Tsukuba-Dooba-Doo

Our last day on Sado Island proved to be more fruitful than any of us expected.  As we had explored much of the southern part of the island, we decided to follow the coastline north to "see what happens."  It wasn't too long before we pursued the notion of driving to some breathtaking beaches on the northern tip of the island.  If we played our cards right, we could fit in a couple of fun pit stops, stop by the northern beach, and make it back to Ryotsu Port just in time to catch our jetfoil back to mainland Japan.



Much to our surprise, the other side of the hill lead to two natural, ocean-fed, crystal clear, sun-warmed pools!  One was twice as large as the other and both were easily 8-10 feet deep.  Immediately, my brain went into overdrive as I tried to rationalize reasons to not jump in.  My swim suit was in the car....I gazed up at Katie, Nancy, and Hal as they all agreed "well, you pretty much have to!"  I leapt out of my clothes until I was in my underwear.  I did one more quick check for sharks or jellyfish and then, as they say, 'the rest is history.'     


I changed after we got back to the car, then we hit the road again.  The following hour long stretch of pavement was the craziest, curviest, narrowest, blind-corner-est road I've ever driven.  When I proceeded through the things such as blind, single lane bridge crossings into blind hairpin curves there was a deafening silence.  Often times the only indicator of oncoming traffic were strategically placed, one foot diameter, convex mirrors.  Although it was hair raising at times, we made it safely to Ohno-game (turtle).

We had the option to hike to the top of Ohno-game, but we were still sore from Fuji-san.  It was almost lunch time so we ate at the Ohno-game lodge before we drove down the road to Futatsu-game (two turtles).




I cursed the fact that I didn't have goggles, but decided a swim was utterly necessary.  The surroundings were like something out of a movie.  It was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life.  However, as we were on a tight schedule to catch out jetfoil, I couldn't swim for very long and we left.

We made our jetfoil in time and had an event-less trip back to Tsukuba.  We had made it!   

Getting from Kawaguchiko Lake to Sado Island required a cornucopia of vehicles: shuttle bus --> local train (x2) --> limited express train --> super express Shinkensen --> local bus --> Jetfoil boat --> and a rental car.  We were mostly excited to ride on the jetfoil!


A jetfoil is a boat which has jet engines and hydrofoils underneath that lift it above the water at certain speeds (same principals as airplanes).  The huge reduction in drag allows it to travel very fast for a passenger ferry.  Our ferry got up to about 45 mph, it reduced our travel time on the water from 2.5 hours to 1 hour, AND the ride was as smooth as a baby's bottom.
   
Upon our arrival on Sado Island, we rented a car and drove to our hotel.  We were greeted by an amazing hotel staff at Hotel Aikawa Yamaki and were shown our rooms.  Luckily, their staff let us get settled in without the hour long lecture we had received the previous night.  First on the agenda was a hotel-sponsored dinner.



With our bellies properly stuffed, we started our walk to a performing arts show down the street.  Just outside our hotel we could see a fantastic sunset across the Sea of Japan.


The show we were about to see was the official "kick off" show of the Earth Celebration, which just so happened to be going on that weekend.  It was to be performed on a Noh Theatre  and was a trifecta of traditional Japanese performing arts.


I must admit, I didn't do an inkling of research beforehand.  Sooooo....during the entire 90 minute show, I had no idea what was going on.  Listen to this audio of the first performance I recorded as you read the rest of the description of the show (below).  This should help set the mood. 


As far as I could tell, the first show told the tale of a samurai fighting a ghost.  This was accomplished through a hodgepodge of chanting, singing, drums, flutes, and a guy in a mask doing gestures on stage.  It was cool, but from my ignorant-non-Japanese speaking-ADD-American perspective, it was painfully long and bland.  The next performance was a wordplay based battle between two Japanese gods...?  The Japanese audience members seemed to really enjoy it, but it was monologue and dialogue heavy.  Naturally, I resorted to thumb twiddling for entertainment.  The final performance was the most entertaining and perplexing show of the night, Tsuru-nyobo.


This is what I thought happened based on what I saw:
An injured crane is rescued by a man...the crane flies around, plays with the man, is happy, then sad, then dies, then recovers, then dies, then lives, then plays, then dies, then comes back to life, then flies away forever...the man is sad.  

This is what it's really about:
Once upon a time, a young man rescued an injured crane.  As a gesture of its appreciation to him, the crane turned into a beautiful girl and then went to the home of the young man to become his wife. Having become wife of the young man, the crane told the young man he should never see it when It was at work. Then the crane went into a weaving shop. It wove clothes with the feathers pulled off its body. The clothes were sold at high prices. One day, the young man felt anxiety and peeped into the weaving shop. There, he saw a crane weaving clothes with its own feathers.  With its identity known to the young man, the crane flew away to join its friends.

