Sulfer Dioxide, Evaporation and Onsens

As much hiking as I've done over the years, I have never climbed a mountain. Mt. Misen is a mountain, true, but a mountain that has been hiked for about 1200 years by Buddhists who have made many convenient stairs out of rock and wood to make their meditation hikes a little less difficult. Kind of like a Mountain Climbing for Dummies™ for those who aren't really sure they want to climb a real mountain. Believe me, it's real enough and plenty of work, though, and I had no real desire to prove myself on anything bigger or more difficult.

Which is why I found myself this morning on a bus heading towards an active volcano with the intention of climbing it and looking inside.

Notice the people hiking at the bottom. It was a BIG mountain range.

At the bus station, we met up with an Australian, Tom, who was taking 8 months to travel across the northern hemisphere and ended up hiking around together. It was a lot of fun swapping stories of our travels in Japan and his across southeastern Asia. We really need to visit Vietnam and Thailand after hearing about his experiences.

Once we got off the bus at the base of the peaks (there are five peaks in Mt. Aso), we found that they had closed the volcano, Nakadake, due to some silly regulations about sulfer dioxide levels and people suffocating. Of course, these things change, and we were instructed to check back in the afternoon, and perhaps the wind would change and we could go up. With our initial plans on hold, we had to find something else to do. Well, there was this convenient mountain in front of us, see. So, we figured this is the closest we'd ever been to the base of a mountain, so we climbed it. It was not even remotely like a sheer face or anything that you would picture when someone says "mountain climbing". It was instead a long series of muddy, slippery trails that rose at a reasonably steep angle. So, for the next few hours, we climbed Ebishodake.

Tom, Sumi and I atop Ebishodake (1337m)

The scenery was vast and beautiful, and since none of us had good enough cameras, the pictures all ended up looking brown and uninteresting. Being a very clear day, we could see for miles in all directions.

Very brown. Notice the steam rising from the crater.

We also could see the wind direction had shifted since the morning, and was now blowing away from the trail that led up to the crater, meaning they most likely were going to open the trail. So we headed back down the mountain and towards the base of the volcano, where there was a ropeway and the requisite merchandise uriba (selling place), complete with bad food, ice cream and souvenirs. Along the way, we had to cross a toll road on foot (a big no-no) and find the real path that we were supposed to be on (apparently the "trail" we took down wasn't official) and pass an old, abandoned ski lodge. It was most likely abandoned because it doesn't really snow much in this latitude. They had to make all the snow themselves. When there is some of the best skiing in Asia a little ways north in the Japanese Alps, I guess it doesn't pay to make your own slopes.

Once we made it to the base, the ropeway was up and running (a good sign), but a guy in a uniform informed us that it was still "dame" (no good). Well, after a lunch of white bread, potato chips and water (yum!) we threw caution to the wind and made the climb...all 15 minutes of it, up a sidewalk along the toll road we crossed earlier. We chose to walk rather than pay the ¥1000 each for a round trip on the ropeway. It was worth the walk.

Note the very gray coloring of the ground around the steam. This is usually filled with a very blue-green water, and the steam bubbles and rises up from the water, and looks like this:

Apparently all the water had evaporated. This is usually a sign of the area heating up rapidly before some form of volcanic activity. We, of course, knew noting of this until we returned to our hostel and asked the guy at the front desk about it. He thought we were kidding when we said it was gray, and when I showed him the video, he very seriously asked if it was in black and white. It was not. Great. Earthquake, tsunami, now a volcano erupting? Also, all the rumbling you hear in the video is the gas escaping from the ground.

So, after a long day of risking our lives hiking around a volcano that may or may not blow, we headed back for another Udon Soba meal (Tom, not speaking Japanese, was grateful for a meal that wasn't pre-boxed sushi), then a trip to the local onsen (powered by the local volcanic activity) for a wonderful, hot bath and back to the hostel. Tomorrow will most likely be a more leisurely visit to Kumamoto for a castle tour, a bamboo grove and maybe some omiyage (souvenir) shopping before heading further south to more volcanoes (hopefully dormant) and a sub-tropical coastal city.

"... as he looked off into the distance..." <-- feel free to finish that sentence any way you see fit.