Day 24 Japan - driving Hokkaido, Shiretoko and stargazing

15 September
Day 24 Japan

Was up pretty early to start my driving today.  I had a number of places I wanted to try and visit over the next couple of days.  I wanted to focus mostly on nature stuff while I was on Hokkaido since that's largely what the Japanese see this place as.  So I was focusing on things like waterfalls or nice gorges or caves or whatever.  Some of them were on the very far east of the island so I figured I would head to those first.  The car rental lady assured me I would be able to do it in half a day or so.

Plugged in my GPS and headed towards Shiretoko National Park.  There are a bunch of waterfalls, lakes, mountains and whatnot out this way.

There was a failure at my second my toll gate.  As part of driving here I rented an ETC pass which I assume stands for Electronic Toll Card.  Drive through the toll thing and the boom gate automatically opens when it detects the card.  However the ETC lane was out of commission on the first toll gate I passed through and the toll officer gave me a paper ticket.  It was of course all written in Japanese and the guy couldn't explain to me what I was supposed to do with it so I just ignored it and continued driving.

I got to the second toll gate and the ETC wouldn't work.  I was holding up this line of traffic ... couldn't reverse to get out of the way and couldn't go forward.  After a couple of minutes this tinny voice comes out of the speakers and I say the magic word ... "English?"  A little man comes in uniform comes scurrying out of the toll booth and directs me to the carpark next to the toll office.  Uh oh.  Is my pass broken?  He's trying to talk to me and get me to give him something when eventually he says something like "ticketu" and I remember the piece of paper the previous toll guy gave me.  He smiles and nods then takes the ticket and my ETC and runs off into the office for a few minutes.

He comes back out after about 10 minutes all smiles, plugs the ETC back in with a bit of help from his mate then says I can go.  I assume they processed a manual payment or something.  The card worked at the next toll booth so whatever he did worked.  Thanks Toll Booth Willy!

A couple of rants.
1. Japanese speed limits
What the actual fuck!  The maximum speed limit I saw on a highway was 70 km/h and many roads were 50 km/h.  Do you have any idea how long it takes to get anywhere going 70 km/h?  Less than 70 kilometres in an hour is the answer.  The roads and cars here are so good I don't understand why the speed limit is so low.  I think it's this quality that makes it so frustrating.  In Mongolia we were going incredibly slowly at times because the roads were absolutely rubbish so it wasn't annoying.  Here you can see what's possible vs what's expected.

Neither does anyone else in Japan according to the speed at which everyone was driving.  You would run into enough people doing the speed limit that it was annoying but everyone else was driving at 90 or 100 or 120 or 140.  Basically I'd say 80% of people simply ignored the speed limit and drove at whatever speed they felt comfortable with.  Once I decided to do that also I started to have a much better time driving.  There were a few things which looked like speed cameras around but everyone ignored them so I can only assume they don't work or are not acted on.

2. Reckless driving
Of course once you have people deciding what other rules they get to ignore.  People overtaking at 150 km/h around blind corners, parking in the middle of bridges to take a photo or pulling over randomly and smashing the brakes to stop.  The worst was a guy who was tailgating other cars with literally 1 metre between cars (could tell from the shadows) and trying to pressure them into going faster.

3. Single Lane Highways with no overtaking allowed
Not only are you driving incredibly slowly in some areas you're also not allowed to overtake people.  This isn't unique to Japan but is incredibly frustrating due to the slow speed limits.

Once you get over that the scenery around Hokkaido is absolutely beautiful.  Mountains, lakes, river and forests everywhere.  It's not pristine - there is development and buildings nearly everywhere - but it is gorgeous.  It reminds me a lot of driving around New Zealand but NZ has far fewer people and far more sensible speed limits.

Given the speed issues and the number of traffic lights everywhere it took far longer for me to get to Shiretoko than I expected (Google estimate plus 30% or so) so I could already tell I wasn't going to hit all the places I wanted to.

Shiretoko was beautiful.  Mountains and ocean.  A beautiful drive up the coast approaching the town.

My first stop was the Oshinkoshin waterfall.  This was right on the highway approaching town so extremely easy to get to.

Shiretoko town has a few interesting rock formations outside it.  I particularly liked the huge rock with a profile like a turtle but there was no convenient place to pull over to get a picture :(.  I did stop at a lookout though for a decent picture of the coastline.

