hey all,
This is going to have to be rather short as well. I have about 500 things on my to-do list, and like the mythical hydra of yore...you get the idea.
Michi and I made it up to Aomori station where we parted ways. She went to the wedding, and I went to Hirosaki, to see Hirosaki Castle.
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| Some art/sculpture on the way to Hirosaki castle from the station. |
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| A still blooming cherry tree near the castle. |
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| Hirosaki Castle |
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| This is crazily delicious! It is mango flavored soda/jello with chunks of nata de coco thrown in for good measure. |
Afterwards, we met up again and spent the night in Aomori City. The next morning we traveled to the Towada Lake area, which is famous for the eponymous crater lake, and for the Oirase River, which has lots and lots of waterfalls on it. We spent most of that day hiking the river trail.
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| One of the many waterfalls along the Oirase River. |
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| The view from the hot spring at our hotel. Can you believe we paid something like $70 per person for these views? |
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| One of the views from a boat on Lake Towada |
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| Yet another of the many waterfalls on the Oirase River |
The next day, we took a bus from our hotel over to the lake itself so we could ride the boat across the lake. Somewhat stupidly, we took a taxi back to the river so we could hike a little more. (There was some confusion about the bus stop we wanted, since it was apparently so obvious what this one bus stop's name was that nobody bothered to label it on any of the maps.)
We then started the Odyssey back to Tokyo. Just after we had exchanged our train tickets at Hachinose station, the staff announced that there was a stop signal for our train and they didn't know when it would get moving. We had to wait for 40 minutes or so before we could get on, and then it stopped for at least the same amount of time at Morioka station. We got off there, and waited for a Yamabiko bullet train, because that bullet train starts at Morioka and it has three free seating cars. That meant that we actually had a chance of sitting down during the 4+ hour ride back to our place. Luckily, we were able to get seats and the rest of the ride went pretty smoothly.
We didn't get back until around 10PM, three hours later than we had originally planned, but we made it back.
Cheers,
