A Bus Trip

While I had originally planned on going to Sapporo for my "mid-term break" I decided that 1) it was too expensive and 2) I've been to a couple of big cities in Japan and big cities are all kind of the same throughout the world. SO, I signed up for the $100 2-night and 3-day trip that is set up by the school. It ended up being a much better idea since 23 other students from the program went on it as well as 10 or so Japanese students from Hakodate University. The list of things we'd do included 1) Going to Noboribetsu (a city sitting on a bubbling river of hot water/sulfer... they have a lot of Onsen) 2) going hiking/river trekking 3) Seeing a Volcano 4) visiting an Ainu village (more on this later)

Here's my review of the trip...

1) Noboribetsu was a four hour bus ride away. It was more fun with friends... but any four hour bus ride wipes you out. We got there and checked out a cute little town and hit up a really beautiful Onsen. There's no real crazy story to along with this Onsen visit, thankfully. I checked out a giant sulfer mountain bubbling with hot water, it smelled horrible. But it was cool. Here's a quick shot of it...


(Sulfur valley also called "Hell Valley") It smelled like eggs.

2) After our Onsen visit we got back on the bus and got lost for about 2 hours looking for a super market to buy our breakfast for the next morning. This resulted in everyone buy loads and loads of alcohol to drink when we got to our hotel that we were going to. We again got lost in the vast forests of Hokkaido trying to find the hotel. Turns out it wasn't a hotel at all. It was a hostel/ecology center. No one really know what it looked like except we saw a giant pile of helmets and life vests outside of it. We knew this couldn't be a good thing. We "checked in" and they told us "if you want to walk around don't go away from the lights outside of the building or else we might get eaten by a bear. Great. A bear.

The next morning after everyone was mildly hungover we had been given a choice to go for a hike or go "river trekking" I signed up for river trekking because that sounded fun and it sounded like a good photo opportunity. No one had been given any instructions on what to bring for this, so I assumed it to be a simple little walk through the creek. We put on sun screen, jeans (so not to get bitten by bugs) and then stuff. The guide laughed at us and asked where our swimsuits were. We laughed because we knew were in for deep shit. I switched into the shorts I brought along (everyone wasn't so lucky.) We were given a lunch box but were told to empty out backpacks to put it in because it's extremely dangerous to not have both hands available in case we fall. Great. Bears and now dangerous rocks.

Remember the helmets and life vests? Yep. Got some of those. And special "water shoes" that didn't fit. So we hiked in a river up to our waist for two and a half hours against the current. It was a blast. Except I was scared for my life sometimes. Other times it was really pretty. I brought a little camera and snapped a couple shots. Here I am in my awesome garb... (Check out the shoes)



We stopped and ate lunch, I forgot my chopsticks back at base camp. So our guide (His name was Mister Mister... how awesome is that?) he made me chopsticks out of these stalks. They were awesome until they cut my lips and I bled a lot, but I DID get to eat lunch like I was on a desert island... so AWESOME.

After this we left and went to our next place to stay. Hakodate University owns a litlte 'field research dorm' out in the middle of nowhere so we went there. Of course they stopped at a convenient store on the way so everyone could buy tons of alcohol. We arrived and it turned into the strangest night.

Every now and then I kind of step out of my body and look at the situations I'm in. This was one of them. I was standing in cafeteria of a giant empty dorm in the middle of nowhere on a mountain in Japan. The lights in the middle of room were off and each side were on, so the room looked kind of divided. One side had a bunch of Japanese students dancing to random pop songs and the other corner had teachers teaching students how to play Japanese tops (you wrap a string around a top and throw it to unwind the string... it's really hard.) anyway, I was looking at it. I was stnading in the middle of this thinking. "Where the hell am I?" Just one month ago I didn't know ANY of these people. We were all speaking in Japanese. We were dancing, drinking, and playing tops...in JAPAN? ON top of a mountain away from everything... where am I???

3) Next, the Ainu village. The Ainu are the "native americans" of Japan. So I guess they're the "Native Japanese." They live in Hokkaido. They pretty much have the same story where they got screwed over and have to obey the rules of everyone else and finally recently they got their own rights. The trip plan said we'd be going to an "ainu village" but we really want to "Ainu Land!" An ex-Ainu village that was rebuilt for tourists. It had a depressing bear cage that made me want to dry and then a bunch of people dressed up like Ainu people making jokes and "teaching" us the Ainu language. I was kind of offended by this part of the trip because it was just this kind of exploited amusement park where people could go and think they got a cultural experience of the Ainu people when in fact, there were no Ainu people. Just bears in small cages and people in costumes. Tourism can be a great thing and it can be such a destructive thing. I just

4) The volcano was a short trip but a pretty cool one. There was a small town that was on the side of a volcano and in 2008 it got completely destroyed by an eruption. Instead of doing a massive clean-up-and-rebuild, they were smart and they all got the fuck out of there so it wouldn't happen again. They left the destroyed city there and now you can walk by it and see it. It's very eerie and very cool at the same time. Nature was growing and taking over the city, trees grew around mangled buildings, broken cars just sat on jagged twisted streets. It was really something to see. I couldn't help but think that one day after humans no longer exist some other alien or new species will develop and find all of our city ruins covered in trees and grass, and how beautiful and creepy that will be. Hopefully we don't have to worry about that soon, but seeing this looked like what I imagined it to look like, it was a very interesting feeling... here's a little photo of it...



I enjoyed my trip and I feel very fortunate to have such great people on the trip and I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to do stuff like this. I've also come to appreciate the beauty of Hokkaido even more. I wouldn't have gotten to experience the nature here had I gone to Sapporo. It's a very strange place compared to America it's got nice cool summer weather, big beautiful mountains, tons of farms and cows, a lot of ocean, and then also miles of wide flat plains. It's so strange. It's kind of like a sampler of all types of geography. It's like the "dessert tray" of the world. How fun.

I'd briefly like to thank my Japanese teacher Matsugu Sensei for reading and showing some people my blog website. Thanks very much! And thank you to everyone else who reads it! I'm never sure who reads this, other than my mom.