Hokkaido - Shiretoko!!

After lunch we arrived at Shiretoko National park. this was the main reason i wanted to come to Hokkaido and seemed the same for most of the people on the tour. It's a world heritage listed national park and one of the most beautiful places i've ever been too. It's famous for wildlife and much of the park is unnacesible so has remained unspoilt. In winter the ocean is covered with drift ice, in spring flowers, summer the mountains are a beautiful green and in Autumn the mountains are red. This is a place i'd love to visit in all four seasons.

The first picture is out first stop in Shiretoko. just to the left of this shot was a heap of people fishing but like everywhere else they weren't catching anything. The second picture is our group with a ranger from the national park giving us a guided tour of the park. the two bottom pictures are of lake 1 of the 5 lakes.

This area is famous for wild bears and as you can see from the first picture they're really here. Those are claw marks from a bear trying to get fruit from the tree. the photo at the bottom left is a map of the five lakes. it's supposed to look like a bears paw. the last picture is telling you that lakes 3, 4 and 5 are closed because there's too much bear activity at the moment.

After visiting the five lakes we went to our hotel but on the way back the sunset looked like it was going to be beautiful so we dumped our bags in our room and started running to the ocean. I literally mean running. sunset was at 6:20 and we left the hotel at the 6:00 so not much time considering we had about 2kms to go. it would have been pretty funny seeing me running with my camera and Mika trying to keep up carrying my tripod. you can see some bigger versions of these sunsets pictures on my flickr page. It was beautiful and well worth it.

here's dinner at the hotel. It was all you can eat again (called viking) here. it was huge. 80 differenty types of food. mostly seafood. i pigged out on fresh prawns, crabs and oysters. after dinner we went to the onsen (public baths) they were the best ive been too. there was 5 baths including a giant spa and another one you lie in thats shaped to your body that massages you. there was also an outdoor bath with views of the ocean and boat harbour. really relaxing and soothed the sore muscles after running to the sunset.