Izu Oshima Travel Report – part 2
Day 3
Close to nature my hotel was. In my new sea side room I killed a smaller spider, two other unidentifiable bugs and worst of all a large centipede… giiiiiii…. In the morning at breakfast, I met the only other hotel guest that day, a young British guy who had spent some years in Japan teaching and was back for a holiday visit. He told me he killed three of the monster spiders in his room the night before, and that this hotel was the dirtiest he has ever encountered in Japan… Reassuring that this wasn’t only my opinion!
Anyway, it rained 9 in the morning but just about stopped at 9:30 when I left the hotel to catch a bus at 10:00 for the “Oshima Park”. Considering the weather I still thought it was no good idea to tackle the volcano. Already arrived at the bus station I noticed that I had forgotten my sunglasses in the hotel and it was too late to go back to the hotel for them. I see nothing without sunglasses when the sun is out and jogged back to the only sports store of the island half way to the hotel and they sold some sunglasses indeed even if they had only five different ones to choose from.
Back at the bus station I noticed that one of the sunglasses’ arms missed the protective ear piece and pure metal stuck out at me. I wrapped it with a tissue and jumped on the bus, being one of three passengers.
After a ride of about half an hour and being the only remaining bus passenger, I arrived at the Oshima Park, which is a lavishly wide garden with a zoo in the center. To my utter surprise everything was for free. Well, our taxes pay for that, but I am really wondering why they take no entrance fee for the zoo. The zoo has a walk-in bird house with peacocks and swans, geez, flamingos and also some tiny wallabies. The peacocks were very busy appealing and opened their brilliant feathers every few moments. Their hens completely ignored them though 
After some falcon and eagle bird houses they have another walk-in parrot bird house. Next to a porcupine, two smaller parrots were busily flying around and two giant macaws waited inside a cage. You could feed them with peanuts in their shells, which you could buy at the little souvenir shop at the park’s entrance.
The parrots gently took peanuts out of my hand, then cracked them open holding them with their feet to get to the contents, very cute guys.
Next they had camels, lamas, giant turtles, all sorts of goats and a giant enclosure with mountain goats and lemurs. They also had an armadillo, sloths and red pandas and last but not least a petting zoo with normal goats, pigs and three donkeys. I asked an animal handler what to do with the rest of my peanuts and he said, oh, the goats eat them, the donkeys eat them, and the pigs eat everything anyway. All three specimen turned out to be very eager for those peanuts.
I’m really surprised they have a big zoo like that on this island in the middle of nowhere. In contrast to Ueno zoo in downtown Tokyo where there are more people than animals, the animals on Oshima have a quiet and I guess much better life – I saw a dozen human guests and that was it.
Among them was a girl from Osaka and we ended up wandering through most of the zoo together. She had brought her bicycle via boat from Atami and was bicycling around the island, which is some 50 kilometers.
She jumped back on her bicycle and I strolled through the park next and climbed down to the sea or at least until there was no further way down (see flickr pics). Back at the souvenir shop I had a late lunch with the only thing on the menu: ramen. Funny, you either get ramen or nothing, well considering the number of guests one’s gotta be grateful they offer food at all! Then I practiced some hiking and climbed around some more in the utterly lonely park and that done waited for the bus, again being the only passenger on board.
Back in Motomachi I went to the sports store and complained about my new sunglasses. Japanese service – the sales lady apologized and let me exchange the sunglasses for another of the five pairs that she had 
What sort of freaked me out the whole day was the lack of people on the island. I frankly had not excepted the place to be so lonely. It was great in a way, since this is the main purpose of getting out of Tokyo during golden week, to escape the masses for a while. But the level of expectation determines how you feel about something a great deal. When I went to Tasmania for example I expected it to be lonely and was not “freaked out” in the least. But Oshima did freak me out a bit – I had not expected Tasmania-like circumstances 120 km way from Tokyo!
