Eating Tosca

I have yet to write up our experience of having a fox attack our chickens (a longer story than you might think!), but the result was that we had one dead chicken. Well, now what? We didn't originally plan on having chickens for meat—just eggs. But now that we had this chicken on our hands, we had to decide whether Tosca should serve as fertilizer, or as dinner. (This pic is of Tosca when she was still a chick.)

Lin was out of town for a few days at the time this happened, so I did what any good new chicken owner would do. I totally avoided the issue and just stuck her in a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. After a day or so, I figured I had to do SOMEthing, or the meat would start to go bad. So I started looking online to see how one goes about processing a chicken. (If you're vegetarian on moral grounds, or otherwise squeamish about meat, you should stop reading here. I'll have other chicken posts, and they usually won't have anything to do with eating them, I promise!)

Okay, if you're still with me, here's what happened next. On my go-to resource, backyardchickens.com, I found a helpful guide for how to do it, complete with (VERY) graphic pictures. My first problem was that normally when you kill a chicken to eat it, you cut off its head in the process. Since Tosca died from fox wounds, she still had her head attached, and although she was dead, she still looked very much like Tosca! So, I tied a paper towel around her head so I wouldn't have to look at it. That wasn't the end of my difficulties, however. The problem with trying to cut off the head with a kitchen knife is that it's actually kind of hard to get through the feathers. If I hadn't already been so weirded out by the whole thing, I would have calmly pulled the feathers aside to get to the skin, but I was trying to have as little contact with the bird as possible! So the knife didn't work. Then I tried some garden loppers. This also wasn't super successful. But somehow between the various cutting implements, I did manage to get the head off.

Next you have to get rid of the feathers. I accomplished this by dunking the whole animal in boiling water, then in cold water. This makes the feathers easier to remove. I had to re-dunk a bunch of times before the feathers actually came off easily. If you've never done this, you've never fully appreciated HOW MANY feathers a chicken has! This was definitely the most time consuming and boring part of the whole process.

Cutting off the feet came next (saved them for stock!). Weirdly, the "skin" on the feet peels off just like socks. Oh my gosh, that reminds me. If you are at all interested in food sourcing and international shipping thereof, you have to read this NY Times article. As you probably know, chicken feet are very unpopular in the U.S., but hugely popular in China. Because our commercial poultry industry raises unnaturally fattened birds, our chicken feet are the world's meatiest. So there's a huge export market of U.S. chicken feet going to China, where the American industry can make a ton of money on a product that most Americans don't actually want to buy. Who knew?! Anyway, poor Tosca's feet were quite skinny, and only fit for stock.

By this point, Tosca looked more like a regular chicken from the supermarket, so it was a little less gross to deal with the process. I'll spare you the details of the gutting part, but I actually found it fascinating. Kind of like middle school dissection projects. The gizzard was especially cool—it really does contain the little rocks that you're supposed to make sure are in your chickens' diet. They're bigger than I thought, maybe the size of aquarium gravel. We don't feed grit to our chickens, so I guess they're getting what they need from the dirt in our yard.

Once gutted, you can then prepare your chicken or freeze it just like you would with chicken from the store. I can't say that I'm anxious to do the processing thing again. It was time consuming, and I'm actually not sure that I could kill a chicken on purpose (remember this one died by accident). Maybe if we ever live someplace where we can have a lot of chickens, so each one doesn't become a pet, we could entertain the idea of raising meat birds. But for now, we're sticking with the layers!

P.S. At the time I processed the chicken, I just threw the finished product in the freezer. Just the other night, we cooked her up for dinner, using Lin's special roasting method. It didn't taste remarkably different from other chicken meat, but I did think the dark meat was tastier (gameier?) than usual.

Best backcountry gizmo ever

Everyone seems to be talking about coffee this week, so here's my excuse to talk about my favorite cool outdoor product we picked up in Japan. It weighs less than zero, and voila! Fresh drip coffee while camping, no awkward plastic cone to stuff into your pack--this thing IS the filter, and no cone is needed. I should say that credit is due to Lin, who spotted it in the store before I did.