Headed towards the Kamuiwakkayu Falls next.  Had to go down a nice dirt road for about 20 minutes to get there.  The falls themselves were nice but not spectacular.  More of a river running slowly down some rocks than a waterfall unless it was a bit more impressive further up.  This one is famous because it's a waterfall that is sourced by hot spring water so the fall itself is warm.  You can climb a bit of a way up the rocks here as well and there are some really nice pools there.  Probably not advised to swim in the though!  The water is slightly acidic so after climbing around for 10 or 15 minutes I started to feel my feet tingle.  Probably good for my skin though I have a small blister on my right foot (curse you new thongs!) that was a bit tender after this.

I did a terrible job of reversing the van into the car park here but we don't need to talk about that.  It's big and boxy and the turning circle is not what I'm used to!

I met a Malaysian couple here who have been travelling around Hokkaido for the last 3 weeks and still reckon they haven't scratched the surface.  Kind of puts my 2-3 days to shame!

After this I head down the road to the Shiretoko Five Lakes.  5 lakes you can do a hike around in bear country.  Exciting!  Unfortunately I arrived about 15 minutes too late to hike around all 5 lakes (they closed the trail at 4pm) but I did do the shorter walk which only takes about 40 minutes and only goes past 2 of the lakes.  The lakes I saw are nice but nothing particularly special.  Only 2 or 3 metres deep.  I think the special thing about this area is that it has a large bear population.

They take bear warnings pretty seriously!  They won't let you on the trail until you sit through a 10 minute video on what to do if you come across a bear and talk from a park ranger about the area.  They had bear sightings on the trail 9 out of the last 14 days.  I liked this poster they had.  I wonder what the bear does with the permit if you run across one.  Do bears keep a food scrapbook?

All trails finish with the same wooden walkway which gives some pretty nice views of the lake, mountains and the ocean.  There's apparently a big storm coming across Japan at the moment but I'm not seeing much trace of it in Hokkaido.  Blue skies this afternoon.  Maybe that was it blowing over last night.

I had originally planned to drive through the the Shiretoko pass and explore there but since it took so long to get out here I didn't have time.  The sun was going down so I headed back towards Shiretoko to watch the sunset from the top of a lookout in town.     Sunset was pretty boring and a bit of a non-event.  Well - boring in the sense that it was just a sunset and there were no spectacular colours or anything in the clouds.  It was nice though.

I hadn't booked accommodation for tonight yet and there was nothing reasonably priced in this area so I contemplated sleeping in the car tonight.  Given that was on my mind I decided to drive a couple of hours south and inland to make tomorrow a bit better for exploration.

If I was sleeping in the car then whatever - doesn't matter where I park. If I decide I don't want to there are more options for accommodation further south.  So I retrace my steps and drive towards Lake Kussharo which on my list.  I passed through a small town called Kawayu near the lake and had a pee stop.  They had a public hot spring foot bath near the tourist centre so I sat down there with my feet in the steaming water and decided it was too damn cold and I'm not poor enough to have to sleep in a car.  So I fired up my phone and found a guesthouse about 20 minutes drive away near lake Kussharo so booked a bed there at about 8pm and headed over.

Turned out to be a really good decision.  The guesthouse was really nice.  A really interesting building for a guesthouse.  Bit central space with almost a spire so the ceilings were really high and guest rooms all opening out onto the central space.  Difficult to describe but it was a really cool facility.  I arrived and the staff had to check their email to get the booking but I had a bed and the place was cozy for the night.  Went down to the common room to do some writing at the table and ended up chatting with an Indian guy who lives in Malaysia and runs I think a Microsoft call centre for local language support in Sapporo.

One of the girls who works there speaks pretty good English and joined us for a couple of hours so she could practice.  We had a good chat.  The sky was really clear tonight as well so we went out and did some stargazing after that.  Not a lot of light pollution in this area so the stars are really excellent.  It's no Mongolian meteor shower but it was great.  And damned cold.  I decided the best way to see the stars would be the lie on the road instead of craning my neck.  I was right.  But the road was god damn cold and I started shivering pretty quickly.  Maybe not such a great idea.  Still - it was the best way to see the stars.

Because the sky was so clear one of the girls recommended a local thing called the "sea of clouds" for sunrise the following morning.

There's a local observatory on top of a mountain next to the lake where the clouds are lower than the viewpoint.  When it's not overcast and conditions are right the sun tends to make beautiful patterns on top of the clouds.  Sounded interesting so I decided that I would get up and check that out in the morning.

Ended up chatting for a while longer then went to bed around midnight which was going to make for very few hours sleep!