00:08 John Daub: Alright, there it is. This is the station. This is Bettoga Station. I wanted to come here and bring you somewhere super deep in Hokkaido. Come on. Let's turn off the engine here. Wow, there's not much out here. Check it out.

00:32 John Daub: This is Bettoga, which is on the Hanasaki Line, which runs between Kushiro and Nemuro. One of the more isolated train lines. Very few people ride this. And apparently this station is not like Shibuya Station. It's not exactly bustling. But what makes this station really unique, besides the fact that it's in the middle of nowhere, is that it is actually an old train car. At least it looks like it is. And we're gonna have a look inside. This is as deep as you get in Hokkaido. When they don't really have a real station, and they just take an old train car and make it a station. Yeah, it's not a really big population here. I don't think there's any electricity at this station either.

01:23 John Daub: Here's the Hanasaki Line that's gonna be coming by here in about 30 minutes. I got here too early, which is maybe a good thing. And I'm gonna have to film this for the main channel. This is the train station. That's Bettoga. And here's the sign. As you can see, this is a typical JR sign. You see these just about everywhere. Bettoga. Of course you gotta come here by rent-a-car. There's no way to get here unless you come by train. But yeah, not a lot of attractions here. There is a shrine straight ahead. And maybe we'll go take a quick look down this road. But there really isn't much here.

02:07 John Daub: Let's go inside the station and take a look. At 11:35 in about 30 minutes, the train from Nemuro is gonna be making its way this way through here to Kushiro. I just took some drone shots at another station of the train going the other way. There's only five a day. Whoa! This is pretty basic. But it's clean! It's pretty clean and no spiders in here, which is a huge plus. Wow, we're in a JR station. Maybe the most remote. One of the most... It's really clean! Welcome to Bettoga Station in a trailer.

03:05 John Daub: We'll take a look at that sign in a second. It tells you how to get on the train. Here's a schedule of all of the trains that come to Bettoga Station. The first train is at 6:05. And you can see, it's about every three hours. It's not very frequent. The last train is at 7:40 p.m. going towards Kushiro. So you don't want to miss that because the next one isn't until the next day. And going the other way to Nemuro, there's a train at 9:03. That's pretty late. But going towards Nemuro, there's only four a day. And going the other way, there's five a day. So I think maybe one of them might be a weekend train.

03:50 John Daub: You can see here's the train line. It's not huge. Here's Kushiro. Here's Nemuro. And I guess some trains from Kushiro will go up north to Abashiri, which is where the prison used to be. We're here, Bettoga. So very close to Nemuro, which is 640 yen. It's about 30 minutes to get to Nemuro from here.

04:20 John Daub: This is interesting here. Be aware of a train coming in, going out, or passing through. Watch your step so as not to fall from the platform. It's a true story. So they have a graphic to show you what not to do. Don't go onto the train line. I mean, if this was India, it would be okay. I've had family members just jump onto the track to cross platforms. And I felt like I was breaking a law by doing that. But that's the way they do things in India. They just sort of jump across tracks. In fact, the tracks are the restroom there. You could do that here. No one would report you.

05:14 John Daub: So you'll board the train here. But if you ever drop something, legally you should not be going and getting it yourself. But I think if you know the train schedule, maybe you can think about it. There's no public telephones here.

05:36 John Daub: Let's have a little walkabout Bettoga area. We are 77 meters above sea level. So usually they let you know that in case of tsunami. The sea is not that far away. You can see up there the horizon. That's the sea. So we are 77 meters above. So pretty kind of high here. So that's the station. This is the exit. Watch your step. All right. Let's go into the town. Let's go try to find a McDonald's. There's not going to be any. There's not going to be any restaurants at all. However, there is a Daiei Con [?]. So that's going to be kind of neat to be able to see something here. You could spend the night. I don't know. Even this road, only about three cars have passed. And I've been here for about 15 minutes. So it's not really what you would call even a highway. Although the self-service is pretty good.

06:54 John Daub: They said there was a shrine, Bettoga Shrine. So just take a quick look, see around the corner. And then I got to get ready, get the drone ready and the camera ready for the train rolling through here. It's a slow process making an episode like this when there are only four trains a day. You got four shots and I'm coming back here in May so I can fill in the rest. Okay. There's a shrine. Shrine straight ahead. Hello. Thank you. No fast food, no convenience stores, not even a vending machine in Bettoga. It's pretty basic and I think people like it that way. I could see myself maybe making a retreat here. And a retreat meaning like this is where you go to get away from everything, including people. I haven't seen anybody here. Oh, there's somebody over there. YouTuber has never been here before.

08:15 John Daub: I'm going to take you guys to downtown Bettoga. All right, here's the shrine. Let's just go take a quick look, see maybe we can make an offering for peace. If you missed it, I showed you Russia from the easternmost side of Japan about an hour ago, maybe a little bit more than that. This is an amazing shrine. I'll walk down the center. I said hi to the lady there. There's a lady moving bricks. I have five yen, which is a typical donation at a shrine.