It's made to work with chopsticks, but of course you can just use two branches you pick up from the ground...

Packed up, it looks like this:


Pretty cool, huh? (Incidentally, you can buy it here in the U.S. from online retailers, but no one has a picture of the thing in action! I wouldn't buy it either if I only saw it folded up.)

Children and chickens and worms, oh my!

Last week we took the chickens to Boulder, where they got to meet all the kids on Lin's block. (Coincidentally, they also met a bunch of the various Ft. Collins neighbors' kids and grandkids this week--guess it was the week of the kids!) Below, Ava with Buffy (who she renamed Sunshine...and who was previously named Brunnhilde before we decided that was too big a name for a chicken; on the other hand, she's our largest breed, so maybe when she's a grown chicken we'll go back to Brunnhilde).
Noni, Tosca, and August.

The King boys helped find lots of worms, bugs, and slugs to feed to the chickens. Even Pete (one of the dads) got into the worm-finding action. An overturned container also turned out to have lots of bugs and bug larvae for the chickens to peck at. Here's the container, the chickens, and Lin, Louie, August, Noni and Ollie.

Tosca enjoys the view from Ava's head.


Katherine likes Little Red (formerly Carmen, but too cute not to call Little Red)!

Katherine, Erin, and Little Red.

Katherine, Tosca, Norma, and Ava.

Chickens!

Well, we finally got our chickens--we're now the proud owners of one Rhode Island Red, one Buff Orpington and two Ameraucanas (two brown egg layers and two blue/green egg layers). Fort Collins recently changed the regulations here in town so that you can have chickens (up to six, and no roosters) in your backyard. My original plan was to buy some older pullets, so that we wouldn't have to do the indoor chick thing before putting them in the outdoor coop, but when we went to buy them, the oldest ones they had were two weeks old. So as you can see from the pic above, they're still pretty little--we probably won't get eggs until, oh, October or so. For now we're keeping them in a cardboard box inside the house. Sometimes we let them run around, but they seem to like stuffing themselves into corners. They also seem to like to sleep together, all smooshed together in a clump.


The coop turned out to be a way bigger project than I thought. I bought some plans online (which turned out to not be so great--mistakes in the materials list, some measurements missing, no cut plan, etc.). We originally hoped to make it from recycled building materials from ReSource, but it was too hard to find the right sized wood for the plans, so we wimped out and went to buy new wood. Although some of it is from Home Depot, we also got some of it from Mawson Lumber, where a very friendly and helpful guy worked with us to finish up our shopping list. Mawson is a local outfit, so if you can't bring yourself to shop at the chain stores, they're a good bet.

Here's Lin painting the frame. This style of design is called a "chicken tractor," and it's meant to be mobile, i.e., you can pick it up and move it around. So the "fertilizer" (chicken poop) can be distributed around to different parts of your yard. The coop and the run are all part of a single unit. You might notice that this design requires a bunch of angle cuts in the framing parts. I don't own a miter saw, but a guy who's done some work around our house let me borrow his, so I used it for the first bunch of cuts. Then I finally figured out how to use my bandsaw for the same purpose, so I made the final cuts on that. Here are more pics of the work in progress.

Japan Part III: Bike Tour in Nagano Prefecture

More from our Japan trip earlier this summer. Hmm, I finished part III before part II. Well, part II, coming soon...here's part III! (Dated June 22, but posted July 16.) As in the previous report, photos can be enlarged by clicking.

When we first started talking about going to Japan (it was actually Lin’s idea), we knew we wanted to do something other than just see the major monuments. Lin also prefers the countryside to the big cities, although I lobbied for at least a few days in Tokyo and/or Kyoto! Anyway, we stumbled across the One Life Japan website and found the perfect tour for what we wanted. We would cycle around the rural villages outside Nagano, and our guides would be folks who actually lived there.

