Our apartment hosts were happy to pick us up at 7:20 in the morning and take us to Kutchan Railway Station for the train to Otaru, where we would have a couple of hours en route to Sapporo and New Chitose Airport. It was a local train, and rather pleasant working our way through the snowy countryside.
Otaru is a small coastal port settlement, with a canal through it, and a well-known fish market.
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| Otaru's canal, definitely winter here |
We'd previously checked being able to leave our bags in luggage lockers at the train station there, but the largest size wouldn't fit Alastair's long ski bag. That was quickly remedied by walking 5 minutes down the road and leaving it at a bike rental shop for a small fee. We had two hours to wander around the attractive little town. It seemed a good place to break a day's travelling. It was very cold, but we were all very surprised to find the sea slushy and frozen at the port. It's the first time John or I had seen frozen seawater. Pretty cool (no pun intended).
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| Frozen discs in the sea |
We got our first real taste of Meiji-era architecture (post 1868, pre-WWI), and enjoyed wandering around the central area a little. The main drawcard at the fish market were its famous king crabs. Most stalls had boxes of them, all squirming around. You could buy one and have it cooked in the stall-owner's eatery immediately next door. Prices were far too high for us - several hundred dollars for a reasonably sized one. We opted instead for a more reasonable set-menu of sushimi, which was delicious and cost about NZ$18! The place was heaving, with massive numbers of staff - I counted 16 working in the small kitchen!
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| Fabulous sushimi set meal |
We caught the 1pm train for the next one-hour journey to Chitose Airport, and, having already checked in our bags, negotiated the rather baffling system for depositing them. It was then onto the plane for just over an hour's flight to Komatsu airport, south of Kanazawa. The weather was perfect and we had some incredible views over snow covered fields, forests and dormant or extinct volcanoes. The houses coming into Sapporo were remarkably nondescript. Very boxy, nothing about them says Japan at all.
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| View from the flight to Komatsu |
For the next leg we jumped onto the airport shuttle bus to the Kanazawa bus terminal (40 minutes away). Alastair did well lugging his 20kg-ish ski-bag all over the show, though it does have wheels. The Kanazawa bus terminal is a very impressive piece of architecture but we didn't hang around too long, just enough to find out where to collect the city loop bus for the short trip to our accommodation spot. It was cold and dark by the time we jumped off the bus at 6pm and scouted for our rooms (with the handle 'Vacational Rental Sunny Heights').
With a little detective work we found it. A little tricky trying to track down the reception, but one door had a little bit of signage, and on opening it we arrived in a living room, but with some Booking.com signs on the wall, so clearly the right place. Some discussion about how long we had the rooms for - he had assumed both were for 3 nights, but Karen and I were keeping one for a further 2 nights.
We'd booked two small apartments, side-by-side. At around 20 square metres they were among the larger places on offer. The living room doubled as the bedroom by rolling bedding out over the tatami mats at night. We all slept well because we all prefer firm beds.
Before we lay down on the floor, however, we searched the local vicinity for a meal. There didn't appear to be much open on a Sunday night, but one place seemed to show a little life, and we went on in to find a fantastic little bar full of locals having drinks and snacks. Great fun! A bit of shuffling around of the locals to make room for us at the counter and we were away. There was a good menu of tempura and miso soup, which turned out to be delicious. In front of me was a collection of shoju (barley-based liquor, similar to sake) bottles with a date and some scripts, which we worked out were each bought by a different customer, and would be drunk over a period of a couple of months, or perhaps only weeks for old soaks.
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| Customers' shoju bottles, named and dated |
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| Friendly locals at Fukuten Restaurant |
We have found that as Europeans, we are very rare in this area, and clearly a source of interest. However the Japanese are so polite that we normally only get an initial glance then eyes are carefully averted. We hadn't expected to be such rarities. Presumably when we get to Kyoto and Tokyo things will be different.