanada Day

Inexplicably, Perry found us a Canadian cafe in his town, in the heart of Inaka Japan. In Perry's town--2000 fruit-growing souls spread along 8 kilometers of highway, inland from the slightly more densely populated coast--Perry found a log cabin called "Lac De Jeune" that serves steak and apple pie dinners, with a Canadian section on the menu and a Canadian flag hanging inside.

It was ridiculous.

And, of course, when we asked the proprietor about the Canadian connection and told her that today was Canada Day and we were Canadians, she looked at us like we had three heads.

Apparently Canadian food is comprised of spare ribs and nothing else.

After dinner in Niki, we headed back to my place in Furubira and observed Japanada Day in true Japanada Day fashion, by drinking Canadian Club and beer, and taking in Transformers.

Also, pancakes and Maple Syrup--real Canadian Amy Thede Maple Syrup.