Although not originally from the area, the husband and wife team of Kevin Cameron (originally from the U.S.) and Tomoe Kawafuchi (originally from Tokyo) decided they wanted to give up the big city life and move to the Japanese countryside. Their interest in sustainable living (and chickens!), made them the perfect guides for us. When they are not leading tours, they make a living farming rice and vegetables in Sakaemura.

On day one, we met in the slightly larger small town of Obuse. We were only there for one evening, so I can’t say much about it, although I have a sneaking suspicion that it might be kind of a tourist town. (I say this in part because the hostel we stayed in was more expensive than the hostels in Kyoto, and because there were some places to eat that seemed to have been built strictly for tourists.) I wondered if it might be like Aspen (i.e., people who work there can’t afford to live there.) Anyway, we did have some amazing (and cheap!) grilled shrimp in a restaurant housed in a former sake factory. You're supposed to eat the whole thing, claws and all.


Here we are saddling up and meeting each other for the first time. Our group included Chris and Sandy from Vancouver Island, Canada, and Julie and Kathleen from the Twin Cities, Minnesota.


Overall, I’d say that the cycling was somewhat harder than I expected, but not too hard for us to manage, and I was happy for the exercise after spending the past handful of months slaving over statistics, report writing, and other tasks, all chained to my computer! I’d say I was pretty out of shape after all the computer-sitting, but I did manage to get out for one or two hill rides outside of Ft. Collins before the trip, and I was definitely glad I did. That said, the tour is structured so you can ride as much or as little as you want—there’s always the van to hop into if you don’t feel up to any portion of the riding, or if you want to ride more than the rest of the group, Kevin is happy to provide additional routes.

Click here for a map of Obuse. Side note: if you use maps.google.com, the major cities will be romanized, as will the train stations if you zoom in—this is incredibly helpful. If you use maps.google.co.jp, everything will be in Japanese alphabet or characters. It's also worth noting that when using "get directions" in Japan, there's hardly anywhere in the country that won't give you the choices "by public transport" and "by car." I know this is a relatively new google feature, but I sure as heck know that there aren't very many directions I could ask for in the U.S. that would offer a public transport option--our infrastructure being so dismal. In Japan, on the other hand, even very-small-town-A to very-small-town-B will yield a public transport solution.

Okay, so I’m a geek, but here is a map of our first day’s riding (I love mapmyride.com!), from Obuse to Jigokudani Monkey Park. Most of the ride was still in town, until we began the ride up the hill to the monkey park. You can click to get an elevation chart. You should also be able to zoom in and out on the map, as well as see the mile markers, if you click on "view full ."




Our lunch stop was at the train station in the town of Yudanaka, which included this hot spring foot bath! This lunch was our first taste of Tomoe’s excellent, very veggie-friendly cooking. She even makes her own tofu “mayonnaise.”


The road up to the park is quite steep, so Lin and I mostly pushed our bikes, only getting back on as the road flattened out toward the top. At the park, we stayed at the onsen (hot spring) inn. There are about a million websites dedicated to onsen, so I won’t duplicate all that here. Just google if you’re interested. I’ll just say that, unlike in western countries, a) this is a traditional way to take a bath, not a luxury; and b) while they are separated by gender, they are communal, so you can’t be shy about being naked in front of a bunch of strangers. (Kevin told us that some of their clients opt out for this reason.)

Here are the usual taps where you’re supposed to wash yourself before getting in. (Now I know why my grandmother used to keep a little stool and a plastic tub in her shower!)


The indoor bath.


The outdoor bath. There's a guy with a towel on his head sitting in the bath, and you can see the river just beyond.
The inn had a number of different baths for women, but it turned out that they were all too hot for us, so the only one we could tolerate was the outdoor bath (which was unusual in being mixed gender). The tour included a hot spring bath basically every night, so by the end of it, we were more used to how hot it was, but since this was our first experience, it did seem VERY hot!!

