Asahidake

After 3 years in Japan, I have finally gotten to Hokkaido!

And to start off with the big picture, we headed up to the central part of Hokkaido, to climb Asahidake, the tallest mountain on the island. We set up camp at the base of the mountain, with a nice warm, tasty curry for dinner, and only a couple million mosquitoes.

In the morning, we set off up the cable car to the base, with a beautiful view over the surrounding hills and valleys.

Asahidake

A live volcano, one whole side has small steam and sulfer vents sprouting up here and there. The hiking path meanders along the side of this valley, and up a ridge to the top, 2290.9m above sea level. 

The fog arrived just as we reached the top, but that merely gave the snow field we found on the other side a more wintery touch. 

A long chain of people was making its way down the snow field as we got there, but we took the fun route down and ran/slod out way to the bottom, picking up a stranded and nearly dead dragonfly en route, and carrying it to safety, a coupe minutes down the road, when it had finally warmed up enough to fly off. 

On the other side of Asahidake, a series of hills and valleys, a mix between Star Wars and the Canadian Rockies. A Hokkaido bear was sighted further up the large valley, but our path led away to the other side of the ridge, and back into green, lush valleys.

At the edge of a small stream, another small steam and sulfer vent bubbled up, creating a lovely, if somewhat smelly, little hydrothermal pool. 

Following the stream that quickly got much larger as meltwater flowed into it, the path continued on a series of wooden pathways through flowered meadows and snowy streams.

A 6-hour hike, but mostly spend wandering quietly amongst beautiful mountainsides, flowered valleys and wonderful views of the surrounding countryside.

An absolutely magnificent start to my visit to Hokkaido!

Yuka mammoth

Have just come back from an amazing exhibit focussing on the baby mammoth found in the siberian permafrost about 10 years ago.

The 39 000 year old mammoth, called Yuka, and a mummified wolly rhinoceros, also from the permafrost, have come to Yokohama for the summer.

Yuka was found sticking out of a river bank in Siberia close to where a group of mammoth hunters usually work. They dug it out, kept it on ice, literally (i.e. they left it outside in the snow - this is siberia, after all), and called the museum.

I had already read about Yuka when it was discovered, and how it is the best-preserved and most complete mammoth ever found, still in it's thick coat of fuzzy orange fur.

But what I did not know is that it was so well-preserved it still had its brain, and they have managed to take it out of the skull in one piece, and are now looking into how mammoths thought and such.

"That's where we cut it open, see?"

They have also noticed quite a few chunks of flesh missing, possibly cut out by early humans. The humans might have actually have made it possible for us to find Yuka, by burying the remains of the body so as to come back for it later.... and never coming back.

The riverbanks in that area have also produced half a horse, a near-complete whooly rhinoceros, and innumerable bones, tusk, teeth of other mammoths, bison and small antelope-type things.
Must be quite gruesome taking a hike around there if you haven't been warned....

Hawaiian corals and genomics

Off to Hawaii for and intensive 10 days of holiday sympsium on corals and new genomic technologies, with a few other animals thrown in!

Great place, great weather, awsome talks, and millions of ideas generated and swirling around, which was the whole point of getting lots of scientists and students talking around a beer table!

Absolutely horrific sea cucumbers....

The home of the wild Hydra 

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More horrific sea cucumbers, this time gobbling down coral spawn....

Teenager albatross in the Ka'ena point reserve.

大野山 hiking

Tired off my old backyard Miura peninsula, I packed up a sandwitch bag, tied up my hiking boots and set off to a bit of real countryside. That is, countryside so far removed as to be outside the range of the automatic ticket machines, and where you actually have to buy a paper train ticket from the conductor.

大野山 is a nice-sized hill about 2 hours West of Yokohama, and is famous for the view of Mt. Fuji from the top, the green pastures, and black and white cows.

The track is a pleasant 2 hours walking from he train station to the top, along beautiful forest tracks and small countryside roads. Wildlife was everywhere, with blue-tailed skinks darting into the undergrowth, huge lazy butterflies flitting around, large spotty-legged daddy-long-legs gracefuly meandering amidst the tree roots and, the paths being quite frequented, the giant spiders and even more humongous sticky webs were mainained at a safe distance from average head hight.

Nearly to the top, a small carved rabbit kindly informs visitors we have now reached 634m, the height of the Sky Tree, the tallest building in Japan.

And out you pop from the forests, into open pastures of knee-high lush grass and armies of red and blue libellula (or what wikipedia tells me are commonly called skimmers).

The view over the southern-most South Alps, to the North and East,

and over the plains surrounding Sagami Bay was breathtaking.

And there were, indeed, some black and white cows, although, like any sensible animal, they were engaged in a midday nap when I passed by.

hiking in the rain

It's like splashing your way along a sidewalk with your umbrella, but you do it on a forest trail. Tap dancing is not encouraged. Singing is fine, but it appears to bother the cicadas somewhat, and, as I soon found out, they have a tendancy to dive bomb anything that bothers them.

It felt good to get back up into the forests in central Miura peninsula, wading my way through exhuberant greenery. I haven't been hiking around here for so many months, it was almost a pleasure to get back into the cicada-infested woods, with flies, bees and mosquitoes zooming everywhere. I had, somehow, forgotten just how big the spiders get, and just how huge and sticky they think their webs needs to be. But then again, if they're planning to catch those 10-cm wingspan butterflied that flit around the underbrush, maybe big is better!

The rain, coming in fast and erratic downpours, gave quite a springy feel to it all. This was added to by the huge flocks of Japanese quail clucking around the forest floor. And believe me, these here quails have no trouble flying at all! Back to the biology books - part 1.

Another thing undoubtedly brought out by the rain was a sort of white, soft-looking crab. Now I've seen a few of these dead in streams, but this one was quite alive, and we must have been over a kilometer from the nearest stream at that point. Everyone knows of coconut crabs, but small forest crabs live in temperate forests? Back to the biology books -part2!

Other critters out on the move were about 5 herons, all fishing in the same stream, a big crow trying to eat a large red fresh-water crayfish that wasn't dead and was not giving in. I ended up staring at the crow till it went away, and last I saw of the crayfish was a swirl of murky water as it scuttled back under its tuft of grass. I also saw a snake who was having some difficulty with the slippery mud of the hillside, but as I was having a bit of trouble coping with the steep, slick path, I didn't stick around.

After 4 hours of tromping around, and still managing to get utterly lost, despite the numeroushikes I've done around there, I finally made my way back to the station, and to some drier clothes. The biology lessons can continue, though, as there is just as much wildlife around my room as in the forest, with huge batalions of cicadas in the trees, and this cute little gecko that came to look in the window at me.