00:01 John Daub: Hey everybody, welcome to Chuo-san. This is a mountain right in the middle of Chichijima. On the other side is a view that you just don't forget. It's so beautiful. Right down there is Omura, which is the main village of Chichijima. You can see it between the harbor and the bay. And on the other side is the Pacific Ocean. Tokyo that way, 1,000 kilometers.

00:29 John Daub: It's a little bit windy up here. Sorry for the wind noise in advance, but you can see just how spectacular it is. From this platform, you get a 360-degree view of the islands. I thought I would bring this view to you live, just to share a little bit of it while I have a chance, because we have a very strong 4G signal. So I'm just going to pan around the island, the platform here.

00:57 John Daub: If you look down there, you can see that the island is pretty much just jungle. There's not any—there's a couple of houses right down there. I think that's an old World War II leftover. There's a lot of little buildings left over from World War II. Down there, there is a small town on this side, but there's a rain cloud over us right now. So it's kind of dark, but it's going to brighten up in about a minute. You can see this is the south side of the island, and it's all jungle. And if we pan around, you can see the road down at the bottom of your screen. And then there's another peak. This is the highest peak on the mountain, Chuo-san.

01:51 John Daub: Alright, we're back. The signal's going in and out, but this is pretty much countryside. It's kind of incredible just to have a live stream at all from this location. There's where we came from. The trail goes through there. So that's the center. The highest point is 319 meters, I think. Down there you can see the sea. That's, I believe, Higashijima. You can just see Higashijima on the other side. From there you get a better view. Maybe I'll take you over there. There's a cell phone tower, so we should be getting a pretty clear signal. Straight in the middle there. Right now there's a huge cloud above us. So I'm hoping once this passes, we'll get a little bit of sunshine in here.

03:00 John Daub: This is the last full day that I have on the island. And I wanted to at least do one live stream from an observation point. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that. Because that boat that you see right there, in 24 hours I'll be on that boat. And we'll be cruising back to the city. So I've got 24 hours to finish these episodes that I'm making. This will be about a 10-day shoot. It's been pretty long. But just from this point though, it's so stunning to be able to look down on the village and see it all. It's just in between my fingers. It's pretty amazing to think I was living down there. Now that big lump on the left side of the village, where the weather station is, that's where I made some of the sunset videos. Really beautiful. Everything looks more majestic from the sky.

04:06 John Daub: Ah, we got some other hikers coming. Welcome guys. Yeah, this guy is really stunning. I'm actually trying to do with the GH5 a time lapse to try to get some of the clouds. But we've been underneath this dark cloud for 10 minutes. That's why I decided to go live to try to kill some time and also share this with you. Yeah, Shazreen got it right. Do click the like button if you do like being up here with me. Videos need to have a little bit of love. So up here it also lets you know what you're looking at. And if you can't read these, you can always use Google Translate. With the Google Translate app, you'll be able to tell you what all this means. This is Asahi Yama (sunrise mountain), and Asahi Yama is right there. From that point, you can see the beautiful sunrise from that point. The sunrise is from this direction, and the sunset is from this direction—meaning this is west and that's east. So that's how you figure it out. You can figure it all out from the sun if you ever get lost.

05:26 John Daub: This is Minamijima. This is where the turtles were. And I have some amazing video that I'm going to release on Instagram. I don't know if I'll release the video, but I'm going to release the pictures of a turtle that we kind of saved—a baby turtle that was walking in the wrong direction. It was going to die. So we picked it up and put it into the sea, which you probably shouldn't have done. But I'm human. Save the turtles. This is the sunny side. You see the beautiful sun glistening off of the Pacific Ocean. And now we got some visitors behind us. Konnichiwa.

06:20 John Daub: Still we haven't gotten sunlight. We've been over this cloud. This cloud's coming over us. You see that? Dark cloud. Waiting for the cloud to go away. Nice sunny view. But it's quite incredible. And if you haven't already gone online and searched, you can see the history of this island back in World War II. It was brutal. And President George H.W. Bush—Bush's father, who came after Ronald Reagan, was vice president with Ronald Reagan—was shot down right off the coast here. I believe it was on this side. His airplane went down into the water, not far off the coast. Believe it or not, he was the only one—nine out of ten people—he was the only one that was saved. And it's quite a miraculous story.

