Livin' the McDream: Snow Monkeys in the Wild! And Hotokegaura

Guess what we did 364 days ago? Visited Hotokegaura! Yes, this adventure was a repeat (timing completely coincidental) but we just had to show our friends this beautiful place. Throw in some random wild snow monkey sightings and it's well worth the long drive.

**Map, GPS coordinates and driving details are at the bottom of the post.

In no way is this drive in the Shimokita Peninsula a "quick trip," if you're following our route you have to be prepared for an all day adventure, the distance is deceiving, only about a 210 miles round trip, but it's almost 8 hours of driving time, not including any stops. Yea, that sounds crazy, average of 25mph or in our speak 40kph...SLOW either way you say it! Lots of narrow streets though villages and winding mountain roads. Go on a clear day and the scenery and views are amazing.

We started off the day with a stop at the Sun Mamoru Winery to sip a couple samples vino and get some grape ice cream. Next stop was Whale Island in the village of Wakinosawa. Every time I see it I wonder if it was actually formed that way or manipulated by humans? I mean, obviously the lighthouse placed at the position of the blowhole isn't a natural occurrence, but the rest of it? Hmmm...

Always so tragic when I find these. A broken glass float.

View from a lookout point on the road from
Wakinosawa to Hotokegaura.

Arriving at Hotokegaura there is a small parking lot, signs warning for bears and then a hike down a hill and down stairs to the coastline. There are a lot of stairs and on a hot day a towel and a spare shirt are not a bad idea after the sweaty ascent back to the parking lot.

Last year when I wrote about our visit to Hotokegaura I explained how the name means "the coast of the Buddha" and that the rocks are said to look like statues of Buddha. Funny thing, we didn't see Buddha in the rocks again this year. It's a 2 km stretch of coastline and it can be viewed either by hiking from the parking lot or taking a boat cruise from the nearby village of Sai.

Lots of sea urchins!

It definitely moved! Haha

The rocks have flecks of aqua, very pretty.

Baby wearing rock climbing daddy!

We may not see Buddhas but we
do see an eagle...or hawk?

Did I mention there are stairs? This was just the beginning...

A little north of the parking lot is an
area to pull over and get the view from
above. The haze made it hard to see
where the water ended and sky began.

Severely disappointed that we hadn't seen snow monkeys south of Hotokegaura (where we saw them last year) we headed north on our journey back to Misawa. And then out of nowhere we spotted a monkey! We stopped and they just kept coming out of the trees, sooooo many monkeys! Mommas and babies! We had lots of fun watching them and wished we could have stayed longer. The photos didn't turn out that great, but I was shooting through the car windows.

And there's a video, yes, we are so nerdy being excited about this...you can mute it to forego our comments and awesome jams that happened to be playing when the iPod was on shuffle and we were too busy to notice and skip to a more entertaining song. And yes, it's very out of focus, was still learning my camera at the time.

These are Japanese Macaques, also known as Snow Monkeys the most northern living monkeys in the world.

Don't mind us stopping by during your lunch!

Baby on the bottom.

I don't know what they were all looking at...

Baby on the top.

On our drive back we went through a small village that was preparing for a parade...had to dodge floats on the already narrow streets.

As I said above, our route took us about 8 hours round trip without including time for stops. From Misawa to Wakinosawa took about 2 1/2 hours and another hour from there to Hotokegaura. The route home (going north from Hotokegaura to Oma and then to Mutsu and Misawa) took about the same amount of time 3 1/2-4 hours-ish.

GPS coordinates:

Whale Island: 41.128671, 140.809583

Hotokegaura: 41.310704, 140.804151

http://www.hotokegaura.jp/