Aso Volcano to Oguni Village

As much fun as Kumamoto was (and David wanted to stay for a whole week!) we had plans to go see Aso Volcano.  We rented Mark a car, collected everyone up, and drove out of Kumamoto.  The volcano is about an hour out of town (and visible from town) and while the road was busy (it's single lane), once we arrived it wasn't too busy.

The weather in Kumamoto was a little overcast, but once we got to the volcano the fog roled in and we couldn't really see anything, except the large shopping area!   We had lunch waiting for the weather to clear, and tried one of the local delicacies - horse meat.  The person selling the meat (on skewers) made sure we understood this was horse meat - but Andrea pushed on and says its good!)

Once the weather got a little better we tried walking up to the volcano.  There is a cable car (400 Yen each way) and you can drive up (1500 Yen per car), but the walking path looked good.

As we walked up, we noticed sirens going off.  Cool.  We kept on walking.  We noticed there were a lot of cars coming down the hill, but not many coming up.  When we we got further up, we found what all the fuss was about - the volcano was giving off a lot of gas and they had evacuated the peak.  Reluctantly, we turned around and walked back down.