Part 1: Mount Aso – peek climbing

Welcome the first of five blog posts covering my travels around Japan between the 25th of December and the New Year.

Prepare to scale heights, plunge into the anime world of Akihabara, view the awesome food I’ve eaten, and more. The picto-blog will take you on a journey to experience a slice of Japan.

The journey began on a clear, yet cold, Christmas Day, catching a Shinkansen to Mount Aso. This was the FIRST time I’ve been on a shinkansen, and it didn’t disappoint.

Smiling me. I went from Hiroshima to Hakata to Kumamoto to Mount Aso.

There are lots of different types of Shinkansens. Hikari, Kodama, Nozumi, Ariake. They use different trains and have different speeds (both train and number of stops wise). Kodama is the slowest, and Nozumi is the fastest. Ariake is specific to Kyushuu (I believe). This is the Ariake. Kind looks like a prison train to me.

The Ariake is a pretty funky train. It’s very compartmentalised, this is the compartment I was in. You can also see that the overhead storage is like that of a plane. Swanky eh.

On Japanese trains and buses, you’re not meant to talk on your mobile. You will see lots and lots of people sms-ing, playing games, reading ebooks etc, but if your phone rings, everyone will glare at you, and sometimes the conductor will even put an announcement asking you to switch your phone to silent and not talk on the train. On Shinkansen’s, you have to go into the corridor sections, or use special compartments like this one below.

I spent something like 5 hours travelling from Hiroshima to Mount Aso, by three Shinkansen’s, two trains and a bus. I won’t bore you with my scenery shots, but this shot was taken at 10x zoom, and I thought was pretty cool. Wind power ftw!

Now we come to the Mount Aso volcano caldera area.

It’s the largest active caldera in the world. The last major blast was in 1993, but there have been explosions over the past 300 000 years. The crater has a 128km circumference.

I actually didn’t go up to the crater (they run a cable car up to it), but stopped 5 minutes away at the Museum/Observatory. When I got there, I saw a neighbouring hill behind the complex, and spied a path at the top of it. I thought it would be a great place to get an awesome view of the crater.

Zoom on a camera ftw. This is a zoomed-in picture taken of the path from the mountain in the picture aove that I saw from the complex.

There were busloads of tourists, chinese, japanese and korean, but avoiding them, I struck out on a path heading in a likely direction. After a few ups and downs and lefts and rights, I came to a crossroad, and naturally, chose the road less travelled (or most weathered).

It wasn’t easy, both the path and the weather.

It was blowing a GALE the higher I got. I was almost knocked down several times, and when it got REALLY bad, I actually had to lie on the ground, to be shielded partially from the wind by the grass. ==” Did I mention it was COLD? There was no snow, but there was ice around.

Even though I was freezing, the view from the top was simply spectacular, and worth every step.

Pictures are worth a thousand words.

And this one is prob worth two thousand. The wind was SO strong, not to mention I was looking into the sun.

It was amazing. I called this post “peek climbing”, because I was climbing another mountain to “peek” at the Mount Aso volcano. After getting off the mountain, I made the trek back to Kumamoto, and went to defrost in the hotel bath.

Tomorrow’s blog post will cover my adventures in Kumamoto City, then following blogs will adventure to sushi train, Tokyo and my growing anime collection.

Stay tuned!