Day 8 - River Tracing

Today, we woke up at 8:30am to enjoy some Japanese Miso soup to start the day. Yum yum! Then we spent the morning staying at Rocky's house while he and his wife Ikumi went to work. After lunch, we headed down to the fishing center. Rocky works in a building next to the river which promotes tourism in the area. It is called a fishing center, but he does more than that. Today, we were trying something new, river tracing. I was very excited to try this. Basically, it is walking up a river in a wetsuit with some rock climbing involved. By the end of the trip, you get to see a waterfall. It was pretty challanging since it has been raining a lot and the river was full. Rocky said it was the highest he's ever seen it.

We walked up many hard bits, until we came to the toughest part. Rocky mentioned that he was worried if he could make it up, but he did. The next person to go was very tall and not quite coordinated. Rocky through down a rope to give some support. Along the way up the wall of rushing water, the man slipped, and so did Rocky. Everyone help their breath for just a moment as we were all prepared to see two bodies falling down the waterfall. But, Rocky reacted fast and braced his body against a big rock while being plunged into the torrents. It was pretty exciting to see since in the end, everyone was okay, and Rocky pulled the man up to safety.

It wasn't so easy to climb this part, especially after watching that display, but, I was prepared and it went smooth enough for me. The water was cold, but we got used to is and enjoyed some diving into the water soon after the hike up the river was finished.

Next, we had to hike out of the river through a forest up the a steep hill. This was nice because we saw a temple at the top, next to a cliff. We gave thanks and headed off, when I noticed a strange animal walking around like an inch worm. Was my eyes decieving me? Was this a leech on the forest floor? To my surprise, it was, and a big one, too. Then Dennis told me a story about how he had three leeches on his body while walking through the forest of Malaysia in Borneo. In Canada, you see, leeches are always in the water, so this was news to me.

When we got back to the fishing center, I was shocked to see on Dennis, a small leech sucking his blood above his waist on his side. That made me do a very thourough check of my body, and to my relief, I was clean.

We said goodbye to the Japanese group that joined us, and then I saw something on Dennis' ankle, another leech! And this time, it was huge and full of blood! My god! Dennis didn't panick, so we took some photos. Rocky used a cigarette to burn it off of his ankle. It dropped to the ground in pain. Next, he took some salt and the poor creature shriveled into a raisin as it oozed out Dennis' bright red blood into a neat puddle onto the pavement.

Later on, Rocky had some customers over for a barbeque. It is Rocky's mission to increase tourism to this part of Japan, so he hope I could pour their drinks and talk a bit. My Japanese is really bad, but I was able to answer some of their questions and ask some of my own. Eventually, I went upstairs to wake up a friend of ours, his name is David Peyrot.

The reason he was sleeping is because he had been hitchiking all over Japan. And this day, it took him two days to reach us, and he had only two hours sleep, so he was exhausted. We know David originally from Hokkaido, Japan, where we were teaching snowboarding and skiing for the winter. we also traveled Okinawa together. He became a good friend of ours, and it was nice to see him once again, even if for just a short time. Our first full day at Rocky's proved to be one to remember!