Mount Aso

Mount Aso

Today's trip took us to Mount Aso, the largest active volcano in Japan. We also finally got the chance to ride a train completely free of English translations. And to decipher the railroad tables. They are surprisingly understandable once you learn to recognize the relevant kanji.

The view from the train window was excellent the entire way, once we switched trains in Kumamoto and started going east. A bit difficult to take pictures of, I'm afraid. Too many railroad electricity lines and passing trees. I shot some movies, maybe I'll get around to distilling some useful panoramas out of them one day. :-)

We arrived in Aso just in time to miss the bus. While waiting for the next one we walked around the village, which didn't take long, and tried to take some pictures of the peaks. Then we decided to go to a café and have a delicious chocolate parfait. After ordering, we realized that the bus was leaving soon and we would miss it unless we cancelled the order. We excused ourselves thoroughly and explained that we were in a hurry, but the waitress and the kitchen personnel excused themselves even more, which made us feel quite bad about ourselves.

On the way up, the bus took a ten minute photo break, where we could get some great pictures of the Kijima peak and the Kusasenri ("thousand kilometers of grass") field. The Volcano Museum was then just around the corner.

Japanese trivia: Neko Dake (根子岳) means "Neko Peak", the eastern and most cool-looking of the five peaks in the Aso crater, while neko dake (猫だけ) means "just a cat". No difference in pronunciation. Japanese is a wonderful language for wordplay. :-)

In retrospect we are still wondering if we should have gone directly to the still active Naka Peak instead of stopping at the museum, but there's a 1 km safety distance, so our official version will be that we chose to see the live footage at the museum instead to get a better view. We wanted to do both, but when we were finished at the museum everything was closing and we had to catch the last bus.

The Japanese language is starting to work smoother. Some words and phrases are slowly coming back, others are being learned, and like I said above I'm starting to recognize the kanji of the important place names, among other things. Before you start accusing me of hubris I want to make clear that I have no illusions of being fluent in the language after being here for two weeks. :-)

Time to sleep. Tomorrow we will go to Kumamoto and see the castle, which is supposed to have a wonderful cherry tree garden.