Sunday, June 8 – Driving to Nemuro Bay and the Pacific Ocean

 After breakfast we packed the vans and set off back to the harbor and climbed onto one of the whale watching boats.  There wasn’t any rain today and the sun even came out, which made for a much more pleasant trip.

Bob in green

  We could see Rauso Peak towering above our village.  We returned to the harbor after 2.5 hours without having seen much more than thousands of Short-tailed Shearwaters, a few Fulmars and two Black-footed Albatross.

We continued driving south, a couple of hours, stopping for our 7-11 lunch break

My unlikely lunch of pancakes stuffed with whipped cream and sweet red bean paste!

eventually turning off on the 18-mile Notsuke sand spit, the longest in Japan.  The spit itself is crowded with fishing gear, shacks, plastic fishing floats, boats in varying condition.  Strings of nets stretch out into the ocean, catching a lot of fish plus probably mammal, fish, and bird by-product. 

Family of four fox kits and their mom, who was shedding her winter coat, playing among the boats and other marine debris

Not a very attractive area, but the landward shore had good birding.  And finally, the elusive Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler hopped up on top of a bush and uncharacteristically sat there so we all could see it!

Map of the Sand Spit

Continuing on to Lake Furen Mark pulled into a rest area for us at the exact time five buses pulled in, disgorging hundreds of school kids, all in their uniforms, out on a field trip.  We decided we didn’t need a toilet after all and took off.  We reached the town of Nemuro and our hotel.  I had done my research and determined this hotel had a laundromat, so I grabbed my bag of clothes and dashed down the basement and found two nice machines that for $2.50 and some soap would supply us with clean clothes for the rest of the trip!

This hotel doesn’t offer dinner, so we all walked a couple of blocks to a very nice restaurant where we found multiple dishes of raw fish and shellfish, plus a baked potato, since we’re in the potato capital of Japan!!  The main course was perfectly cooked salmon, so Bob had something he wanted to eat.  Mark said the local sake is the best so several of us tried it - in very large glasses! – and it was very light and refreshing!

I popped my laundry into the dryer and in an hour had tons of clean clothes!