This was one of those grandiose treks that came on a whim - the best kind. Take the local trains to northern Japan just to see what happens!! Why not? After all you can do it for cheap using the Seishun 18 ticket - a ticket that lets you ride local JR trains for 5 days and only costs 11500 yen (~105CAD)! I have got to give credit to a very good friend of mine, Dave Bokan, for instigating the idea. He dropped by Japan for a second time and wanted to do something outside of Tokyo. Thats pretty much how it all started.
I made a map of the final journey using the ultimate power of Google! Click on the dots to read some info about that stop.
I also took a lot of pictures. I plan on putting a full 100-photo trip summary up sometime, but until then here is the abridged set for Facebook. If you have me on Facebook, view them through my profile or else you wont be able to comment.
..So on with the rest of the long story..
Dave and I are masters of planning. That is to say, we need no planning - or so we think until 1 hour before we have to do something. This trip was no exception. Sure we exchanged some internet links that proved people did this before successfully, but we didnt write out a real plan or an itinerary or anything. First of all, we didn’t end up buying the right ticket for the trip, we bought something similar but it made the journey a little more complicated. Then, we thought of leaving in the morning of January second.. but love for sleeping in made that go away. No worries. “We’ll take the night train to Niigata, and then figure it out from there” was a catchphrase on the evening we supposed to leave. The evening came, then the train came, then we came to the platform only to find that it is “reserved seats only”. No problem - run to the ticket office at 22:59 before its closed at 23:00. “Sorry sir, all the seats on that train are full“- well that’s anticlimactic. With the next train that gets us closer to our destination leaving at 4:44am, we decided to re-group in an internet cafe, and just spend the night there. After about 3 hours of research we had things written down on paper with times of train arrivals and even station names! Foolproof plan. We were off on that train at 4:44 heading somewhere north.
On the way up Dave and I resumed with our hobbies: I put in my earphones and went crazy taking pictures of sunrises and just about everything else outside of the train; Dave slept gloriously. Our first stop was Sendai, a city on the eastern coast of Japan famous for Gyutan - beef tounge. Of course we had to indulge in the dish over some beer and then spent some time touring the city and taking pictures. Regardless of the fact that Japan shuts down for Jan 1st 2nd and 3rd, we still managed to have our entertainment. At 6pm we were on the road again heading to Hachinohe for the night (in theory).
Soon after our departure it started getting cold and we eventually saw snow as we reached Ichinoseki. Compared with the awesomely warm winter weather of Tokyo, this started to remind me of Canada. The trains also drastically changed from the metropolitan area. The 12-14car long monsters shrunk to about 2-3 cars in length and always had plenty of seating available. The whole atmosphere was very different including people and the way they dress and act. Perhaps it was the “middle of nowhere” effect. Throughout most of the ride i pondered on what it would be like to live so far out of a big city - kept my imagination busy.
Of course when we arrived at Morioka, one of the bigger towns on the way up, our foolproof plan went out the window (again). The train we were planning to take would cost us an extra 3000 yen ( ~28CAD), and the alternative route was not running until the morning. The two of us shrugged it off and rented a capsule hotel. It came with a ticket to a public bath/sauna, which would have been iffy up until about a week ago when we went to a hot spring resort in Odaiba and conquered the North American fear of public bathing. Back to our shameless European roots! After some food and sleep we were on the road again before 7am.
The trip between Morioka and Hakodate (our final destination), went surprisingly smoothly aside from small things. On our way we took an express train that took us through the longest tunnel in the world - 50 min of underwater travel from Honshu (the main island of Japan) to Hokkaido. We got in and couldn’t find an “unreserved seat” so attempted to “Gaijin Smash” [verb: to use foreigner ignorance to an advantage] and just take some empty spots. That didn’t last too long as we got moved out pretty quickly, but at least I managed to snap a picture of Dave being a bit edgy about the scenario. Once we got to Hokkaido, the trains degraded once again - now resembling 2-car diesel powered tractors that run as fast as real farm machinery. The people were also a bit less concerned about politeness and full out lay down on the seats when there was plenty of room (a horrid no-no in Tokyo unless you are a bit beyond happy drunk). Finally the Hokkaido winds were coming from the oceanside, so they were cold and wet making plenty of ice patches everywhere and feeling rather chilly on any unshielded skin. Strangely (and stupidly) enough, no one uses road salt here - the sidewalks are a disaster. Canada 1, Hokkaido 0.
