Roadtrip to Aomori

The adventures continue!

It was the week before I had to return from my trip abroad so I was eager to do everything I could to explore more of the country. To that end, we decided to buy a tent, rent a car, and headed north to Aomori!

Despite seeing the fireworks in Tokyo I still had yet to experience a traditional festival in Japan, good thing that the Nebuta Festival was approaching! The Nebuta Festival occurs annually in Aomori during the peak of summer and is the largest Nebuta festival in Japan. Nebuta refers to the various colorful floats that are carried through the city which is lined with tons of shops, fresh food, and carnival games.

August 3rd, 2019

This marked the beginning of my last week in Japan, I had just packed away all of my things from my apartment and got ready to begin my week-long road trip. We spent most of the daytime buying stuff around Tokyo in preparation before picking up the car at night.

Alright, we are poor college students so we had to cut costs (oh my gosh the adventures we went through because of this). There were four guys including me. We'd split the cost of renting the car and we would buy a tent to save hotel costs. Each night we'd have two guys in the car and two in the tent and we'd alternate each day. To take baths we'd go to an Onsen (natural Japanese geothermal bath) each day. This mostly worked out since they're actually pretty cheap (500-1000 yen) which translates to roughly $5-10 per bath. It would take about two to three days to get to Aomori. Well, such was the plan at least, let's go on to how everything played out!

August 4th, 2019

I said we had a plan but we really didn't, we just kept heading north and stopped by anything interesting we saw, and oh boy there were plenty. Our first driving stop was in Ibaraki, we wanted to see the sunrise from the ocean so we stopped by a local park and waited by the ocean. It was also our chance to get some sleep since we did pull an all-nighter (out of several more all-nighters to come, we hardly slept in this week) though, at this point I've pulled more all-nighters in Japan than I have for the past 20 years of my life so I got kinda used to it.

It was another very surreal experience. I never knew that the sky could be so colorful in the morning. The park was very empty (understandably so, who the heck would be here at 3:00 to 4:00 am?). There were some flat rocks and benches nearby, some of us were hungover from the night before and were sleeping on them (F in chat for Charles).

We left and drove another one or two hours north and stopped by Kairakuen Garden which was apparently built in 1841 by the local lord at the time. It just happened to be nearby so we stopped by for some pickled plum-soba. It looked weird but cold soba noodles were extremely refreshing on a hot summer day like it was that day.

One thing I didn't mention was that we were driving on the outer roads in the countryside since highways in Japan are heavily tolled (It would cost more than an airplane ticket to drive on the highway to Aomori). Eventually, after driving for a few more hours, to our dismay, we found ourselves in the middle of the Fukushima nuclear power plant exclusion zone.

You can imagine how much we freaked out when we saw a Geiger counter in the middle of the road.

The cleanup process from the nuclear disaster is still ongoing, so there were some people there but they probably knew what they were doing.

At that point, it was getting late so we drove the rest of the night to Sendai and took a bath at a local bathhouse, ate some hotpot, and drove to a nearby park to camp out.

August 5th, 2019

We drove several more hours up north and saw a temple built into the side of a mountain.

I don't quite remember where this was, but I'm guessing we were in Iwate.

We also drove by a peculiar pond that we saw was steaming for reason so stopped the car to check it out. It was called Jigokunuma or lit. "Hell Swamp."

I saw a dragonfly land on a rock by the water and it turned over and died immediately. Yeah, this pond probably isn't safe.

Some glimpses outside the car window on the way through Iwate. We drove until dark and found another Onsen, took our bath, and camped in a park nearby.'

August 6th, 2019

Driving on the mountain roads we found a river stream deep in the mountains and decided to stop the car and explore the forest.

... somewhere in the mountains of Japan

Okay, we were running out of ideas, so we decided to point to the highest mountain we could see and tried to drive there. Along the way, the roads were so high up in elevation that some clouds were actually forming below us. We were pleasantly surprised with the results.

We found Lake Towada, a lake that was formed on the peak of the mountain, or rather the crater of an ancient, but active volcano. The clouds were only a couple hundred meters above.

What else is there to do on a hot summer day other than jump inside?

Side note, the water was extremely clean. It was as if I was jumping into a lake filled with the kind of water you'd find in water bottles. You'd never find a lake like this in Minnesota (well, for one thing, lakes in Minnesota aren't high up in the sky). It was also crystal clear so it was terrifying to look below the surface... because it was so deep that I couldn't see the bottom. It was also a bit terrifying to know that there was an active volcano under there.

After having our fun, we left and drove to the nearby Sukayu Senninburo ("Thousand Person") Onsen. You could tell it was a volcanic bath as the water burns your eyes and smelled like sulfur.

Don't worry, no important bits are exposed

After our bath we drove the rest of the way to Aomori and camped out... but we ran into some issues. We didn't expect there to be so many campers. It seems like other people had the same idea as us. The camping grounds were overcrowded and we were too exhausted so we opted to camp in a parking lot in front of our car.

August 7th, 2019

So this is what it's like being a member of the urban homeless. It did not feel good sleeping on asphalt, but this was ironically the most sleep I got during the entire trip. We drove around Aomori and explored the shops for souvenirs until the festival started in the evening.

The festival lasts three days and if I recall correctly the second night was going to happen.

The atmosphere was a cruel reminder of what it was like before this year's pandemic. Hopefully, things will be cleared up by next year!

August 8th, 2019

The drive back wasn't as eventful as the journey there, In short, it was time for us to be bored out of our minds as we stared at the mountains that we've been stuck on top of for days. As we didn't make any stops we made it back to Tokyo in about 10 hours.

This was the craziest road trip I've ever had, but it probably won't be the last. I probably should have taken more pictures of the things we'd done but I was far too overwhelmed by the constant influx of unexpected sights and experiences to capture every moment.

There are just some things that you'll never be able to experience in Japan unless you rent a car, so try to apply for an international license before coming if you can (just try to avoid doing some of the things that we did).

Thank you for reading and I hope you are at least a little bit more inspired to explore this beautiful country!

Luc