after the mountain

.
click for map!
.
we checked out the other side of daisetsuzen national park - featuring foot onsen - but after the glorious conquerhood of asahi dake, nothing seemed real.

.

.

we found that the most interesting thing about the other side of the mountain was in fact ourselves, and rediscovered the joy of the jumping photo. i reckon one of them is a cut above the rest - which do you like best?!
.

.
we headed up to abashiri, the most southerly point at which one can see (and iva and nick have seen!) sea ice (though not in the middle of summer!) and checked out their northern people's museum. it was pretty damn interesting, and i was enjoying myself until g let off a ripper of a fart and we became acutely aware of the museum's lack of ventilation and the dagger stares of all other breath-holding customers.
...
we foxed about on the coast for a bit before heading up to io-zan, a sulphur-yellow stained collection of egg smelling geysers. it seems that domestic tourism has gone bust in japan, as our guidebook said we'd struggle to get past the crowds, but we were practically the only ones there. it was high season: the billion-car capacity carpark (now empty) certainly spoke of more prosperous times.
..
mashu-ko in akan national park - at one stage the clearest lake on earth - is the jewel in hokkaido's crown. the first day that we visited we couldn't see anything because of cloud cover and had to console ourselves by playing with the local squirrels: かわいい! we were gagging to get a glimpse of the lake, however, so we shlepped back the following day. it payed off: the clouds parted and we saw that shimmering jewel.
.
..
after an unutterably boring tourist train journey through kushiro national park, it was time to make our way back to chitose. here we had our final dinner with iva and nick, crashed at a cool ryokan tucked away in a side street and caught an early morning plane back to tokyo.
.
.
and that's the end boys and girls :( a lazy tokyo morning and a shibuya lunch that tasted like congealed cum on my plate marked our final hours in the land of the rising sun. it was time to say goodbye! goodbye to public toilets that are actually clean. goodbye to the biggest city in the world that has somehow retained its civility. goodbye to maid bars and porn shops full of women shoving different species of marine life into their clackers. goodbye the drum machine to which i involuntarily gifted the skin of my first interdigital clefts. and of course it was time to say goodbye to vov and nick (our diamonds in the rough) but only until next skype! time to head back to a beloved sunburnt country, choke on the miasma of impending exams, and get on with this wonderful business of being alive.

さよなら!
.

.

the water flows, but back into the ocean; the moon sinks, but is even in heaven.