Granada

Winter in Hokkaido

Hot and sunny Okinawa is a beautiful place, but apart from a slight decrease in sunlight intensity, winters do not – contrary to what the locals insist – ever actually get cold. And although the shiny red hibiscus flowers are beautiful, they are no poinsettias.

So after several busy busy autumn months at work, I foraged around the back of my closet for my mothball-smelling seaters and winter jackets, and set off northwards in search of Winter!

As it was, I nearly died of heat stroke walking down the to the bus stop on that very sunny 20°C Chrisrtmas day in Okinawa! But Winter same soon enough as we stepped out of the low-cost aircraft on the tarmac of Osaka airport, and had to walk to the (unheated) terminal building in a blistering wind and inhuman (by Okinawan standards) 8°C. Luckily, they did have heat in the main waiting lounge, and after a slight re-arrangement of sweaters upon my body, I was soon off to Hokkaido.

I had gone in search of snow, and was not disappointed as the plane dropped low over a white expanse of runway.

Having seen my snow, I was now ready to go back home, and I still had a week to enjoy the food, hot thermal springs and snow world of Hokkaido with my friend Nozomi and her brother from Soleil-Oppama!

And her awesome Daihatsu Mini look-alike!

One of the few things I had had time to prepare for this trip was a day doing cross-country skiing. With so many volcanoes and hills, Hokkaido is one of the few places flat enough to have cross-country ski paths. We rented gear at one park right outside Sapporo, and had a very fun afternoon zooming along, with only a few mishaps on the steeper hills.

Setting off for the 6 km track.

A bit of a tricky corner (I was on the ground, too)

Goal!

It was so fun, we went around the 3km track too, just to go past a second time.

Our next Hokkaido experience was ice fishing for wakasagi smelt on a big lake in south-central Hokkaido. We drove up to the town of Furano, right at the base of a huge ski complex, and from there, a bus took us to the lake where small tents had been set up for fishing.

Nozomi, her brother and I shared the tent with a man and his son, and we had quite a productive morning, everyone catching at least 4 fish.

The staff then fried them up right there on the lake, and they were the sweetest, freshest fish I have ever tasted.

My last day in Hokkaido, we went bird watching with some park rangers I had also previously met in Yokosuka. Most of the birds have gone south already, but we did get to see a pair of woodpeckers, and might have spotted one of the very rare black woodpeckers (but it was flying too fast for us to confirm that).

As the start of the New Year is a very important family occasion in Japan, I flew out of Hokkaido on December 31st. But because neither low-cost airlines nor Okinawan bus services are known for their convenient timing, I had to spend the night in Osaka and continue my voyage home on January 1st.
I had hoped to observe the fireworks in Osaka from the airport, but the airport observation tower is closed at night, and I couldn't, at already 11:30, make in in to Osaka before midnight.

CEO of Peach Airlines giving out gift cards

So I didn't get to see any New Year's festivities, but I did exchange joyful 'Happy New Year's with the other couple of voyagers spending the night at the airport. But the rather sad mood was changed in the morning when the CEO of Peach airlines came in person to the departure terminal at 6 am!!! to with us a Happy New Year and inaugurate a new route! Every person flying peach that morning even received a 1000¥ bonus gift!

Happy 2015 to you all!

May your paths take you to many new and interesting places!

10,000 Eisa dancers

It was a bright and sunny day….

… and the great Hulk was off to relax a bit at the beach.


Yesterday was held the 10,000-dancer Eisa festival in Naha.

By which name they mean the main shopping street in Naha was packed from one end to the other by all the local Eisa-dancing groups, all whirling and drumming in synch to the songs played over the loudspeakers.

A most enjoyable whirlwind of colours, drums and happy faces.

Shinsei-maru

Back on mainland Japan, for a 10 day cruise on the Shinsei-maru, the new ship built to replace the Tansei-maru when it was retired last year.

After an early flight into Tokyo, I raced off to JAMSTEC to pack up one of their microscopes and some extra sample jars, as I haven't quite gotten the OIST lab up to cruise specs yet. Then off to Tokyo university to help pack the cruise stuff on the truck. The truck, which turned out to be 2 huge trucks, in fact. Although there were only 2 more scientists than are usually on a Tansei cruise, the amount of stuff everyone brought seems to have increased twofold. But we've all done this before, and soon both trucks were on their way, and, after a small pit-stop to see the Sky Tree in Tokyo and meet up with all the Oppama folks, I followed suit and took a Shinkansen up to Sendai.

I had visited the Shinsei-maru when it first came to JAMSTEC last autumn, but it's different actually going on a cruise, and so after a relatively quick unpacking, we spent a busy afternoon deciding where everyone should be, what we should do with all this stuff we had brought along, and finding where the spare hooks were hidden (under the sink, of course!).

I then had a morning free, so went to visit the site where Sendai castle used to stand, and got to see the famous statue of the founder Date Masamune, and his awesome helmet.

Then it was time to go!

And with style, please!

It was the first time on this ship for many of us, and we got a good slap of 'this is how we do it, boys' right from the start. The ship has dynamic positioning through rotating propellers at the back, and so instead of leaving dock normally, we simply untied the ropes and swept away, parallel to the dock, until we were out in the central canal, where they put it in gear and we were off. The most quiet,  easy, and V.I.P. departure I've ever seen.

The ship control panel available as a touch screen in the lab, showing the main propellers set for a fixed station sampling.

The cruise itself went very well, with quite nice weather.

Well, mostly reasonable….

... and some pretty amazing sampling.

The CTD being deployed by its specialized crane.

One of the 2 dredges we deployed … and some of the cool stuff that came up in them.

We had the usual rocking water-plankton-bentos group, and we had half the crew and even the captain down on deck helping us fish!

Our first shark!

The captain and his optical illusion flounder

(that one was minute, but he made up for it by out fishing everyone the next day)

The boat is incredibly quiet, and it does not roll at all, ever, which made both everyday life on board and sampling very easy and relaxing, and soon we were steaming up to the JAMSTEC wharf, parallel-parking the boat just to impress everyone, and then spending the whole rest of the morning unpacking our luggage which had greatly increased in size and weight since Sendai. But more weight means more samples, and that's what we were out there for!

 Back to my hot and rather humid tropical island, but Fukushima, I'll be back!