3. Hokkaido, that big island in the north

 

The garden in Sapporo at the old Municipal Building

The trip from Tokyo to Hokkaido turned out to be our first Shinkansen (bullet train) ride and it really did not disappoint.   As we waited in line on the platform for our train, this futuristic jaw-dropper pulled into Tokyo station, yes it has a Tokyo Station just like London doesn’t have a London Station.  Our train, a real stunner, looked like something designed for an attempt on the land speed record.  Shiny aquamarine top half, a pink stripe and then a white lower half, just like a long squeeze of toothpaste also designed for an attempt on the land speed record.   Despite the fact that we have a train driver I can’t help calling him the pilot, being in charge of such a sleek piece of

The Shinkansen

engineering and in a very smart uniform to match.  As the train halted, teams of cleaners scurried in cleaning, tidying, wiping surfaces and getting it suitably presentable (i.e. very smart) for us passengers.  Then they were off the train standing in a line alongside the coaches until at a nod from the supervisor they all trooped off.  Like most passengers we had reserved seats which were allocated when we got the tickets and each seat had more than enough legroom for me.   The train had arrived from the direction in which it was to leave and as it halted all the seats automatically turned to face the new direction of travel.   The seats could be turned as pairs by the passengers too so if four people travelled together they could face each other and if they’d had an argument they didn’t have to..  

Trains don’t seem to have a restaurant car although a trolley does come along always pushed by a woman.  Men drive the trains, men check the tickets.  It is a male dominated society so

Waiting patiently in line

you’ll wait a long time for the first male equivalent of Geishas available to entertain business women.  Anyway, food for long train journeys is traditionally a packed lunch in a Bento Box bought at the station.  A Bento Box is oval, about ten inches by five inches and two inches deep.  Compartments hold various Japanese tidbits and there is a great number of choices some of which are advertised as “based on a 100 year old design”.  Heather’s vegetarian one cost 850 Yen, a little under six pounds ($7.50) while I’d managed to secure myself a couple of cheese rolls from wonderful Andersens.

The journey was as smooth and as quiet as you might imagine, somewhat like a very smooth airplane flight or even a lift travelling horizontally, a feeling reinforced by the on-board staff who mostly looked like flight crew (what we used to call stewardesses).   The trains are very much on time and I saw a departure board stating that the approximate travel time for the journey was 4 hours 2 minutes.  This included the 14 miles or so for the tunnel between

the main island of Honshu and Hokkaido.   It was indeed a 4h 2m journey and our transfer time of 12 minutes for a change of platform to an express train was comfortable.  This express was to take us to Sapporo, the largest city on Hokkaido and our home for four days or so.  One of the reasons the trains run so punctually must be the organisation of passengers waiting in a queue where the doors are and the briskness of any stop.  Over the next couple of days or so on Hokkaido we travelled on a number of express trains and I timed one stop from the moment the doors opened, six people getting off to the moment the doors closed at 24 seconds.  It helps that train announcements and on the ‘electronic display board’ are in Japanese and English and tell you what the next stop will be, urge you to get ready and “not to talk too loudly so as not to annoy other passengers”.  

Just about as close as I
want to be to a bear

I thought it was time to say something about Japan the country.  Well, it’s an island nation lying off the coast of a huge continental area and certainly in recent years has had a bigger impact than the size of the country would be expected to.   Sound familiar ?  Compared to recent times it is in economic decline, especially compared to its near continental neighbours.  Sound familiar ??   Japan’s area is about  377,000 square kilometres compared to the UK’s 242,000 sq km (California 424,000 sq km) with about twice the population of the UK, coming in at around 127 million.   About 80% of the country is mountainous and there are large areas of fertile plains along much of the coast with a large proportion of the population, which is why the tsunami of 2011 had such a devastating effect.   Next lesson - double physics.

We’d booked an Airbnb in Sapporo which was a small apartment, giving us more space than a hotel, a chance to make our own breakfast at least and use the washing machine.   I have to say that Sapporo is not the most attractive city, with lots of apartment blocks pretty well everywhere but I did warm to it after a few days.  Fifteen minutes walk south of us was the main railway station with a huge shopping centre built around it with the tracks on the floor above ground level.   There were a lot of various shops with a big selection of restaurants, many with no English menu translation and all spread over several floors.  Not much English translation anywhere to be fair. 