Unlike traveling to, say, Yellowstone to see a grizzly, you don’t have to be worried that you might not see a monkey at Jigokudani. Here are a couple of very short videos of the ones right outside our room window. (If you are a monkey person, maybe you can tell me why they seem to like to eat the bugs they pick out of each others’ fur…)





Apparently the monkeys are protected in this park, but elsewhere in Japan you can get a bounty for bringing one in. There certainly were a lot of them at Jigokudani. Since there’s a bounty, I gather that they’re a pest. I wondered if the locals think it’s weird for us to enjoy looking at them, in the way that we think it’s funny (or irritating!) to be stuck behind a car stopped to take elk or moose pictures in Estes Park.

The inn provided the first in a series of wonderful meals. It wasn’t the first time I’d had shabu shabu, but it was the first time I ever had DUCK shabu shabu (my family usually used beef). You can also see Lin’s yukata in this picture. Japanese hotels and inns, from the most exclusive to the most humble, all provide a yukata that you can wear in the room—and to your bath and dinner/breakfast if you are staying at an onsen inn. We liked this so much that Lin persuaded our Kyoto hostel to sell us some before we went home, and we now enjoy wearing them around the house in Colorado.


The tempura in the lower left corner of the above photo were all made from wild leaves found right in the forest outside the inn.

The meal also included iwana, or trout, that we were to have a number of times on the trip, and some honeyed crickets. The latter were actually quite tasty!

Here are a couple more monkey shots, plus photos of the surrounding forest.



The next day, we rode from Jigokudani, back through Yudanaka, and then onward toward Nozawa Onsen. Our lunch stop in Iiyama included soba from a restaurant owner who used to coach the Olympic ski jump team in Japan. Here's the day's ride:


Famous for its thirteen public hot spring baths, Nozawa Onsen is a ski resort in the winter, and was the site for some of the events in the Nagano Olympics. Here's our group ready to hit the baths.


The town is quite small, and it's easy to get around on foot, so it's expected that visitors will wear their yukata in the street on the way to the onsen. Along the way, we were waved down by two very excitable women who seemed anxious to explain that half our group had our yukata on backwards (right over left instead of left over right). They claimed it was because you can't hide (and then draw) your weapon if you do it right over left--this assumes that you like tucking your weapon inside your yukata, and that you are right-handed!

The bath we visited was called O-yu, and was housed in this beautiful building. The women inside were as helpful as the yukata-patrol out on the street. Even though they spoke no English, they kept waving their arms around trying to explain the protocol. One woman used her own plastic tub to pour water on Lin. We eventually figured out that they were trying to tell us that one side of the tub was hotter than the other, and that it was better to use the cooler side to wash with. I again wimped out and was unable to get into the hot side at all.


Our inn, Ikesho, provided another spectacular dinner. (The top photo in the following series is of the trout being cooked over an indoor charcoal pit.)





Here's what the room looked like. Most of our rooms on the trip were roughly like this one, with sleeping futons that were folded up and put away during the day. I was surprised at how spacious the rooms generally were.

The town may be a tourist town, but real people live here, and tend to their gardens.

One of the hot springs is for villagers only, and is so hot that it is used for cooking (no, they don't use this one for bathing!).

Here's a man using it to boil his eggs. (If you enlarge the picture you can see he has them in a basket that he just leaves to soak in the water.)

Our inn also provided hot spring-boiled eggs, with a beautiful flower painted on the shell.
The next day, we left the inn and rode downhill out of Nozawa Onsen, and over to the Uchiyama Paper Workshop in Kijimadaira village.

My trip map for this day is a bit approximate. I wasn't completely sure of the location of the paper workshop (A), and the ride that looks like it was along the railroad tracks actually wasn't strictly along the tracks (between B and C).


Like many Japanese handicrafts, making "washi" (handmade paper) is a time-intensive process. In the fall, kozo trees (related to mulberry) are harvested, and their branches are steamed. The bark is peeled off while the branches are still hot, and then cleaned. The bark is then spread out on the snow (Jan. - Feb.), where the sun bleaches the bark white. Next they boil the bark in an alkaline solution, then clean the bark again, and rinse it in water. Pounding the bark comes next, and then the remaining fibers are mixed with water, and this solution is what's used to make the paper. A frame with mesh in it is lowered into the water, then lifted out. The fibers stay on the mesh while the water drains out. We got to try our hand at this final step. Natural items such as leaves and seeds can be added to the paper for texture.