Being the champs we are, we didn’t have reservations for a hotel in Hakodate, not even a recommendation from the internet. Asking the clerk at the information desk resulted in a room at “Smile Hotel”. To our surprise the place was very decent and had a nice view from a balcony (see pictures), but the price was in accordance with the name - cheap. Happy with our newfound accommodations we went and spent a pretty penny at a higher-class sushi shop - and it was good.
Our Hakodate time was spent pretty well. We went up to a very large hill/observation point on ropeway and witnessed what is apparently regarded as one of the top 3 night-views in the world. I made my first decent panorama shot *hooray*. Before calling it a night we spent twice our planned amount at a local bar where the crowd slowly dispersed from our diameter because of our foreignness. Savoured some good brandy and rum though. In the morning we went to the fish market and at some very fresh seafood (caviar, sea urchin roe, and clamfish on rice). Of course we made the trip to the local brewery - after all what better time is there to start a 4-glass sampler of beer than 11:30 in the morning? All satisfied I bought a small and useless keepsake from the souvenir store and we got on the train at about 1pm.
At this point in time Dave was beginning to worry about making it in time to catch his flight. Due to our rapidly changing plan and unplanned mishaps along the way, we had to buy tickets for the Shinkansen [noun: bullet train] to take us halfway back. If we missed that train, Dave would miss his plane, and then lose his reservation for on campus residence at Waterloo. Understandably, the stakes grew quite a bit and so did Dave’s concern. The “Wambulance” [noun: ambulance for whiney people] was en route.
The main highlight of the return trip was a stopover at Kanita, our northernmost station on Honshu. We had an hour to waste before our train arrived, so we wandered the tiny middle-of-nowhere town/village. By the oceanshore there was a flock of very large white birds relaxing, they could have been swans - my bird-identification skills are a bit rusty. Aside from the fact that the birds were very photogenic, the surrounding beach with distant mountains and a close-to-sunset sky made for glorious must-see pictures. My camera has a wide-angle lens with no zoom, so i had to get really close to take the good shots. Awesomely enough, as i slowly inched towards the flock, the smaller birds (probably the females) went into the water, and the bigger ones stayed on shore and watched. An unplanned encounter like this in the middle of nowhere was the kind of stuff that made this trip worth it. You’ve really got to see the pictures.
The final night was full of worries of missing the shinkansen home, so we had some good food at an izakaya (typical Japanese restaurant) and called it a night at the hotel in Hachinohe. At 7:10 we were on the ridiculously fast train bound to arrive in Tokyo in under 3 hours, this time with much more appreciation of it’s speed - it took us a bit under a day to travel the same distance on local trains.
Once back in the city we rushed to Imatake’s sushi, a very small and traditional sushiya close to my house where the only chef knows my roommate Ivan and I by name. He even remembered Dave from the time he came in the summer! We went all for the sake of Dave’s last hour in Japan - that was a good 5000yen lunch for the two of us. Surprisingly enough Dave did manage to miss the train to the airport because of the time it took to transfer photos to his computer. Luckily there was a tiny bit of forethought and we didn’t book the last possible train. Changing the ticket time also turned out to be free. Dave was on his way, and I slowly began returning to my routine lifestyle, harsh realizations of the amount of money I spent, and the mess that my apartment got turned into after having 5 people in it at a time. All in good fun.
On the whole, this trip was definitely awesome. I’m glad to have friends like Dave to accompany me and encourage spending money. I’m very glad to have the opportunity to show people around another country and give them a good experience. I’m also very glad to have friends that actually made it down here and had a good time with me. I am equally as glad to have friends back home that will be welcoming me back in several months - that should be fun. All in all, I’m a pretty glad guy at this point in time.
Oh, and another thing: I’m glad that some people are actually interested in reading the stuff i force myself to write here. Thanks.
i miss you