Greetings One and Everyone
Its Wednesday afternoon and I am back in Haboro. I just returned from a week of driving, camping, climbing and driving (in that order) and I am still very tired. I had a great list of things to do last night, none of which got accomplished. Instead they were replaced with fun things. Now its wedneday and I have no much fun things. Only things I must do, like clean and study and lesson plan.
I have a kendo pre-shodan test on Saturday. I am very much looking foward to it however there is a written section of the test, so I have been memorizing answers like crazy. My brain hurts. We have to answer two of 3 questions which may or may not appear on the test. As for the physical portion of the test, I am sure it involves being pummeld.
Editors Note: I pass the pre-test! Yay. Now I have the green light to take the test in July.We had a Korean Kendo Master come to our Budokan on Monday. That was quite an honor. Sadly I didnt get to spar with him because there wasnt enough time. Watching him spar was like watching Hayashi Osensei, Haboro's resident 8th Degree. They both stand with the sword in front, completely relaxed. This seems to totally unnerve the oppenets, who start shaking their shinai and weaving back and forth trying to confuse the masters. They are not confused. Instead they wait till the other person commits. Then, faster that I can see, the other person is flying across the ring, and the sensei is standing as before. Next.
So yeah, Golden Week.
After BOE day on Friday May 5th (shogakkou was cancelled again) I hopped on the bus and rode down to Sapporo. I walked around sapps town, ran into Darren, whom I somehow always manage to run into in Sapps. Darren will feature later in this story as well, playing the role of Deus Ex Machina, so please pay attention.
Around 10:30pm I met Gregory, the second of our three-man party and we loaded up his van and cluncked down to Kutchan. Clunk Clunk. We rolled in at greater-than-or-equal-to midnight and met Jonn, the third of our three-man pary. For some reason we loaded up the van then and there in the cold and black of night. Oh wait yeah that was so we could leave early, which we didnt really do.
Anyways, exaushted and with dreams of thin seams and hand-jams dancing in my head, I fell fast alseep.
Satudays Morning May 6th was supposed to be an early start. I emphasize "supposed to be." This will also feature later in the story, several times, and will end up becoming a bemoaned theme of our trip. Wheather it was a poor mastery of time-sense, a general air of laziness, or a refusal to speak-up, I might never know. Either way these three vices combined to create a group-think rationalization for lack of haste actually required, and we ended up being late almost every single morning for every single event.
Ah yes so where was I. We rolled out of Kutchan and drove over to the towns famous natural water springs. Dipping in this well of goodness we filled up 5+ litters and then drove to Hakodate. We were the last car on the ferry even though we did indeed make it on. The boat shoved off and away we went, sailing south for parts unknown.
The strech of ocean between Hokkaido and Honshu varies greatly in distance depending on your point of departure. We chose Hakodate to Oma, because it was the shortest and cheapest route. I fell alseep on the boat durring the last 20 minutes of the 1.45 hour trip, this time dreaming of food. If I had known of the absolutely amazing dinners we where going to be having at the hands of Jonn the Master Chef, I would have been positivly drueling. But all I could think about was plain ramen and and maybe some spagettii sauce, because thats how I roll. I am now a changed man though, and I will never again associate "camping" with "crappy food".
...unless I am camping with Jim, but thats another story...
"Jim you should probably wash your pots after cooking with them""No, all that stuff just adds flavor""you mean the charred pieces of carbon and dried ramen?""...yes."Sorry, I digress. Back to the story.
The boat docked and we were last off because the system was FIFO. At one point durring the trip however my stomach became LIFO, but that too is another story.
I really need to stay on track.
So the boat docked and we all got off. The Driving began. We saw ocean, farmers, trees, tori, temples, small houses, big houses, castles, cattle, priests, sakura, school kids, fields, sakura, rice fields, convieniece stores, crazy vans, sakura, telephone polls, buudas, tractors...all sorts of things. At some point we ended up spending about $40 in maps, which i was more than happy to do. My good friend from long again Bryan Batdorf once said "I never feel bad about buying a book." I could naught but agree with him. And when the book happens to be filled with shiny maps, I am close to ecstatic. I tried to then hog the navigator position as much as possible. Not so much for the shotgun (because the van was awesome and the back seat was even better) but for the ability to stare at the maps for a long time.
So after buying maps and after staring at them we started realized, somewhere around the MOS Burger/Baskin Robins stop that we have a LONG way to go before we got to Ogawayama. Like, at least another 11 hours (and we had been driving for 9). So we made the exectutive decision to take the dreaded Highway.
