Christmas Day on a volcano!

Our second attempt at Mt. Aso was a success. We tried again on Christmas Day when we were driving east from Kumamoto to our next destination. We drove up the little toll road early in the morning (you can also take a ropeway, but toll road was cheaper than two people on the ropeway, plus Markian hates heights). And this is what we saw. This strange reddish/brownish barren land. Very different from what we'd seen in the rest of the caldera. It reminded me of being out west in the states.

Behind Markian in the picture above are emergency shelters in case something goes wrong while you're up there, because this is still an active volcano. I really don't think they're going to do much good in that situation though. You'd pretty much be screwed.
Finally, we get to see what we came here for. The huge active steaming crater. It's so cool. I'd never seen inside of a volcano before, and this is one of the few places in the world where you can get this close! It looked like a beautiful blue/green inside because of the water in it. It looked very similar to a giant geyser. It was really stinky up here, but nothing like our last attempt when we weren't even this close!
We took a picture of ourselves and then lots of pictures of inside the crater. It was different, but a great way to spend Christmas morning. I have so many good memories of this trip!



So many people around up were holding wet cloths to their faces and trying not to cough. The smell today wasn't bothering me at all at that moment.


Here is what the rest of the landscape looks like up there. Nothing can grow there I guess, so there is lots of volcanic rock from previous explosions.


Desolate but beautiful.


By the time we'd done the short little walk around and looped back over to the caldera, it was really smoldering. The air smelled really bad.
Above: A shrine. Here you can pray for your life when the mountain is going to blow.

So, I went and looked at the warming sign and about two minutes later the thing activated and said the air quality was really bad and it wasn't safe to be up there and they started moving people out of the area.

Look at all the smoky sulfur stink!
I started coughing uncontrollably again like the day before when we couldn't go up the mountain and I felt like I couldn't breathe, so we got in the car. We were finished at that point anyway. Wow, we'd timed that just right!