Day 4
Thoroughly freaked out after yet another night fighting bugs, this time a nasty, big, black cockroach in the loo, I decided to head home and to cancel my last two nights at the crawly hotel on the lonely island. The Chinese owner lady was very friendly though and gave me back the money for the last night and offered to drive my suitcase to Okata port so that I would have more time on Mt. Mihara.
The weather was still not awesome but since this was the last day, I rushed to the bus stop and took the only bus within two hours at 8:50 in the morning up the mountain. There were two people on the bus to the greatest attraction of the island… Arrived at the end of the road before the volcano it was very cold (after all this was 600 meters high) and the icy wind made me happy that I had taken my warmer jacket plus the rain-jacket and threw them all on. No cell phone service was available at the top but luckily they had a public phone – there are times when you still need those! At 9:30 I called the ship company to rebook my return trip and luckily everything went well. I called the hotel once more and asked her to bring my luggage to the port at 16:00.
That done I could relax and turn my attention to the volcano.
It looks pretty awesome and you can still clearly see the lava flow from 1986, which you will doubtlessly note in the pictures. The maybe 45 minutes walk through the extensive caldera to the top of the volcano was freezing cold but luckily the sun was coming out more and more. Some lonely hikers were around here and there but this was nothing like for example my hike to Mt. Fuji where you are standing/walking in line to get up the mountain.
Mt. Mihara’s crater is pretty awesome and the steam coming out of the mountain here and there adds to the “whew, this is an ACTIVE volcano” feat. Interestingly the steam does not smell of sulfur at all. There was hardly any smell from the smoke but I caught a nose full here and there and it smelled like charcoal if anything. It’s been a while since I visited an active volcano, before Mt. Mihara it was Mt. Aso in Kyushu during my student times and it stank so badly of sulfur that my greatest memory of Mt. Aso is getting sick.
When I went to Hachijojima by boat in 2011, I caught the sulfur smell of Miyakejima miles away on the boat even, but Mt. Mihara just smelled like a BBQ fire – luckily
The hike around the crater is 2.5 km long and the views are awesome. On a very good weather day, usually in winter, you can see Mt. Fuji from Mt. Mihara as well, but that day it shied away behind clouds. Around 13:00 I was back at the bus stop and had lunch in the empty, old and run down souvenir and eating hall looking down at port Motomachi.
After lunch, I went back out some more to the “urasabaku”, the “desert on the other side”. This part of the caldera looks like a desert where, for what reason ever, plants do not find enough to settle down in the black sand. Time permitting, you can walk to the other side of the island through that part of the caldera but with my boat waiting, I took the bus back down to the port and waited there for my suitcase, which duly arrived thanks to the hotel lady at 16:00. I had wanted to take the slow boat where you can go on deck back to Tokyo but it sails only once per day and that around noon, so I had to take the jet ferry again back to Tokyo.
I have now been to three of the islands under Tokyo-city administration, Ogasawara, Hachijojima and Oshima and have detected an interesting divide.
Funnily, the furthest away island is the “richest” one. Things on Ogasawara are relatively new and relatively rich, built by dropouts who decided to quit city live and moved to Ogasawara for freedom and sub-tropical paradise.
Hachijojima was once a tourist resort during economic bubble times and is not completely “degenerated” yet, although, in another ten years or so it probably will be. Oshima made a very old and neglected and rather shabby impression on me. What the tax payer pays for, the zoo, the roads, all that is in great shape, but the people’s houses are very old and run-down. Oshima has never been a real tourist island I suppose, it’s not warm enough as Ogasawara is and somehow just too close to Tokyo. The volcano is great and well worth a visit, but the rest of the island…
This “divide” among the islands is quite fascinating me and I don’t think I am done yet with Tokyo’s islands Next could be Niijima, a bit further south (you can see it from Oshima), with 2700 people on it, even older and even lonelier? But who knows, maybe I will next challenge the most isolated one of the inhabited islands – Aogashima, which is south of Hachijojima and there are only 230 people living on it! Despite that there are a few guest houses, checked that already. You get there via Hachijojima, there is one ferry to Aogashima per day.
Let’s see what I will challenge next in terms of Tokyo’s lonely islands
