Abashiri Ice: The Second Coming

The first weekend in February, we took another road trip out to Abashiri since the drift ice situation had been so damn disappointing last year (I covered it in detail last year, likely out of frustration from not seeing it).

Fortunately this year was a little more ice-filled than last, and when we got out on our sunset icebreaker cruise, it was looking damn near like the north west passage out there:

As the drift ice may drive you to believe when it floats in close and chokes up the town's harbours, Abashiri can seem a pretty grim, pretty bleak place. Its second biggest attraction is a prison, which I'd like to believe says something about the tone of the town. When we passed through Abashiri in September on our Four Points Tour, we were certainly unable to find anything more exciting in the place (well, we hit the very nice Museum of the Northern Peoples for a second time, but that hardly makes up for the generous amounts of boring going on in town).

However, each time I've rolled up on the place for the past two Februaries, I've wound up having a blast. Last year we had a giant slumber party (for what else can you call it when you carpet the floor of a small-ish Japanese apartment with about 18 people) on the Friday night, and then an even giant-er blow out at Caroline's on the Saturday night. This year we caught some nepalese food for lunch, some blue beer on the sunset ice cruise at dusk, and then we crashed at June's again on Saturday night, and it was a night filled with hot wine, pizza, and excellence.

Set against that grim backdrop of ice and lowlands and sea, it really has got to be the people that make Abashiri so habitable.

Adventure The Fourth: Abashiri Ice

This makes the fourth and final installment in the It’s February—GET OUT! adventure series. When this all began, we were getting some of the coldest days of this winter. Now, at the month’s end, the sun is beating down on the snow outside, and last week we had a good couple of days of melt going on (though we’re still getting a bit of snow, from time to time, which keeps me from going into full-out mourning for winter’s passing). From that freeze to that thaw, it would seem that whole seasons have turned. Somewhere over the course of The Busiest Month Ever, dastardly plans were hatched and common threads became salient in ways I had only ever hoped they might.

Abashiri is located on Hokkaido’s north east coast, right on the sea of Okhotsk (don’t bother; I can neither remember or pronounce it, and I live here).

Its geographic location means that every February its shore gets plugged up with pack ice that originates in a Siberian river across the way in Sakhalin.

The sight is something to behold, and local harbour towns run icebreaker tours several times a day during the icy season. I’d been aiming to get out to see it for some time, so when some HAJET kids decided to host an ice-viewing weekend, I had to get in on it.

There was only one problem:

No ice.

Damn.

However, being adventurous, wayward souls, the ALTs of Hokkaido weren’t going to let a little inclemently warm weather stand between them and a good time. We’d taken a five and a half hour train ride out of Sapporo to get to this distant corner of the island, and we weren’t leaving until we got something out of it, whether icy or otherwise. Both nights in Abashiri were mad, high-school-like affairs with BYOBooze, impromptu YouTube dance parties, and apartments/houses absolutely carpeted in futons and passed out foreigners.

We got a little culture and a little onsen in during the days, and on Sunday afternoon we ditched the train back in favour of a afternoon drive to Asahikawa through the rolling foothills around Daisetsuzan National Park. Just outside the city, we came across the Sounkyo ice castle, and it provided all the ice we could have ever asked for in Abashiri.

But that’s all the words I’ve got for the weekend, so maybe I should just let the photos speak for themselves.

P.S. I'm retconning this back to February.