The second half of the day was a longer ride toward Kevin and Tomoe's village, Sakaemura. While Kevin arranged for our finished paper to be mailed to us once it dried, the rest of us rode on. Sometimes our direction-finding wasn't very good!

Most of the day's ride was along the Chikuma River. The towns were getting noticeably smaller (than Yudanaka and Iiyama, for example). It's hard to pedal with one hand, but here is a very short video I spliced together from different "while riding" shots I took along the way (I took out the audio and put in some music, so you wouldn't have to listen to me huffing and puffing as I ride along!). Biking is a great way to see a new place, since you're not hemmed in by car or bus windows. You can also stop anytime you want, and you notice a lot more when you're going at the slower pace of a bicycle.


Our destination was a beautiful restored farmhouse tucked up behind some rice fields in Sakaemura. It rained a bunch during our time there, so I forgot to try to get some good pictures of it. The owner doesn't live there full-time, and so rents it out to Kevin and Tomoe when they have a group in town. I noticed that some of the beams in the house were quite a bit wider than any tree I had seen in any of the surrounding forests. I suppose logging has taken its toll on the local trees.

The next morning, some of us walked and some of us rode to Kevin and Tomoe's house across the river. It was quite a hill to get there, along a narrow winding road. Kevin had to drive ahead that day, so he marked the way on the road for us with chalk. The following video shows Chris riding ahead of me on the uphill, Sandy and me posing at Kevin's note that he left for us at the top of the big hill, and the last part of the clip shows some of the downhill. (This clip also gives me an excuse to include a little music by Shonen Knife, the Japanese girl band from the 80s/90s. This is their song "Cycling is Fun," though it's a bit hard to catch the words through their accents...)


Fortunately, Kevin had fueled us up for our ride at the local soft serve ice cream place, where we had the freshest, best-tasting soft serve I've ever had. A local dairy farmer runs the ice cream stand, and brings the milk fresh from his cows.

When we arrived at Kevin and Tomoe's house, another yummy Tomoe meal was waiting for us.

And aren't these the most beautiful baby zucchinis you've ever seen? (Raised by their neighbor.)

After lunch, it was time to plant rice. Kevin and Tomoe own about six fields near their house. This was also where we met "the film crew," as we came to call them. A local TV station wanted to make a short documentary about Kevin and Tomoe and their business, so they asked us if it would be okay to film. We said yes. Little did we know, they'd be following us for the rest of the trip! Including up Mt. Naeba! Anyway, here's Tomoe heading off to the fields, and Kevin explaining how to plant the rice--that big rake thing he's holding is to mark lines in the mud. Basically the seedlings come in big mats, and so you just separate a few, and plunge them into the mud with your hand.



So here we are planting the rice ourselves. Right after I took these pictures, it started raining, so we finished the planting in a semi-downpour.

Apparently not many people do it by hand anymore. Here's a planting machine.
The next day was Sakaemura's bamboo shoot festival. In the morning, we drove a ways up the hillside to a bamboo shoot grove, where we harvested the shoots that would be used in the luncheon soup. The shoots are about a foot or so tall, and you break them off right at the base.

Here's Kathleen looking for some good ones.


You really have to get in among the plants, which are pretty dense.


Then everyone gathered in the local shrine (I guess it's kind of an all-purpose shrine) to peel the shoots.
Here's a short video of the peeling session.



Chris gets some peeling tips from one of the local women.

Huge pots of bamboo shoot soup cooking away.

And here's the soup!
It's basically a miso soup, and I think Kevin said that they also use saba (mackerel) for flavoring. I've only ever had bamboo shoots from a can, so fresh ones were pretty cool! The soup was served at a community lunch, where the soup was doled out, and everyone brought their own dishes from home to supplement the meal. Of course we hadn't brought anything ourselves, but it turned out that people kept insisting that we share part of theirs, so we got a really good taste of all the villagers' home-cooking! This ranged from sweet rice cakes to curried spaghetti sticks, to various stewed and pickled dishes, to homemade tofu. There was also plenty of alcohol, but notably, no one seemed to be overindulging.




