Wakinosawa, Japan

On Sunday we traveled to Wakinosawa village to see the Japanese snow monkeys. We have been wanted to take this trip for some time.

I have a difficult time navigating in Japan because my original map of the area only shows the street numbers for the major highways and toll roads, many of the highways and surface streets are depicted with lines just not with any names or numbers. Most of the Japanese roads have numbers. So I bought another map, this one shows all the street numbers. I thought I was on my way, but this map is entirely in Japanese. I thought I could handle it because all the street signs are in Japanese and English, I would just compare the Japanese in my book to the sign. Turns out this is near to impossible to do while navigation. It takes me a good five minutes to determine if what I am seeing on the sign is what I am seeing on the map. So this trip I thought I would be smart, I took both maps side by side, and marked out our trip route. Then I wrote all the road numbers on the English map, numbers I obtained from the Japanese map. I appears to be the exact same map, one in English without the roads being marked and one in Japanese with the road numbers marked.

This actually worked really well. Plus after all this time spent looking at our route I had the whole thing memorized anyhow. Plus we have driven most of this route several times going to various other places. When we went to bed on Saturday night the weather was nasty and we decided not to take the trip. However, Sunday morning at about nine I noticed we had blue skies. I talked the family into making the trip and we got on the road about 11:30am. We even wrote down the exact directions with the KM market at each turn. If we turn in directions to the Family Support Center here on base we can win a prize. We all worked very hard to make sure the directions were perfect. We stopped and had lemony fried chicken nuggets on a stick at a Circle K, so good. We got there in about two and a half hours with no problem.

The problem wasn't the directions the problem was the location. The problem was the destination. Wakinosawa is supposed to be the farthest north that any monkeys live. There are supposed to be 1500 monkeys living here in the wild. These are red faced monkeys that only live in this one little remote town or in a zoo. What we saw was about 10 monkeys in a cement cage surrounded by green netting. These monkeys are supposed to play in the local hot springs, this being how they keep warm in the winter. The only hot springs I saw were man made cement and dried up, filled with weeds. It cost us 200 yen per person ($2) and we took some pictures, haven't gotten them developed yet. Then we drove home. On the way home we stopped and got some yellow flower ice cream from Nanahano it is weird but good. I got the idea I should take my friend Niki to taste the Tofu donuts (which we drove past) and the lemony chicken and the Nanahonoe ice cream and we are going on Friday. The best part of the trip was driving through the forest with the trees beginning to change colors. I am hoping to take some gorgeous pictures on Friday's trip. This little jot will only be about an hour each way and I am hoping to take it during Lily's nap.

Well I guess some trips have to be unsuccessful. You never see anything if you don’t try. I am debating turning in the directions. I want to win a prize but this place totally sucks.