Tim's visit: Mt. Aso

After our awesome day in Miyajima, be boarded the Sakura shinkansen to start our travels to Mt. Aso.  Mt. Aso is on Kyushu, one of the main islands of Japan.  We took the shinkansen to Kumamoto, which took about two hours.  This train had wide comfy seats, I think maybe it was the retired green car of an older model of train?  Tim enjoyed some Miyajima beer on the train.

We changed trains in Kumamoto and took the Kyushu Odan limited express to Aso.  This train was very retro compared to the shinkansen, but it was fun!  We traveled in the evening, so we didn't get to see much out the windows.  This was the only time it really rained on our trip, so we were lucky that we were traveling during it!

 The next morning we got up early to take the first bus up to the crater of the volcano.  We were amazed at the scenery around us!  Mt. Aso is the site of one of the world's largest volcanic calderas, with at 75 mile circumference!  In this picture you can see the steamy volcano from the bus ride - I think Tim hung his head out the window to take this picture!

 There are many peaks around Mt. Aso itself, and many secondary volcanic craters too.

 On this day Mt. Aso was especially active, letting off a constant stream of volcanic gas.  This meant that the ropeway and paths up to the crater were closed.  We waited for a little while, but eventually realized that the volcano wasn't going to calm down for quite a while.

 We looked at the surrounding scenery...

 ...and took some more pictures of Mt. Aso.  Not far from the ropeway station there was a museum about the volcano.  We stopped there and saw all of the exhibits.  They have a camera in the crater that is remote controlled, but all we could see was white from the fumes!

Tim was especially fascinated with the ice crystals on all of the small plants!

 We had some lunch and then went back into the town.  Since we had some free time we checked out the onsen at the big hotel next to where we were staying.  It was pretty nice, and there was a good view of Mt. Aso from the baths.  Also, it was nice to be warm again - it was very cold up on the mountain!  But, maybe the onsen was a little too hot for Tim, he was pretty red and sweaty afterwards!

The next morning I checked the website for the ropeway and it said that the volcano had calmed down and all areas for viewing the crater were open!  We quickly packed up our stuff and made it to the bus station.  Up the mountain we went again, but this time we got to go all the way up to the crater!  Hooray!

 Deep inside the crater was an aqua blue lake.  It reminded us of the hot spring pools in Yellowstone!

 These men look like scientists taking some kind of readings.  Tim was jealous of how close they were to the edge of the crater!  Also, those little huts were all around, probably as an emergency shelter in case the volcano erupts!

After viewing the crater for a while, we started to walk back down to the bus stop instead of taking the ropeway.  Along the way we saw a path through what was called a volcanic desert.  We explored a little bit, and saw this lava bomb sitting there!  The soil here was very dark and grainy sand - a very interesting texture!

 This is one of the smaller craters from the side.  It is crazy to think of how active all of these volcanoes once were!

Once we made it back to the ropeway station, we decided it was time to have some lunch.  Tim was excited that the restaurant in the station served the local specialty, horse meat.  (Figuring this out took some Kanji detective work!)  I didn't try it, but he said it was good.

This was the last stop on our 6 day trip!  After the morning viewing of the crater we had to travel to the airport and fly back to Tokyo - boo!  It wasn't too sad though because we still had a couple of days of sightseeing to do after I made an appearance at work on Friday.  

Thumbs up for Kyushu and Mt. Aso!