Your starter for 10 points. Where are you ? Where do you want to go ? How will you know when you get there ?

Rising above the station is a block of perhaps fourteen stories of shops with a restaurant floor on the fourteenth.  Outside was the biggest camera store I’ve ever seen and to give an idea of size there must have over a hundred tripods on display and more camera bags than you could shake a monopod at.  

We saw very few non-orientals around, probably because we’re off the normal tourist route for westerners which is why I chose to say non-orientals because there are direct flights from China and South Korea to Hokkaido.  Outside Sapporo we saw virtually no westerners and locals everywhere will sometimes just strike up a conversation.  “Where you from”, “what about Blexit”, that sort of thing.  The difficulty is that there isn’t a natural end to such an exchange, it just sort of

My doughnut shop friend

peters out, like a conversation sometimes does when you visit someone in hospital.  I was sitting in a coffee shop and a young  Japanese girl engaged me in a chat while Heather was buying the coffee.  My new Japanese friend had enough English to just be understood but whose pronunciation was mostly difficult to understand.   Don’t for a moment think that’s a criticism, my Japanese is virtually non-existent.  I showed her my stock photos I carry on these trips of Milton Abbas and the family, she showed me pictures of her family including grandparents.  I did think that if I had current photos of my grandparents they’d be about 150 years old.  We had a photo taken and I don’t think anyone says ‘cheese’ here they just say “give me two fingers”.  People hold up two fingers or pose coyly for almost every picture.

Japan has volcanos and hot springs a’plenty in a number of places including Hokkaido.  We took a train and bus ride to visit one to the south of us called Noboribetsu.  Another travel variation for us was that you take a ticket as you get on towards the back of the bus and then pay when you get off at the front.   At the volcanic activity area there was

Noboribetsu

a hot stream which was used as a footbath.  Very nice too.  The whole area was all very dramatic and looking like a bad case of industrial pollution with sulphurous steam, ploppy boiling mud and vivid colours.  It did feel very different to other such areas we’d been to and this one had the added bonus that we had timed our visit well for the autumn colours.  The woods we walked through were like many we’ve seen here with nothing growing as an understorey except a dense and coarsely leaved two to three foot high bamboo.  I can’t understand how any trees get going at all and yes, we did see Japanese Knotweed but not a great deal of it.

 

Noboribetsu

Food has continued to be ‘interesting’ for us and we have explored the cuisines of Italy and India on a number of occasions.  I do have difficulty with a lot of the Japanese stuff because despite the amazingly realistic models of plates of food outside many restaurants it is still impossible to see what a lot of it is and titles and menus are often only in Japanese.  Even in bakeries it’s difficult to tell if what looks like a cake is sweet or savoury and generally it seems that savoury is more popular, although some of the kids seem to put away multiple doughnuts at a time.  As far as eating goes, some people would describe me as picky or fussy but I prefer discerning.  Heather, as a vegetarian is caught by so many things appearing to be vegetarian but they often end up being in a meat or fish stock.  Still, in Sapporo we did go to a very smart hotel for a lunchtime buffet which was delicious, varied and exquisitely presented.  Non-alcoholic drinks included for about £30 ($40) for both of us.

So to spice things up a little, we rented a car to drive further north for a look at the mountains and a bit of a walk.  Even though Japan drives on the left (also known as the correct side) it just didn’t feel quite right and I think I feel more at ease getting into a car and driving on the right when off travelling.  One thing we saw that was just so typically Japanese was that at the end of roadworks on the main road there was a sign showing a bowing man.  Still, driving was easy enough for both of us and the roads were pretty empty by British standards.  We went to a place called Asahikawa in central Hokkaido where the Tourist Office told us that autumn was over and the mountains were snow covered.  We consoled ourselves with tea and cake.  


This is also

an area that for some reason that we still haven’t fathomed out grows fields and fields of colourful garden flowers in bands of colour.  We thought that would all be gone by now but some fields were still there with about fifty feet wide strips of Salvia, then Lavender, then some Marigolds or deep red flowers.  Summer photos we saw had perhaps a dozen different vividly coloured bands next to each other.  It was certainly cold but we hadn’t realised that the winter snows really had beaten us to the mountains.   Sure enough as we drove out of town, mountain direction, there were snowy peaks in front of us.

Winter snows come to Hokkaido