07:14 John Daub: And George Bush actually came back to this island in 2002 to kind of put the story behind him. He was able to do that. So he came on a secret trip here in 2002. Not a lot of people know about it. There's not much information or pictures on George Bush's visit here. But he was shot down, and the prisoners of war were tortured. It was really brutal. It's kind of a part of the history that is just left from that generation is on its way out. And everyone has put that behind us. The war criminals have been executed. We like to think here everybody's moved on. This used to be a brutal place, and now it's a place of real peace. So I think that when George Bush came here, an elderly statesman, he kind of was able to put it behind him as well as the islanders. I'm sure it was a very emotional moment. You'll be able to see it if you check the internet—the George Bush 2002 Chichijima visit. And look at his story. It's an amazing story on how the Navy rescued him. And he was the youngest fighter pilot in World War II. So George Bush's story is pretty darn interesting. It's worth checking out.

08:36 John Daub: There's a boat coming in. I believe that's from Hahajima, from the other island. Hahajima is over there. Do you see? You can see Hahajima, the shadow of Hahajima. And this is Chichijima, Father Island, and that's Mother Island in the distance. It almost looks like a dark cloud, but that's Hahajima. And then there's a boat coming in, I believe the ferry bringing people. Definitely check out the history. I think I'm done with the time lapse. I'm gonna move on to the next location. I can't stay here forever. I got a busy day. Sister Island's over there. Someone asked me about Anijima. Anijima is over there. You can see it right there. And then there's the—which is the weird one, the wife island—is Tsumajima, I think that's how it's called. It's like just separated from the entire family. The poor wife is way out there. I feel bad for her. It is strong winds. I apologize for the wind noise. I just don't have the microphones to cut that down.

10:04 John Daub: Alright, that's it. I gave up. The weather is starting to get better. The cloud is gone from above us. And I stopped the time lapse. We have to move on. I don't have enough time. Tomorrow I'm gonna be going to a beach on this side of the island if I can just for a couple of hours. You have to hike two hours to get there. It's like a 10 kilometer hike. I'm gonna do that before I get on the ferry. I figure I'm gonna get on the ferry dead tired. So I'm just gonna sleep—that's the best way to do it. 24 hours on the ferry to get back to Tokyo. It's best to get on the ferry completely exhausted. There's showers on the ferry. There's two restaurants on the ferry. There's lounges. There's picnic tables. There's lots of open space on the ferry. It's almost a city—that ferry is pretty much a city in itself.

11:03 John Daub: You see down the center of your screen, economy starts at 25,000 yen—like about $250 for the basic economy one-way ticket here. So it's not the cheapest but it's not expensive. That's a good thing. I think I told you guys before, the good thing about this island is that it is not overrun by tourists. That it comes by boat because that means you have a lot more of the nature to you and the people that are here are here for like a week. So there are people who really want to be here. And I think if you had day trips to Ogasawara it would stink.

11:48 John Daub: Wow, now you know what? Oh, wow. Look at this now. The sky is moving so fast. I get I should be done the time-lapse in this direction. Now the clouds are really booking and the sun's starting to come out—the sun's coming into our eyes right now. Oh boy. It's a shame. Sorry guys. Hey John, welcome—John Wada writes and they got in to the live by accident. Oops. Welcome aboard. You're now in Chichijima in the middle of the Pacific here in Japan, which kind of almost seems not like Japan, but it is very much Japan.

12:36 John Daub: But when you're out here on the sea, you can always see how the clouds are flat over the sea and just how it explodes up. They're so beautiful—ocean clouds, the most beautiful scenic clouds I've seen in the world. And we're actually here and on Easter Island it was just where you could see along the Pacific from forever and some of those clouds at sunset were just stunning. Another one—look at that. Probably are used to these though, the tropical clouds. Okay, so we're gonna go next spot for me to film. So thanks for joining me on this location, Chuo-san.

13:19 John Daub: Why are they flat on the bottom? I guess it's because of the sea. There's no buildings or anything to break it up. I don't know. It's like why is a flying carpet flat? I guess I don't know. It's carpet. These are clouds. You know, if you're meteorologist leave a comment below. We'll find an answer to that for you. But I have to plead no—I don't know. I know a lot of stuff. I don't know that. Cloud science, cooler temperature. Maybe. Yeah, hot air rises. It's a good question. Alright guys. Thanks for watching everybody. I'll try to do another livestream in the evening, but I'm very focused on making the episodes for the main channel. So I'll see you today and definitely tomorrow for sure. Have a nice day and night.