A travelling day. But leaving an airport hotel never seems to be a bad thing. It is fascinating to see that the more people there are, the more the personal touch seems to get lost in the crowd.
After close to 2 hours of queuing, checking in and transfers, we manage to board the plane to Kushiro on Hokkaido, the northern main Japan island.
It’s winter. It’s cold. We are talking snow and ice. But we are here to line up with other like minded souls to take photos of Japanese Red Crowned Cranes, which used to occur all over Japan.
These regal birds were almost extinct, dropping to 12 birds in 1924,surviving in a patch of swampy wetlands that man could not use. A single dairy farmer started to feed the cranes corn in the 1950s. Now there are close to 2000 cranes on Hokkaido.
All the photographers hope for that iconic photo of that happy couple doing their courting dance. Most just get cold.
