A day trip from Hakodate to Onuma Koen
Hakodate is small. So small that it only has one department store and thats mostly closed down. Small enough that the main station which is where I am staying really only has 2 platforms. Small enough that most people stop here for a few hours and go up the top of the hill I ran up in the dark before moving on.
Aside from the nearby hill / mountain, the 2 tourist attractions are a western style fortress shaped like a star with moats for no apparent reason, or the hysterical leaf mecca of Onuma Koen.
Unfortunately, it is raining, snowing, sleeting, and raining, and cold as hell. So I thought the best plan was to go walk around a freezing lake and stare at leaves in the dull grey freezing weather and see if I could contract a severe case of hysteria.
Getting to the leaf zone was no issue, I have 1 spare day out of 6 planned on my excellent value east south hokkaido jr east and some areas of west but not west shinkansen and also some private lines but not nikko pass. Seriously these passes are confusing, but on any 6 days in a 2 week period I can ride any JR trains for that day anywhere between Sapporo and Tokyo.
So even though its only 30 minutes each way, without the pass that would have been $30, and I would not have bothered. With the pass I can get soaking wet for 'free'.
Once I got off at the station, it was raining hard. Then it snowed really hard! Nothing was open yet. I paced around pretending I wasnt wet, and a fried things on sticks smoking cafe opened. The good news was that I was their only customer, and they served hot cocoa. So I sat and had that for 30 minutes and stared at the really heavy snow / rain combination hybrid HELL STORM raining down on the parking lot.
Unfortunately, a bus pulled up full of old Japanese men, who walking framed there way in to eat some fried dough on sticks and chain smoke whilst hacking up a lung each. The place filled with smoke fast, I had to leave!
Japan has a serious lung cancer problem, in every train bits of lung are flying across the carriages and I am convince each time someone will die and the traiin will be delayed.
I decided to follow the walking trails in the rain, and thankfully it soon let up a little, enough that I could hide under falling leaves and convince myself I was not wet. The great thing was because of the weather, it was just me.
Even though I am too late for real hysteria by a couple of weeks, I still thought the place looked amazing. More so when you realise they basically built it, and even more so when you realise it was completely destroyed multiple times by volcanic eruptions, see photos below! Unfortunately due to the very low cloud I could not photograph leafs plus lakes plus lava for the LLL combo.
I had a bit of time to kill before my train, so I went to the morning wet market. And looked at squid.
Turns out there are multiple buildings unconnected that are all part of the wet market general area of fish smelling dead things.
This is what greeted me at Onuma, dull, bleak, wet, closed.
These are real dead Hokkaido bears taxidermied however you spell that. They are taller than me. I was confident there were none roaming around this AAA certified tourist zone.
Then, epic snow for a long time.
Still snowing, but I thought I would set off into the snow and rain and take photos with my freezing hands anyway.
But it did look awesome. I imagine it would be at its best, 2 weeks earlier, with sunshine, and snow. I am not asking for much.
There are lots of little islands with the trees planted on them linked by bridges.
There are also ducks. On nicer days most people row a boat around and get off on the little islands and cough up a lung whilst eating cuttlefish and cheese snack.
Well, thats a broken rule. A tourist bridge that is not red.
More view.
2 bridges that are not red.
Photo of the day I think.
Rain had all but stopped by now.
I think there are about 12 bridges in total that I went over. Some were very slippery even though there was no ice. They would be deadly with ice on them.
Also in winter, all these lakes freeze and you can ice skate, ride snow mobiles, shoot bears.
I believe all this is somewhat man made, and needs constant dredging, there were 3 such areas being repaired with heavy machinery.
The visitor centre had some excellent images of the last volcanic eruption, this was taken just an hour or so after. As you can see everything is destroyed.
The mountain, which I photographed yesterday, has erupted over 50 times since the 17th century, and is closed to hikers. It last erupted in 2008 which significantly changed the shape of the summit area, but did not destroy the leaf viewing lake area like previous eruptions.
Exploring the Hakodate fortress at night
Apart from a brief period between coffee and train station tomorrow morning, tonight is officially my last chance to freeze to death on my holiday.
Probably my last chance to freeze until next winter in Melbourne, although you never know, maybe I have to go to somewhere else in the northern hemisphere between now and then.
Sendai is my next stop, and it was 19C there today, practically shorts weather.
Hakodate did not disappoint, still 0 degrees. But it tricked me. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped, so I set out for a long walk through the dark abandoned streets. At precisely the furthest point of my travel from anywhere, it started raining.
So not only did I manage to freeze, I managed to get wet again, also hopefully the last time on this holiday.
This evening I walked to the western fortress which is pentagram shaped and has a tower built near it for tourists to pay $10 to go up and gawk at the pentagramness of the fortress below.
The area where this fortress is can be considered the other city centre of Hakodate. It is smaller than the one I am staying at, but I had to visit anyway to make sure.
It takes nearly an hour to walk there, and there is even another department store there, but its mainly karaoke bars and pachinko parlours, and of course a fortress.
According to over 300 signs I have seen advertising the bullet trains arrival to Hakodate, this fortress is the only one of its kind in the northern part of Japan that is made of concrete. So rare!
It was built by the Japanese under the guidance of the French to protect the city from possible invasion by the Russian navy.
The only time it saw action was as part of a Japanese civil war. So as usual everyone is afraid of the Russians when the real enemy is within.
Today the fortress is famous for cherry blossoms. Well not today, wrong season, tonight it had a group of joggers running around it, just about the only other people I saw all night.
Hakodate is the type of city where people go hang out at the giant supermarket, which they drive to. I was out at 5:30pm and there were no people, so they do not walk home from work, they all drive.
Because everyone drives there are petrol stations. However Japan likes its petrol fresh, and has installed an oil refinery at the pump.
After about an hour of walking, I came to a main street of sorts. It had lights. There were a few places to eat along here, but mainly small bars, closed off from the street.
I found the other department store, and was able to enter just before closing time at 7pm. It seems they make their own clothes here, on a loom.
The quality of this store is highly questionable. You may recall previous amazement on my behalf at basement food halls in Japan. This is what we get in Hakodate. I think they have learned from the Russia of old. Line up for bread, when bread runs out, go home.
The brightest and biggest thing around is the karaoke bar. I saw some guys come out of here DRUNK, drunk enough to be staggering in the traffic. At 7:30pm.
You might recall last night I took a photo inside hamburger chain store Lucky Pierrot, and commented on how big it was, and that there were other identical stores within a few hundred metres of each other.
They are everywhere, heres a map on one of their stores. They have 15 stores in Hakodate, a city of barely 200,000 people. Your choices for dinner in Hakodate are Lucky Pierrot, the convenience store, or raw fish they couldnt sell earlier in the day.
The fortress. It is dark here, so I used my night vision goggles.
This is the tourist tower for the observation of the former fortress culturally significant sakura viewing area platform. Closed as far as I could tell. Not that I was going to pay the fee anyway.
I managed to find a non Lucky Pierrot meal. This is a multi level food village opposite the fort, I elected for ramen again, but only because they had one thats different.
It is half noodle, half bean sprout, with lots of mushrooms and wood fungus. It was excellent. Very happy with my choice.
Final photo for the night, if you dont feel like hanging out at the supermarket, you can pick one of the many many huge drug stores with parking areas that are found all over the city. I dont understand how the population can keep all of these going.