The surrounding hills are apparently good bear-hunting territory, as our next evening's stay was in a bear-hunter's inn (i.e., the inn is owned by a bear hunter). Apparently he took over ownership when his father passed away. While he was alive, his father was one of Japan's "living national treasures," preserving the traditional ways of bear hunting. The bears in question look not unlike our black bears here in the western U.S. (judging by the photos and skins hanging on the walls). The innkeeper was persuaded to demonstrate one of the traditional bear-hunting songs (short video clip below)--this one is used by the hunters as they return to the village, alerting the townspeople that the hunt was successful.



Walking uphill from the inn, there's a wonderful onsen that featured the first tepid water of the trip! (Actually, there were three separate pools--one tepid, one hot, and one very hot.) The water is also red due to iron deposits. The onsen also featured a pipe that dropped hot water on you from about 15 or 20 feet high, which created a cool massage effect. (Pictures below are of the walk to the onsen, and then of the onsen itself.)
Below is another picture of the walk to the onsen, which I'm including to demonstrate something that seemed universally true across all the places we visited--Japan has hydrologically altered its landscape in nearly every conceivable way--even the tiny streams near the rock climbing place we visited contained dams or other concrete structures. I remember learning in geomorph class that Japan's coastline is likewise hyper-engineered. (If I ever get around to writing up the Noto peninsula part of our trip, I can pull out our pictures of some of the coastal engineering.) Similarly vast infrastructure has been put in place to hold up the hillsides--the geology of Japan seems quite prone to landsliding, and of course, to earthquakes.


The next day we attended the opening ceremony for Mt. Naeba, which is one of Japan's "100 Famous Mountains." Unlike the 14ers of Colorado, which are so-named strictly on the basis of their elevation, the 100 Famous Mountains appear to have been chosen by a single author, using his own judgement. This is not unlike Steck and Roper's "Fifty Classic Climbs of North America," which will be familiar to U.S. climbers (who sometimes like to refer to the list contained therein as "50 crowded climbs," since once there's a list, the crowds will follow).

Anyway, back to the opening ceremony... We learned from Kevin that the (Shinto) ceremony was conducted by a visiting priest. Many villages can no longer afford to support a full-time priest, so these traveling priests offer their services for particular ceremonies and occasions. I think Kevin said that this area is primarily Shinto, but in general, it seems that the flavor of religion in Japan is more of a blend of Buddhism and Shinto. (My mother once said that Buddhism is for funerals, and Shinto is for weddings--so Japanese religion transplanted to Hawaii appears to have maintained its dual heritage.) So here is the priest going through the ceremony, local dignitaries offering incense, and the priest blessing the villagers.


Following yet another huge lunch, we got ready to hike up Mt. Naeba. There was a Japanese group with whom we were tagging along, though I have to confess that I never really did understand what our relationship to them was supposed to be. There was a guy who was obviously "in charge," but we later found out that the others weren't all from one group. They had only met one another that day. I figured it was probably like the Colorado Mountain Club, which leads volunteer-guided trips for its members--so whoever shows up are your trip mates for the day. Anyhow, it didn't seem like we were supposed to be officially "with" the Japanese hikers--there were no introductions, etc., but on the other hand, it didn't seem like we could have done it without them.

The Japanese hikers were all dressed in full-on hiking gear--long sleeve shirts, hiking boots (or a version of galoshes that seem to stand in for boots-with-gaiters), gaiters, overnight-sized packs, bear bells, trekking poles, etc. Lin later noticed that one guy even had instep crampons. We thought all of this might be a little overkill, but in the end, I decided they were dressed more smartly than I was!

