Folks here are obsessed with bears. Not only are they a common character in Japanese folktales, but everywhere you go there are warnings and drills on what to do if a bear is in sight. When you go for a walk you would think you are taking your life in your hands, and grownup men walk with tinkerbells in their shoelaces and clap loudly every few steps to scare the blood-thirsty Asian Brown Bears.
We got treated to this paranoia when we went for a walk at Shiretoko-Goko or the Five Lakes of Shiretoko. The lakes are clustered on a shoulder of the Shiretoko Peninsula, off the ridge of Mount Rausudake and a cliff that drops precipitously to the Sea of Okhotsk. They are not fed by any streams, and I am convinced that they are here because a flank collapse (a large rotational landslide) tipped the regional slope inland to form a depression (where the lakes are just an expression of the water table) and the corresponding sea cliff. It is a popular tourist trail, about 3 km long, but you can only take it if you have a local guide properly trained to deal with bears. There is a briefing at the beginning, the guide is in constant radio communication with the base in case there are any bear sightings, and as he walks at a snail's pace along the trail periodically claps and shouts loudly to alert any bears in the vicinity a group is coming. It was a pleasant enough walk, and our guide, Mac, really enjoyed showing us trees, plants, and birds, but having covered only 2 kilometers in two cautious hours it began to really get old. Mac is a funny character, young and with the happy face of a 10-year old, he would make the perfect kindergarten teacher.
The surroundings of the lakes, which are fed by groundwater and not streams, reminded me a lot of Walden Pond, in Massachusetts, where Henry David Thoreau wrote the seminal musings of the conservation movement in America. Walden Pond is a glacial kettle lake, however, and the Shiretoko lakes are not.
Toward the end of the loop there is a raised walkway, shielded from evil bears by a sturdy iron gate and an electric fence, and once we were on it Mac finally relaxed. I felt we had just escaped Jurassic Park. And then, toward the very end and barely 100 m from the parking lot, the people around us went crazy and pointed wildly toward a clump of trees. There was a bear! He must have been a good 600 pounds, with golden-tinted brown hair, not unlike that of a grizzly bear, and basking under the shade of a tree completely oblivious to the stir he was causing. OK, he was a pretty big boy, but clearly not the blood-thirsty monster that had been represented to us. How disappointing.
After a quick lunch we then crossed from northwest to southeast the Shiretoko Peninsula, which extends northeast away from the heart of Hokkaido like an arrow that had just cut through it. The northeasternmost tip of the peninsula is Cape Shiretoko, which sits at the tip of the arrow pointing toward the Kuril Islands and Mother Russia. Our goal was to take a boat from the last town in the peninsula, Aidomari, to the cape and Land's End. It was a smaller boat with a big outboard motor, and the captain seemed to have walked out of the pages of Moby Dick. As we progressed northeast along the steep coast, to larboard, it became clear that we were still on the hunt for bears. It is estimated that there are about 500 bears in the Shiretoko Peninsula, and apparently overpopulation or human encroachment has pushed them to the fringes of the peninsula, where they roam the slopes in search of tender shoots and berries. "There!" pointed the Cap, and on the steep green slope we detected a tiny little brown dot slowly moving. Clearly this was a job for binoculars, which we had brought, and for 10 minutes we watched in fascination as the bear slowly worked his way around some particularly tasty bush. We moved on and after a few minutes we spotted another. And then a mom and her cubs, and then a couple of juveniles, and ... by now we had our eyes tuned up, and we were competing to see who spotted the next bear. Overall we had a dozen or more of sightings, and then I had a flashback to old California, and wondered if this is how seafarers entertained themselves as they followed the coast north through Central California.
I spiced things a bit by explaining the geologic features we encountered, such as dike swarms, pyroclastic layers, columnar jointing, and mudflow deposits common in a volcanic terrane. Land's End was, as promised, the farthest point of Japan to the northeast. On the second part of my trip I intend to hike to the northernmost end of Japan.
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