Hey, at least I got the first part right, right!?  Actually, the interpretive dancer is very famous in Japan and is quite good at what he does.  After the show we walked back to the hotel scratching our heads as we tried to make sense of what just happened.  It wasn't too long before it was lights out.


The next day we took the car up the coast to do a glass bottom boat tour.  We were on the boat for at least 30 minutes and it wasn't until we exited that we noticed a Japanese man wearing a University of New Mexico shirt!  But wait, there's more...I just so happened to have thrown on my New Mexico State University shirt that morning.  As it turns out, he and his family lived in Albuquerque for a couple years AND now they live only a stones throw away from Tsukuba.  Truly crazy.

We still had some time to kill before heading down to the Earth Celebration so we got a little more familiar with the island's unique beauty.


Determined to get in the crystal clear water, we then found a beach and took an hour to swim around.


Finally, it was off to the Earth Celebration.  While there, we browsed around the shops and food vendors.  The main attraction, however, was the performance of KODO.



KODO is a drum group who play the traditional Japanese "taiko" drums.  In many ways, they're all about being BIG.  Big muscular dudes hitting big drums with big sticks.  You could feel the testosterone pumping in the air!  Don't feel bad for the ladies, though.  As if watching these gods-among-men perform their brutish ballet wasn't enough, KODO would occasionally slow it down with very talented female drummers.  All in all, I was blown away and highly recommend it.

We had done it. The four of us had scaled Mt. Fuji and lived to tell about it.  Now we had a date with those sexy, yet often elusive twins, Ms. Rest and Ms. Relaxation.  I had penciled them into my calendar at as-soon-as-possible 'o clock.  There was one problem though, we had gotten back from Mt. Fuji 5th station too early and our hotel at Kawaguchiko Lake wouldn't let us check in.  They did, however, allow us to drop off our luggage and change clothes.  I had a bad case of HBO (horrible body odor) since I hadn't changed since we left Tsukuba.

Feeling somewhat refreshed, we left the hotel in search of something that would kill a couple hours.  You would think that a town situated perfectly at the foot of one Japan's most popular tourist attractions would have tons of interesting things to do.  You would think, but you would be wrong.  Our options were essentially these:


Influenced by the appeal of a 'leisurely' cruise, we chose item 1).   


The boat ride was pretty nice, although it wasn't as long as we had hoped for at twice the price.  Afterward, we perused the shops and quickly discovered that each one was a carbon copy of the previous shop.  The four of us found a bench under some shade and lounged.  It got really interesting when an ambulance and fire truck came to the lake and took a lady away.  Our conclusion, following much debate, was that she was having a baby. 

Still one hour away from our expected check in time, we started walking toward a park, but noticed other people getting checked into our hotel!  I thought to myself 'Oh I hope they let us check in!' and they did.  Finally, we could get in our rooms, relax, and do things on our own time...or so we thought.

An assistant grabbed some of our bags and led us to our rooms.  Before we could say "chopsticks" our hostess popped out of nowhere, introduced herself, and started an unnecessarily long rundown of dinner, breakfast, how to wear our yukatas, ect, ect.  I really started to get worried when she started showing us maps of the fire exits.  'Pleeeeeeeeease let us just relax in our rooms!'  She even insisted on giving a yukata demo using Hal as a model.   


Finally, when I was about at the point of tears, our hostess left and we were able to take several hours to rest.  We immediately plopped our heads down and napped for a couple hours in our respective rooms until it was time for dinner.  Keep in mind, we really hadn't slept since we left Tsukuba on our way to climb Mt. Fuji.

Dinner was a full-on, no holds barred, Japanese dinner.  It was served in Hal and Nancy's room and we all dressed up in our yukatas. 


As you can see, each of us had about a dozen different menu items.  This proved to be a tricky circumstance on account of Katie's shellfish allergy.  Those Japanese people can sneak shrimp into anything (i.e. egg pudding, semi-transparent jell stuff, sauce).   

 
  


Here is a photo of our onsen on our balcony.  Onsens are traditional Japanese hot baths which are located all over Japan in many hotels and resorts.  Usually, you are asked to bathe first so you get in clean.  Did I mention that you are expected to be naked?  Obviously this wasn't an issue for our personal tub, but for westerners it can feel pretty awkward in the public ones (trust me).

After a relaxing soak, we hit the hay because we would be heading to Sado Island early the next morning!

-Seth

"If you never climb Mt. Fuji once, you are a fool.  If you climb it twice, you are twice the fool" 

Immediately after deciding to come to Japan, conquering Mt. Fuji jumped to the top of my "I-must-do-these-things-or-I'm-an-idiot" list.  In fact, I remember the exact moment, way back in February, when Nancy said that she and Hal wanted to climb it with us.  Word on the street is that watching the sun rise from the top of Mt. Fuji is breathtaking.  So, our plan was to hike up to a mountain hut, sleep for a couple hours, then wake up and finish the hike in time to watch the sun rise.  