The lower part of the hike was pretty standard trail-hiking fare. The sun was out, the views were great, and the hiking not too strenuous (though maybe it was strenuous for the film crew, who were still following us around carrying their large TV video camera and tripod). Then we hit some snow, some of which was a little on the steep side, but there were fixed ropes for us to hang on to (had there not been fixed ropes, I'd say the trip probably could have justified bringing along at least a small ax in case of a fall). I was also kicking myself for leaving my gloves in my bag in the van, since hanging on to cold, wet ropes is less fun with bare hands. Anyhow, here are some pictures:


Toward the top, we hit a final snowfield leading to a saddle, from which a boardwalk crossed the flatter section heading to the summit and the mountain hut where we were to spend the night.

It's about another hour or so from the saddle to the hut. The summit area features broad plateaus with views of the surrounding mountains.


Lin at the entrance to the hut.

The hut was a lot like the huts we stayed at on our Haute Route trip, except not as crowded! There's a big room with two decks of sleeping area, with pads and blankets provided, plus an eating area where dinner and breakfast are served. The blankets are pretty wimpy, so I'd say it's best to take a bunch of them, or bring your own bag! The food was good, and as in the French and Swiss huts, alcohol was available for purchase.

My two best sunset photos.


Watching the sunset turned out to be a pretty interesting linguistic experience. We went out to look at it a little earlier than we really needed to, so we were all standing around waiting for the actual event. Maiko-san, Kevin and Tomoe's assistant, was waiting with us. Without Kevin there to translate, Maiko-san and I, plus one or two of the Japanese hikers, had a very entertaining "language lesson" conversation (you know, where most of the dialogue is comprised of "how do you say ____?"). At one point, Maiko-san pointed out that the Sea of Japan was in one direction, and Sado Island in another.
Maiko (pointing): Sado Island.
Me: Oh, Kodo!
Japanese hikers: No, Sado!
Me (waving my hands in the air like I'm holding bachi): But Kodo lives there, right?
Japanese hikers: Oh, you know Kodo!
So then I had to come up with a reasonable Japanglish explanation for how I had heard of Kodo (I played briefly with a taiko group in New York, and I used to work for a venue where Kodo performed when they toured the U.S.). Check out this cool video that includes some beautiful shots of Sado, interspersed with Kodo's concert performances and some views of them playing outside.

I'm sure our hiking companions would be really surprised if they knew how many North American taiko groups there are! In fact, on returning to the U.S., I contacted some Denver area taiko people to see about learning to play the fue (or shinobue) I've had sitting in my closet for the past six years. They got me set up with lessons, and...but I digress. (More on the fue lessons in a future post, maybe.)

So all in all, the sunset was beautiful, but the conversation was really fun! We continued our dialogue over dinner, when Lin got some of the Japanese hikers talking about places they had been, and we told them about our trip to Ogawayama. One of the hikers was already on his 50th of the 100 famous mountains! We also learned the useful information that Hakusan, which we were thinking about doing, was probably still too snowy to attempt without snow-climbing gear.

And of course if you're there for sunset, you're also there for sunrise. We went outside around 4:20 a.m., by which time the sun had already risen a bit over the horizon.

Here we are at the actual summit post. Maiko-san, myself, Sandy and Chris.

And here's the Japanese group:

Going down turned out to be quite an adventure. The film crew people were having a really hard time descending, either because they were carrying too much equipment, or because they just didn't have enough experience traveling on snow. Even with the ropes, it was very slow going for them!


Here's a short video that shows the general flavor of how things were going (there was no rope on the highest snowfield). One of the (experienced) Japanese hikers (guy in baseball cap) went for a ride while trying to help the (less experienced) film crew members.


It was all fun and games here, but there were a few spots lower down where such a ride wouldn't have been what you'd call safe. But as I said, there were the fixed ropes, and in one section where there wasn't one, one of the Japanese group whipped one out of his pack and set it up for us. Anyway, we all got down in the end.

The tour finished up with a visit to this outdoor hot spring with a beautiful view:

So, thank you again to Kevin and Tomoe for guiding us around this part of Japan, and to our trip-mates for sharing it with us! I highly recommend the tour, and this kind of traveling in general.

Next we were off to Kanazawa and the Noto Peninsula, before heading to Kyoto. It'll probably be a while before I finish those trip reports...