Sorry for the long break! After Kushiro, we suddenly didn’t have any time!
Hopefully we can make up for it with more posts in the coming days!
On September 27th and 28th we were in Kushiro.
On the first day we relaxed a bit and went to a Japanese Supermarket for the first time, to buy some frsh ginger for Charlie (she was still a bit sick).
And the stereotypical Japan-story happened to us: We couldn’t find fresh ginger or personel that wasn’t occupied at the register, so we asked another customer who couldn’t find the ginger either. we thought we had settled on “生姜ないならしょうがない” (a pun: “when there’s no ginger, it can’t be helped” but it’s the same sound twice “shouga nai nara shouga nai” – Jörg was praised for his good Japanese) so we went our respective ways – or so we thought! 5 minutes later, the lady came running and told me that she found the ginger and that it only comes in huge portions though. She apparently found an employee and asked her and then she still had to find us again in this huge store, since we abandoned the thought of buying ginger that day 5 minutes ago. I guess anyone who stays in Japan for a week and interacts with the people a tiny bit probably has a story like this.
Additionally, our AirBnB host asked us what we were gonna do the next day and when we told him that we are going to take the bus to the marshlands he offered to drive us to the bus station since it is so far to walk and only 5 minutes with the car. Unfortunately we were a bit late the next day and it took more like 9 minutes with the car and so we endet up just so missing the bus, whereupon our host suggested just driving us to the marshlands himself. He didn’t even accept money for gas and the marshlands are rather outside the city!
We got lucky missing the bus though since we would have taken the bus to the observatory which has a boardwalk through the forest and is connected to the Onnenai visitor center by old train tracks that have been repurposed as a hiking path. Our plan was to first walk around the boardwalk then hike to the visitor center, but our host accidentally drove us directly to the visitor center. No problem – we’ll just do the track the other way around! However, when we asked for the busplan in the center, we were told that a bear had been sighted last week and therefore the hiking path and the whole boardwalk around the observatory had been closed off.
Originally, we would have gone to the observatory first, alighted the bus, noticed that everything is closed and would have been stuck there for 2 hours waiting for the bus to the visitor center. Luckly, like this we could just take a lot of time walking the boardwalk around the visitor center. It was interesting, but we were a bit annoyed because Charlie put so much effort into researching the trail between the two points. The trail seems to be less frequented and is barely mentioned on the internet. She had to really dig deep to find out that it actually exists. She planned a nice daytrip and now it was just closed off : (
But, as said, what we did see was nice and just at the end, someone special graced us with their presence!
Right at the beginning we saw this beauty here that seem to be utterly undisturbed by the humans on the boardwalk.
There weren’t many flowers left at this time, but we managed to spot a few.
Actually there should have been birds as well (for example cranes like the ones shown on the life-sized printouts in the visitor center), but didn’t see a single one throughout the whole hike. Only when we returned to the visitor center, we saw a single spotted woodpecker.
The bog is a bit barren, but it was fun walking through this unusual landscape. The boardwalk makes it really easy to get around and prevents you from falling into a hole which you can’t escape from. It was also an adventure trail at times. We were surprised that a construction like this has not been banned from entry in Japan, but obviously we were happy that at least this path was still open.
We were searching for a salamander that came up to a stone for sunbathing the whole time, but unfortunately we didn’t spot one. Instead, a snake suddenly appeared and let itself be photographed for a while, before slithering back into the undergrowth.
Here in the marshlands we first saw the question-and-anser-signs. By now we encountered the same design in Noboribetsu too, which leads us to believe that this might be universal in Japan. The conecept is as follows: on the first sign a question about the area will be asked and if you follow the path you’ll find another sign that gives you the answer and poses a new question. This kind of trail entertainment worked well for us, even though we got most of the questions wrong.
We walked at an extremely leasurely pace, since we had a much longer tour planned. Nontheless we were done with the trail after 2 hours and took the bus back to Kushiro.
Here we walked through a park in which we amazingly saw deer again that were just crossing the path.
What we didn’t see were other people. It almost made us a bit sad, since we are used to Hamburg in which all pretty parks are used by the residents all the time and here in Kushiro there’s a really gorgeous lake that invites you to stroll around it, but we only saw maybe 6 other people – and Kushiro is not a tiny village. We wondered whether everyone was at work?
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