I always encourage my friends to visit.  I like having visitors and I think it’s even more important to do so here in such a small town.  Nik, my predecessor, told me that he never got many visitors to Saroma.  This left me less than optimistic about friends visiting me, here in this far-flung remnant [...]

Saroma, while surrounded by mountains, isn’t dwarfed by them as is Palmer or other towns in Hokkaido.  Saroma sort of melts into the softly rolling, forested mountains, many of which are small and gently sloping enough to be farm fields.  There is one mountain at the very southern edge of Saroma that is a decent [...]

I finally posted all of my photos from my four day bike ride north from Oumu around Cape Soya and then south to Rumoi.  The captions of the photos chronicle the trip well enough.  I’ll let them and the photos tell the story without a blathering blog post. Photo below links to the gallery. Here’s [...]

This weekend marked the 22nd annual Pumpkin Festival here in Saroma.  It’s by far the biggest event of the year, with the whole town coming out for a weekend of festivities revolving around the famous local pumpkins. The Pumpkin Festival weekend kicks off every year on Saturday night at 6 pm.  As it gets dark, [...]

Yoshie and I took a four day bicycle trip around eastern Hokkaido last week.  On two folding bikes, we covered over 200 kilometers, went through two national parks, rode along two oceans, conquered two 2000-foot mountain passes.  We saw five foxes and dozens of deer, bathed in four different hot springs, and saw the Russian-controlled [...]