Last weekend I went on a bus tour. It was an organized tourist tour with audio guide in four different languages to some fairly popular destinations. Fortunately it was rather chilly and -just like the rest of the last two or three weeks- cloudy, misty and rainy. So there weren’t many people apart from us. Unfortunately we only had about an hour at each stop and spend a lot of time in the bus and because of the weather we skipped the last stop (I think).
First stop was Lake Shikotsu.
Lake Shikotsu is surrounded by mountains
And lovely
Next we had a short break at a restaurant/shop full of mushrooms. Mushroom soup, fried mushrooms, mushrooms on rice, mushroom tea (not kidding) and more. They also had other stuff, but nothing’s interesting when there’s mushrooms ;)
Didn’t take many pictures there, this is the best one I got
Then we went to Lake Tōya where it started to drizzle and it was completely quiet and beautiful. The fog made it look even bigger. We also had lunch there at an onzen hotel. It’s a volcanic area with a lot of hot springs so many people come there to enjoy them.
Can I get anyone excited with bow ties?
That boat was the only thing you could hear apart from the waves and the rain
Don’t you dare telling me this isn’t good weather.
Last stop was Mount Usu where we took the ropeway on a plateau from which you could see Shōwa-shinzan which was formed by eruptions in 1944/1945. It looks very interesting, being a rocky red pile between all the green mountains. There is steam coming from the mountains, although you can’t really see much in the pictures because of all the fog/clouds.
Oh look, wet air!
Shōwa-shinzan
It was quite cool seeing all those places though I would have liked some more time to walk around.
Smiling Rice 