Mt. Fuji, or Fuji-san, is one of Japan's most iconic natural wonders.  Its almost perfect cone towers over the land at 3776 m (12,388 ft or 2.3 miles) high.  About 10 months out of the year it is snow capped, which saturates the trails in July-August with an insane frenzy of summit seekers.  We aimed to be among these crowds vying for a spot up top.

In order to get to the trail-head (5th station) by 1:00pm, we had to leave Tsukuba by 7:25am.  5 hours, 5 trains, and 1 bus ride later we were welcomed by hundreds of people at the 5th station.  



As soon as we steeped off of the bus we were hit with an air of excitement.  It took half an hour to check out the area and buy some climbing sticks.  These aren't just any climbing sticks!  These are official Mt. Fuji climbing sticks!  This means that along ascent, as you pass the stations you can get that station's logo burned onto your stick.  By the end of the hike, most of the real estate on your stick is filled up with these cool logos.  Most of these also have the elevation of that station and the year.  Pretty sweet, huh?  Below is a photo of mine after half of the hike. 


Ok, so after all that jazz, we finally started the hike.  It all felt very surreal to finally be on the trail at Mt. Fuji.  Everyone was super excited and full of energy.  As we walked along the first stretch, we passed people who were just finishing.  In retrospect, I should have gotten a clue from the people who looked like they had just come from a long, fierce battle.  However, my blissfulness blinded me as I practically skipped along the trail for the first 30 minutes.    



There isn't too much to be said about the climb except that it was harder than I thought.  There are some sections that are fairly steep.  Not to mention, there are times where you have to stand in line as the masses bottleneck. 



This is where we were assigned to sleep...ugh...I could devote an entire post to the sleeping experience, but I will try to be brief.  As you can see we are are very close together and I was sleeping about 3" from another lady on my right.  That mixed with the cold, noises, bright lights, vibrations from people walking around, and overall discomfort meant that none of us slept more than a wink.  


It was definitely more crowded at these early hours than it was during the day.  As we looked down the mountain side, we could see a river of lights trickling up the mountain.  By 3am we had finally staggered through he gates at the top. There were already a huge plethora of people up top and from the looks of the river of lights down the mountain, there were going to be a lot more.  We decided to stake out a good spot and wait.  We waited for over an hour in crazy coldness and then finally....walaaa!  






Quite frankly we were too tired to gawk at the top for too long so we started our descent.  Again...this was harder than I thought it would be.  You have to take a different trail going down, which amounts to about 4 hours of rocky, slippery, quad-killing switchbacks.  

"The Lewins are coming! The Lewins are coming!"  Although I wasn't yelling this on horseback like Paul Revere, this phrase kept running through my mind as I tried to fall asleep the night before Katie's parents arrived in Japan for their 8 day visit.

It was guaranteed to be a full throttle week jam-packed with everything Japan has to offer: squeezing through its crowded train stations (Tokyo), sitting atop its highest mountain (Mt. Fuji), and swimming in its crystal clear waters (Sea of Japan). All the while, we would be taking in the both traditional and contemporary culture.  However, before we could do all of this fantastic stuff, we had to rent a car and pick up Hal and Nancy from the airport.

 
Honestly, I wasn't too nervous about renting a car with the steering wheel on the right side and driving on the left side of the road.  It was very black and white for me:  I'm either going to kill us within 5 minutes, or we will be fine.  Once we got the first couple of white-knuckled turns over with, it became second nature.  Actually, not driving any sort of motorized vehicle for 5 months probably helped me with the transition. 


We cruised to the airport and were happy to see that Hal and Nancy made it here without incident.  After a brief Hallmark moment, we loaded their/our luggage (we made them bring about 50 lbs. of food) into the car and puttered back to Tsukuba.  On the way back we spotted a BIG Buddha towering over the treeline.  Since we had the car for 24 hours, we planned to seek this out the following morning.  Once we were back to the Ninomiya House, Hal and Nancy unpacked and went to bed.  Katie and I frantically unpacked our ridiculous amounts of American food such as popcorn, green chili, and beef jerky.  Christmas came early for the Walkers!    

The next day everyone woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed.  Hal and Nancy seemed relatively unaffected from jet lag so we made short work of breakfast and headed to the big Buddha.  I don't think you understand when I say big Buddha...its really big, like Guinness Book of World Records big!  Its about 430 feet tall, which is more than twice the height of the statue of liberty.  Once again...BIG!


There were some gorgeous flower beds and paper lanterns all around the area so we took pictures. 





Later that night we had a reservation at the apartment for the 9th floor "Communication Salon" which is spacious room with a small kitchen, pool table, piano, big screen TV, and a stellar view of Tsukuba.  The Haines family joined us as we enjoyed sushi, wine, cheese, and sake.  I had a wonderful time relaxing and shooting the breeze with everyone for a couple of hours.  I tried to savior every moment because the next day was TOKYO.