travelling allrite

There is snow around, the peak of the mountain is up ahead and I'm wearing a t-shirt. Even I feel a little cold right now but I know that a hot bath lies ahead. Or below us, as was the case right now. We were up Mt Daisetsuzan, overlooking the beautiful Sounkyo Gorge in Central Hokkaido.  The steep gorge is lined by sheer rocky cliffs and topped by rock formations like crumbling castles. Thirty thousand years ago a volcano exploded filling a valley with its pyroclastic flow. The molten rock cooled quickly into hexagonal columns. At the end of the last ice ago a glacial lake dammed by ejecta from the volcano broke through and quickly eroded the rock, causing the tall columns to collapse, creating Sounkyo Gorge. The National Park Information Centre has an English subtitled video of the formation of the gorge, along with scary looking stuffed bears. When we left the hotel, late, I hadn't made up my mind whether to go to Sounkyo or take the easy option and visit No...

Squid ink, sea urchin, sake, beer, wine, pumpkin, sweet potato, horseradish. Not your average dessert menu. But they were some of flavours on offer at Kita no Ice Cream Yasan in Otaru, along with the more normal lemonade, chocolate and white peach. B ordered the black squid ink and sea urchin flavours, while Alex and I have a cone of the visually appealing lemonade and pumpkin. The verdict: Squid ink is okay, sea urchin disgusting, lemonade wonderful and pumpkin not so nice. I want then to try apple pie and white peach, but B won't let me. I suspect that some flavours are only tolerable after a high enough consumption of the beer flavour. Otaru is a port city about 40 minutes by rapid train from Sapporo. It's the shortest amount of travel we've done in a day so far this trip - even the trip to the airport hotel in Sydney was longer! Once a major fishing port, Otaru has a large number of historic warehouses and a scenic canal still lit by gas lamps at night. Now it...

Hokkaido is the only of the four major Japanese islands that we have not yet visited and today we were destined for Sapporo, the largest city on the island. Hokkaido is not yet connected to the Shinkansen network, so it's a fair ride by train to get up there. We raced up to Shin-Aomori, the current northern terminus of the Shinkansen line on the latest E5 model train and changed to normal express train. As we departed Aomori we could see the continuing construction of the extension to Hokkaido. Pictured on the back of the seats is the schedule for traversing the Seikan tunnel under the sea between Honshu and Hokkaido. At its greatest depth the 54 kilometre tunnel runs 240 metres beneath the surface. Much of the route between Aomori and Sapporo runs along the eastern coastline, though it sometimes dips into verdant mountainous forest or the rolling hills of rural areas. It feels isolated and wild out here, a different Japan to the semi-tropical southern regions. ...

There is much to see in the Tohoku region of Japan. I had multiple itineraries planned for today, all of which involved a lot of train travel, the differences being which lines we caught. But after the previous night I wasn't feeling so enthusiastic about a whole day on the rails. I was looking over some options with B when she spotted my brochure on the Gono-sen line, a scenic route which winds its way around the northwestern coast of Honshu. Ever since seeing a picture on the wall of a JR ticket office in Tokyo I've wanted to go on the Gono line. Next question, how to get there. Do we go north first or across to Akita? First B does the washing using the hotel facilities (usually my job and it keeps me up very late), then we have a Japanese breakfast of miso soup, rice cakes, Japanese potato salad and (for a western touch) mini croissants. I'm still dithering about the destination when we cross over the road to Morioka station. Eventually, we reserve seats up to...