About Furepe Waterfall (Furepe-no-taki [フレペの滝])
The Furepe Waterfall (Furepe-no-taki [フレペの滝]) was kind of a percolating spring waterfall that seeped out of the sea-battered cliffs and right into the Sea of Okhotsk.
Due to the delicate nature of the falls, the Japanese translation of “furepe” was said to be something like “maiden’s tears”.
Therefore, this waterfall kind of blended in with other waterfalls that we saw on the boat tour of Shiretoko’s coastline, which started from Utoro.
Like with the Kamuiwakka-no-taki, I’ve included a separate page for this falls instead of clumping it with the other Shiretoko Waterfalls.
That’s because it was possible to experience this falls from land as well as by boat.
However, unlike with Kamuiwakka-no-taki, it was our fault for completely overlooking the trail that we could’ve done to get to the top of Furepe-no-taki by land on our first visit while bear activity prevented us from visiting it 14 years later!
I guess this oversight was a result of how much there was to see and do in the Shiretoko-hanto.
In any case, as far as the boat tour was concerned, at least the benefit of doing this was that we could get cleaner frontal views of the Furepe Waterfall.
The challenge was getting a decent photo (i.e. not blurry or awkwardly composed) with the bobbing of the boat.
This especially made things difficult on Julie’s slow point-and-shoot camera, but even timing it on my much faster DSLR was still non-trivial.
In case you’re wondering, had we visited the top of Furepe-no-taki by land, we would’ve taken a short 20-minute walking path that began from right behind the Shiretoko Nature Center.
The main benefit of visiting the falls in this manner was that we would’ve had nice coastal views agsinst the context of the Sea of Okhotsk.
Maybe one of these days, we’ll come back here and try to do it this day (and not be thwarted by bears).
Authorities
The Furepe Waterfall resides near Shari in the Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan. It is administered by the Shiretoko National Park. For information or inquiries about the area as well as current conditions, you can try visiting the Ministry of the Environment website.
For the boat excursion, see the Kamuiwakka Waterfall page for details.
For the Nature Walk, the Shiretoko Nature Center was about 5km north from Utoro near the intersection of the road going to the Shiretoko Go-ko (Five Lakes) and the road heading to the east side of Shiretoko-hanto.
For geographical context, it took us a pretty brutally long and slow 5 hours of driving to get from Asahikawa to Utoro by way of Abashiri and Shari. Asahikawa was 137km (2 hours by car or 2 hours by train) northeast of Sapporo. Sapporo was about 9.5 hours by train or 90 minutes by flight from Tokyo. It was also possible to fly to Sapporo from Osaka (under 2 hours) or Kobe (2 hours; this was how we did it on our trip).
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