We started off on our journey to Mt. Aso around noon. Mt. Aso is a huge crater from a volcano. It is the largest active caldera in the world. It is has erupted and killed people as recently as the early 90s.
But the real story of the day was getting there. We decided to take the "scenic" route. And this day was a perfect example that trying to find your way around the back roads of Japan is not an easy thing - especially as a westerner.
We did happen to stumble along some spectacular countryside and crops so we got some nice photos to remember the day.
The Journey:
We headed off the expressway at Haki and made it to Hoshino and were trying to get to Yabe. We saw a sign for Yabe and followed it.
The road was beautiful and through the mountains - along rice fields, tea crops, and persimmon trees. Then somehow we ended up in a nature preserve and the road got really bumpy and then ended. So we figured we must have taken a wrong turn.
We turned around and tried to find signs for Yabe again. The problem is, all the signs were written in Chinese characters (kanji). And we can't read kanji. We tried to match up the words on the map we had to the words on the signs...
We finally found a sign that looked like the kanji for "exit" and thought that must be the way out of the nature preseve. We followed that sign and ended up in a town that was called something that looked like "exit." Ha ha. We continued on the road past the town of "Exit" (or whatever it was really called) but had to stop when we encountered the road blocked by a mudslide.
We turned around and went back to the town of "Exit". There was a gentleman working in front of his house and we "asked" for directions to Yabe. (What Roland said was, "Yabe? onegaishimasu" - Yabe, please.)
After a few hand signals between the men, we headed off again toward Yabe. Apparently the communication worked because we finally came to a large stone sign that said "Yabe Village". But the sign was in the middle of nowhere!
It turned out that Yabe was about 2 kms down the road from that sign. Once we found Yabe we continued along the way toward Mt. Aso. It was getting late so we ended up just finding a lookout point and looking toward Mt. Aso and not actually going there!
Click on this link for the photo album of our day in the country while trying to find Mt. Aso.