Lemme tell you something about Highways in Japan.
They suck.
They are beyond resonable in both price and access. They are an active excersise in everything you and I hate about big companies who are out to get the little guys. Built with public funds yet slapped with a ridiculous toll system, they become holes that money is thrown down into, but without all that good wishing stuff. The construction companies litteraly build highways to nowhere. We almost road on a huge bypass that could have fed the 405 arterty into LAX, yet this highway's sole purpose was to serve as an on-ramp to the main highway for a town of perhaps 20,000 people.
The highway cost over $400 round-trip. Yeah, you read that right. Four hundred dollars. I heard that the highways were supposed to be free starting like 20 years ago according to the promise that 25 years after they were built they would be free. But of course that is a huge lie. No company is going be like "oh, yeah, can we please stop making money now? Awesome, thanks."
Saturday night we slept in the van at a rest stop. The drive continued the following day and we finally made it to Ogawayama around 1 or 2. Hardly anyone was there so we had a really nice time parking, setting up the tents and camp and such. That may sound kinda strange but honestly, once Golden Week gets into its official full swing, you cant find a parking space or flat piece of ground anywhere.
Sunday ended with greg and I going to get the in a quick climb before the sunset and then it was Onsen and dinner time and fast to bed.
Monday through Friday was spent climbing, looking for routes, soaking in Onsens, trying to find monkeys who soaked in Onsens, climbing, more looking for routes, more climbing and generally having an awesome time. The quality of the routes was amazing. Everything we climbed was amazing. I did some of the best climbing I've ever done and by Friday I felt so in the grove. I felt like I could have climbed anything, but sadly we had to leave the next day. I could have stayed a whole other week (or year). I would tell you more about the climbing but only a select few of you who read this would really want me to talk about this awesome laybacks and the rough J-tree like granite that shredded my hands or like how this one crimp was so crimpy that i totally had to like, you know, crimp it. You'll just have to come visit me for those stories. Or better yet, we can go back to Ogawayama and you can see for yourself!
What you all would LOVE to read about though is how Jonn climbed a climb naked. That was awful and hillarious at the same time.
I didnt get to meet the people whom I had met the first time I went :( I couldnt find them. it would have been awesome if I could have. Maybe next year.
Saturday was the crazy day. We packed up camp and struck out around 10 I think. We drove all the way from Nagano back up to a point about 60 or 70k south of the Ferry departure point for Hokkaido. The drive was long, uneventful and boring. We rolled into Aomori and met some really cool girls who Jonn knew who had just gotten back from there own crazy trip. They mopeded around the peninsula for a week. With headphones on. In the rain. Yeah they were crazy but also super cool.
We crashed with one of them and then got up and again didnt leave early. Instead we left late and then drove up to the aborted-babies shrine that is like semi-inside of a volcano like thingy. Thats the best way I can describe it. The place was crazy and really kinda creepy and the whole thing reeked of Sulphur. I took pictures.
We left of for the ferry and drove like maniacs, but when we pulled up it was already 500 meters off-shore, chugging away for Hokkaido, leaving us on the shore with two options: swim or wait.
We waited.
The next ferry came like, 5 hours later or something. We got on, got off and then drove to Jonn's house. Cars were un and re-loaded. Greg and I bid farewell and then he and I drove to Sapporo. This is were Darren, my eternal hero, comes into the story.
You see because we missed the ferry, I couldnt ride the last bus back to haboro. It left sapporo at 6pm, and I didnt get into sapporo until 10:30 at night. Had it not been for Darren my only option would have been to spend the night in Sapps town and then take a day or half-day off on Monday, thus using up my precious paid-vacation days. But instead he drove 45 minutes south, picked me up at sapporo at 10:30, then drove me 3 hours north to my town, dropped me off at 1:30am, then drove 2:30 hours back to his town down south, thus getting home around 4am. We all had school on Monday, which it already was. I at least got 5 hours of sleep. Darren got like 3. I owe you one man.
So all in all it was an awesomly awesome week with a crapy ending.
I am back in Haboro now safe and sound. I am going to the islands this week from Wednesday to Friday. I am looking foward to it. Hopefully the weather will hold and i wont get stuck on Yagishiri. Thats what happened last time. so I was going to upload pictures and edit this thing, but I am too tired right now, so thats all you get. I promise I will get them up tomorrow though!
Peace, love
Jesse = Happy
Ah yes, the happy-flake, as I called it. It was really close to the top of pitch 1 (you can see Jon's foot) and it was a much needed rest.
