We leave fairly early in the morning for a reasonably long day heading south. An early start is not a problem as sunrise is currently a bit before 4.30 am and helpfully the hotel breakfast starts from 5.30 am. A 7.00 am breakfast will be fine for us thanks
We stop at a roadside stopping place. I find a iced coffee from the vending machine that is labelled just for me
Leaves a nice taste on the mouth you might say
Meanwhile Diana dose her cultural ambassador thing which always goes down well. I think here she is asking them if they like boys !
And thus we head down thru Sapporo ( for a city of nigh on 2 million people is is a dream to ride through )
We track up into the mountains again on a scenic road and end up in a nice hotel on the shores of LakeToyo which is an old volcanic caldera with an island in the middle And as for the so so view from the hotel in the morning -
We are now getting used to ourJapanese meals
Then this morning is is a short 159km tootle back down to the Interislander ferry terminal. The big mouth is waiting for us -
We settle into the ferry - it is just like a Cook Strait croaasing
Then half way across it all changes. An officious gentlemen in a collar and tie comes up to us. Speaking no English at all he indicates he wants to see our tickets. Diana hands him hers. He looks then makes it plain that we are evicted from this area because of the status of our tickets
We end up being frogmarched like criminals down the corridor to a chairless, windowless room where we have to take our boots off and have to sit on the floor for the rest of the trip. It was a wonder we weren’t thrown in the brig ! I am so annoyed I cannot even compose a Haiku.
Our new seating area for the snext cond half of the trip.
As I sit on the ferry crossing the strait I ruminate and cogitate a little. I have been intrigued to see here in Japan the whole Japanese emphasis on “small is good “ as opposed to our Western thought that “ bigger is better “ - epitomised of course in the jarring extreme by Trumpism. But we in New Zealand are captive to some of it as well
But the interesting thing about the Japanese emphasis on smallness is that I think it is a pointer to the way of the future that we are all going to have to subscribe to as a means of saving the planet. Not just from climate change but also from the viewpoint of resource use. And it seemsto me that in Japan they are good not only at smallness but also resource lightness. Small things I notice - the insurance sticker for my bike is the size of a postage stamp. Most cars are small almost every second car is a Nissan Cube or equivalent. Electric charging stations are everywhere so there must be a good electric car uptake. There are lots and lots of wind farms. Most hotels don’t have air conditioning - just good heating. Hotel rooms are small. There seems to be very much a “waste not - want not” ethos.
Which leads me to believe that the average personal Japanese carbon footprint must be way way lower than that of Western world countries And lower carbon footprints are going to have to be the way of the future.
Way back about 15 years ago I attended a mayoral sustainability conference in Kyoto. We met in the same conference room that the Kyoto Protocol was signed in a number of years earlier. The key meassge from the conference that it is cities ( ie local government ) that have the most power to change our habits to a more sustainable world. And of course that is very much the case in the US right now where state governments and local governments are doing some great things whilst Washington does absolutely zilch. Ditto Australia I think! Our central government at least is stepping up to the plate. But then we are smaller than a lot of local governments overseas.
Anyway we are going to see if we can visit Kyoto ( for me a revisit ). As well as being symbolic it is a nice historic city. Then we might look in on Hiroshima. This the contrast - Hiroshima symbolising the potential nuclear destruction of the world and Kyoto hopefully the start of the healing process for the world. Both in Japan - both very close to each other.
And then, having got these potential visits out of way we then set sail for Vladivostok in Russia
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