Sapporo is a new town and not much of a tourist hotspot, and at the end of the festival we immediately ran out of things to do. We had meant to go and see the dancing cranes (of origami fame) in a national park north of Sapporo, but a national holiday disrupted our plans. After briefly considering a trip to Lake Akan - famed for its spherical, much anthropomorphised algae balls - we caught the train back towards Tokyo, stopping off for a night in the small fishing town of Hakodate.
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| Happy tram. |
On our way to the hotel, Hannah spotted a tram with her inexplicable hero, Commodore Perry, emblazoned on the side. It turns out Hakodate was the second place the American officer visited with his four black ships when Japan was ‘opened up’ to the outside world in the 1850s. The people of Hakodate have embraced this as a tourist focus, possibly because there is not a lot else to do there. This apparently necessitated us going on a bracing walk early the next morning to hunt out tourist destinations like ‘the original site of Commodore Perry’s meeting house’ and ‘foreigner’s gravestones’. It was freezing and I kept warm by making use of every hot drink machine we encountered. These appear every 100m or so along every street in Japan, and sell a variety of drinks – cold in summer and hot in winter. Apparently the most reliable way of judging when winter has started in Japan is the day the machines start stocking hot drinks. My constant favourite was hot coffee in a tin, but by the end of the walk I’d also consumed an 'Amino Acid Replacement' drink and something called ‘Tea-spresso’, which may or may not have been tea and coffee mixed together.
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| Hakodate railway bento. |
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