10:33 John Daub: And we're walking around the shrine. Wow. I passed dozens of deer driving here. They're just hanging out on the side of the road. There's a breeze. It's not too bad, the wind, compared to the Cape I was at before. It was really bad. Dozens of deer I passed just hanging out on the side of the road. It was weird. And they're just watching, like watching the car like it was a tennis match. This is very unusual. I was worried that they're going to jump in front of the car. When I drove out through this beach town to get the first drone shot, I was driving and just on the corner of my eye, I turned this way. There's deer in the town, just like before. So there's a very strong unity with nature in this part of Japan, I believe.

11:59 John Daub: All right, I better get back to the car and start to set up for the train coming. So there you go. That's downtown Bettoga. It smells fresh. Very fresh air compared to Tokyo. You can't even compare. It smells good. Somebody's burning a fire somewhere. Air is cold. It's chilly. So it kind of impacts the nostrils a little bit. But it's warm because of the sun.

12:49 John Daub: Shane writes in here, amazing how much better the video quality is in the country than in Tokyo. There's a lot of people that are using the Wi-Fi, the 4G signal. And that's why there's just like a traffic jam usually. And so you can't get very good signal in Tokyo. The best signal I ever got for live streaming was probably Ogasawara on a remote island 24 hours away from the city. Just because they had the most modern 4G LTE and not many people using it. But we don't have that problem out here. It's like the leaning barn of Bettoga. It's at an angle. Guess that's why they built a new one but didn't have the heart to. What do you do?

13:49 John Daub: What should I do? Do I bark at him? What's inside that drainage ditch? There he goes. Or is that a dog? Living in like, all of the animals are pretty chill here. That's a wild fox. What's he eating? In this direction is Nemuro. And yeah, there weren't any convenience stores for a very long ride. There's another animal down there. That looks like a cat though. Side of the road. There's my car.

15:45 John Daub: All right, everybody. There you go. I hope you enjoyed this. This is Bettoga Station. If you are coming on the Hanasaki Line, you could stop here. Stop and pray at the shrine. Bring a bento. Have some, you know, have a nice quiet lunchtime and then get back on the next train. You can do that. Just hike down the street and make sure you don't miss your train. But it does pay to have a rent-a-car like I do. I can get out of here anytime I want. Don't call me when you miss your train. I might not be here. I probably won't. Train's coming in about 15 minutes. It's time for me to set up the cameras. I don't want to miss it. Once it's here, it's gone. I'm done. I'm on the road back to Sapporo and going to get onto the plane at 8 p.m. tonight and back to Narita. Take the bus back into the city, a taxi back home. Maybe I'm in bed by 11 p.m. Long days. But that's what you got to suffer through to make good content. Any content. You got to fight it out. You can't sit in your apartment and eat and film yourself and expect people to say that's good unless you're witty and smart and have something funny to say. And I don't really have much to say at my apartment anymore because Leo's there.

17:02 John Daub: Hey, AAC! Whoa! Long time no see. Thanks for the Hokkaido journey. Have fun. Wow! It's our friends in deep Portugal on an island. It's awesome. Hey, Mr. Yamni. Thank you, Mr. Fu Yamni. Arigato gozaimashita. All right. Stay cool, everybody. I'm going to try to get to the airport earlier. And if I can, I will livestream at Chitose because it'll be interesting to see how the airport is doing. So my flight's at 8 p.m. So if I can get there at 6:30, a little bit ahead of time, that'll give me enough time to take you around and I don't have to run for my flight. Although it's a lot more fun if you run. It's called drama. You're going to sit there for an hour and a half. You might as well run a little bit, right? Just a little. Gravy rights and go, go, go. Hey, Fungus USMC is here. Wow! I'm seeing a lot of people haven't seen in a while. Long time, John. Rest easy. Rest of Hokkaido. Thank you. It's a five-hour drive back to Chitose, to the rent-a-car place. So I got a pretty fun day. I kind of like this distribution. I like to drive and chill. But if I see something beautiful, I'm going to take a picture and maybe we'll have Hokkaido on the postcard club this month or next month. I don't know. Or the next month after that. By the way, the postcards have gone out and they started arrive already in a lot of the countries. The UK came. It's the postcard of Ameyoko. There's still plenty available if you want to. I could definitely use the support on Patreon. I really appreciate it. I'll send you the postcard the second I get back to Tokyo. Yeah, I like sending postcards. It's a nice day. I got a cherry blossom stamp this month, too. It's like an old Edo Skytree and cherry blossom stamp. They got part of it. Mr. Anzi, how you doing?

19:01 John Daub: All right, everybody. Thanks so much for watching from deep Hokkaido. The last 20, 30 seconds will be of a panorama of this wonderful station called Bettoga. And I'll be back here in the spring, maybe. But I'll be back in Nemuro for sure to ride the Hanasaki Line when the sun goes down. And there's a little bit more green on the trees. It's kind of depressing out here because everything's winter dead. But it's coming back to life. And you can feel it because the sunshine is nice and warm. We just saw a fox. I think that's good luck in some countries.