East Hokkaido Trip I

Finally got the time to settle down and work on processing the photos I've took from the incredible trip to the northernmost part of Japan. I brought my computer with me this time and every night my external hard disk just inevitably had to work very hard on uploading images in the average of 10G per day. At one moment I even feared of my HD ended up broken or something since it's quite an old one. Anyway, there was not so many complication during the whole trip actually and I could fully enjoy it!

The first day, Feb 18, was a rough start actually. I took the 7am bus from Beppu which bounds for Fukuoka Airport, but the bus just had to stop because of some sort of car accident on the express highway for about 1 hour and a half! Everyone in the bus was almost freaked out because we all had to get on the plane to somewhere else. Finally when the road was cleared, the bus driver just sped up like driving a race car and everyone in the bus was like watching their favourite football team on a final World Cup match! That was something funny which shouldn't have been funny at all. When the bus arrived at the airport everyone just fleed out of it.

At the airport I had to take a shuttle bus to the domestic terminal which located on the opposite side of the runway(the bus only stops at International terminal) and I was so pissed off on how slow the shuttle bus driver drove, plus he's got the most boring face and voice ever. I think he should get some day off. Finally when I arrived at the domestic, I rushed to the ANA check-in counter and I immediately got sick because what I saw was a group of about 70+ junior high students waiting in line to check in and upload their bags. What could be worse? well, the worse is that all these students were also checking in for the same flight to Sapporo as well! However, after a super tired start I finally managed to get myself into the plane just in time and all the complication seemed to be ended. I arrived Sapporo at about 2pm then took a train right to Kushiro. The train arrived at 6:30pm, so the first day alone was spent just only on traveling. I stayed in the cheapest business hotel in front of the Kushiro Eki, the Hotel Ocean something. It was very cold and the snow started to fall lightly. I had a very bad udon for dinner and went to sleep. The next day I saw no sun light and it seemed like the snow had fallen a lot last night. I took the bus to Tsurui village to see the crane and when I arrived the snow started to fall again.

However, I felt lucky to get these 2 Sika Deers
that came to the feeding ground.

Many people who have seen the photos told me that cranes in the snow are much more beautiful than in sunny weather, but I don't know why I didn't feel that way at all that day. Maybe because it's my first time here so I really want to get some normal/standard photos first before turning to the more artistic direction. The weather condition even got worse after 12 and I gave up because it fell so hard I couldn't even take any photos. That night I really wished for a better weather tomorrow morning and I unbelievably got it!