Category Archives: Hiking

Christmascaching in Finland (24.12.14)

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You know how Christmas is the time of year that you’re meant to spend time with the family and just stay home? Yeah well, I spent a couple of hours geocaching before lunch. The lighting was great (the sun was actually visible for once), and the snow seemed like it was going to be gone soon enough, so I had to go get some pictures as well.

Having never parked around the area, I spent a good ten minutes thinking of how I should be parking my car when I got there. With the initial difficulties out of the way, I decided to wander in to the forest in hopes of getting a few good pictures before starting to hunt for the geocaches in the area.

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Taking a shortcut through a swampy, snowy forest

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For once, there was snow around Christmas, after it, and it would seem that it will last all the way until after New Year’s before it starts melting again. Since it’s so rare to have so much snow around this time of year nowadays, I thought I should go out to take some pictures of the woods and the lake nearby. I picked up my stuff, got appropriately clothed and started walking.

First, before wandering to the skiing paths in the forest, I decided to go towards the town. Why? Because the trees around the road were bent by the snow; it looked pretty damn cool. After I was done, I started heading back towards the forest.

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Day 13 – 10.04: Through Hell and boiling mud pools

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So I woke up to a weird, awful, infernal noise that made me want to murder someone. I was just about ready to start beating up my laptop before I realised that it was the table clock that I had put to wake me up on 6:00. I closed it and started procrastinating instead of doing what I was supposed to: planning and finishing, or rather, starting the previous day’s entry. Hours went by and suddenly the clock was 9:00.

I had done some research on what I should do, but what I had had in mind previously – visiting the islands on the north western end of Hokkaido (北海道) – was just not possible at that point; the train that goes that far leaves thrice a day and takes five hours to get there. So I trashed the idea. I finally got off my lazy bum and did some research on the locales on the way back to the main island, and found Noboribetsu (登別) to be an ideal place; it had scenery AND a place called Hell’s Valley (地獄谷) a walking distance away. Having decided on that, I checked out of the hotel, but found out that it was raining.

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Day 5 – 02.04: They climbed. Oh yes, they did.

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The new day dawned and I woke up at some point, seeing the Freeman’s Mind episode that I attempted to watch before I went to sleep still playing, looping for some reason. I got up and started fiddling with my computer, mainly writing the diary entry for the previous day – alcohol, for some peculiar reason, had stopped me from working on it the night prior.

Brendan was suffering from a hangover, so what would be better than going to the Mt. Tsukuba (筑波山) – special for it’s twin peaks, Nantai (男体山) and Nyotai (女体山) – eh? So we left for the mountain.

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