Up to Osorezan

This morning was spent with largely uneventful travel. We hopped on the Shinkansen at 6:30am and headed north up to Hachinohe, where we transferred to a local ワンマン車 (One man train) and trundled our way up to Shimokita, where we could catch a bus to Osorezan. We arrived right around 11am, when the bus was leaving, and decided to wait and get some food (we hadn't eaten yet today) and catch the next bus at 2pm.

Shimokita Station. Nice, rural, and a PokéGym

Sumi captured a gym with mere minutes to go before boarding the bus.

We ate at a Cafe Gusto, a chain family restaurant here. Our other options included McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut (I'm not kidding), and a few local spots of questionable quality. Gusto was fine, their pasta was not bad (Spaghetti with eggplant and spinach). We also stopped at an electronics store (Sumi is determined to find a Switch now) and picked up some cases for our gear.

The bus ride to Osorezan gave us a preview of the mountain we'll be bike across (both up and down) tomorrow morning. When we arrived at the temple, we discovered we were the only guests. In a resort-like onsen hotel that can hold hundreds. Also, our bikes hadn't arrived yet. As there was still an hour left in their delivery window we only kind of panicked (it's hard to go on a bike trip without your bikes...). We took the time to walk the temple grounds.

We were immediately struck by the contrast in landscape. Osorezan is a thousand year old temple built in a valley, on top of an active volcano surrounded on all sides be 8 mountain peaks and containing a sulfurous lake, a white sand beach, 108 pools of boiling mud, and a bunch of lava rock. The area was chosen by this sect of Buddhism because it rather closely mirrored their vision of the gates of Hell. The air in the entire area is heavy with sulfur that rises out of the mud pools continuously. The ground water here is so acidic, you are advised not to get any on your face or in your hair.

But it was beautiful, in a barren, desolate kind of way.

Each rock pile is covering a mud pool, so the unwary don't fall in. Boiling mud is hot. Notice the nice, green tree covered mountains in the background. The volcanic activity is contained to this small area directly around the temple.

Yellow and red sulfur deposits are everywhere.

There are many impressive statues on the temple grounds. All must be cleaned regularly, otherwise the sulfur will corrode all of the metal and discolor the stone with red, white, or yellow deposits.

Many Jizou were also present.

In the center of the "Blood Pond" (the area around is standing water with a deep red color.)

A small pool in the middle of the white sands. Brilliant green coloring.

Lake Usori. Beautiful, but too acidic to house life, other than smaller organisms

The newest statue of the temple, constructed in 2011 for the victims of the "great earthquake" and resulting tsunami that hit Touhoku.

There are some creatures that manage to live in this area, including a まむし, which is either a broiled eel or a pit viper. As the sign says "Beware, Mamushi", I'm leaning towards pit viper. We didn't see him.

There were a number of living things in the area, including the above-mentioned pit viper, a ton of せみ, or locusts, ravens, and others. The locusts were huge, and very loud. They made sounds akin to what a frog or bird may make. This disturbed Sumi. She reported that one of them "spoke to her", and that insects were not supposed to makes noises like that.

After checking out the area, we headed back to the temple lodging, where out bikes had, thankfully, been delivered. After putting the together, we noticed that Sumi's front and my rear tire had leaks at the stems of the tubes. This was bad, since I'm not good enough to repair stems. I left changing the tubes until tomorrow morning, and we went in for a shower before dinner.

I mentioned that the lodge was built for hundreds. It was huge, made even more big by the fact that we were the only guests. One of the priests sang an opening and closing prayer for us (serenaded us, really), for the meal.

This was the front lobby. The ceilings were over 20' high, and every room was enormous. Our room could easily have slept 10 people. It was a three room apartment.

The dining hall. We felt kind of silly having a meal all prepared and served for just us in here. A small plaque indicated the meal was for Joounuzu-san...in case they got confused as to which guests this was for....

Shoujun ryouri, or Buddhist cooking, is all vegetarian. It's one of the only types of food here that I can just experiment and try without worrying about hidden fish seasoning.

After all was said and done, we were exhausted. I passed out almost immediately, expecting to be up early to fix the bikes, attend a Buddhist ceremony, and start out bike trip, finally!

Pocky has some unfortunate new branding for their treats. Sukky speaks for itself. Men's Pocky got an overhaul and is now Pocky-Adult Milk. That's not much better. Lovecky is just...no.