Okayama

I realised that I talk a lot about where we are and if you aren't familiar with Japan, it can be a little confusing, so here is a rough map. We started our time in Tokyo and then went down/west to Nagoya (about three hours on the shinkansen). You can see Japan has four main islands that I've labeled too, which will make more sense when I talk about where we go after Okayama. 

Next stop on our journey was Okayama, which is to the west of Nagoya. The shinkansen only took an hour and a half to get here. This is a largish port city along the south coast of Japan's main island (Honshu). 

I love traveling via shinkansen especially because you can get great lunches to eat on them from the station before you go. I was sorely tempted by these kids ones that come in reusable shinkansen style lunch boxes. 

After leaving Tokyo, we had noticed a significant difference in the demographic of tourists. Tokyo had been full of every kind of person; German, French, Indian, Aussie, American, etc. Nagoya had a stack load of Chinese tourists along with the European mix. Coming to Okayama was different again; we only saw very few foreign tourists here. It was still a big city though, so easy to get lost in. Strangely, even though the tourist numbers were fewer, the local department store could have been Australian there was so much English around. Every shop had an English name, from the typical ones like Subway and Starbucks to other random ones like Strawberryholic and Wego. 

Our first stop on day one was to visit Okayama Castle and the gardens there. We wandered through the gardens first, trying to do outside things before the day heated up too much and we needed to retreat to aircon. The gardens were nice enough, but I wouldn't actually rate them too highly (even though they are on some "Top Ten Gardens in Japan" list). 

There were actually a number of light displays set up for illumination in the evening, so maybe it would have been better to come back then. Oh well! We had fun wandering around the various parts and enjoying the views. 

Okayama is famous for its fruit, so I picked up this peach mochi to enjoy there and it was delicious. Then we went into the grounds of Okayama castle. No idea why these enormous fish were on display, but it was likely some festival had just happened. 

The castle was pretty fun because they had a Pokemon event running with lots of cutout Pokemon displayed. Rachel picked up a sheet at the gate that she filled out as we visited each one. You had to write in the names of the Pokemon you found and then use certain letters of each name to answer a question. At the end, you handed in your sheet and got a sticker for your troubles. 

The castle looked cool from the outside, and different to other castles we had seen (like Himeji Castle last year), because the outside was panels of wood painted the dark colour. The castle (and the outer buildings) had been completely destroyed in 1945 but the main building had been rebuilt. They had a model of what it all would have looked like pre-destruction, and it was cool to see all the different buildings that would have filled the now open spaces. 

Inside was five floors of museum that you could take your time walking through. They had a number of displays that were interactive, like this box (below) used for carrying nobles around. There was some support for English (QR codes that you could scan), but not on every item, so it was a little harder to engage when you couldn't read what it was all about. 

And the view from the top was pretty good too. Okayama castle seems to sport a very similar gold fish to Nagoya. 

The air-conditioning of the castle was nice, when we went back outside it was heat city again. So we stopped in to do an hour of karaoke on our way home. Lots of fun singing in the cool aircon. If you are ever in Japan in the summer, I can recommend karaoke as a way to avoid the heat. 

The next day we went to Kurashiki, which was about twenty minutes from Okayama on the train. Kurashiki is an area known for its traditional indigo dying, and when Japan became obsessed with jeans, it was a big production base. As a result, there are all sorts of denim shops clustered together in Denim Street. You can also get a blue soft serve "denim" ice cream. Which we did. 

It tasted mostly of blue Powerade, but was a cool snack on another hot-ish day. I was tempted by the denim, but didn't buy any, still thinking about how heavy our bags were and how far we still had to go with them. We wandered around the area, enjoying the smaller town vibes and old school streets of low Japanese style houses with tiled roofs. 

Okayama is where the story of Momotaro, or the Peach Boy, was originally from, so there was loads of Momotaro things all around too. We went into a Momotaro museum, I was hoping to get pictures and different versions of the story for classroom resources. What it was instead was an optical illusion museum with a Momotaro theme. 

A little strange, but the girls and Steve had lots of fun with all the illusions and tricks. We picked up some Momotaro themed kibidango which is a rice ball sweet similar to mochi that the area is known for. These were delicious and I wished we had more of them. Then we headed back to our hotel in Okayama for a chilled afternoon of D&D playing. 

To be honest, our accomodation here was not to best. It was a pretty standard business hotel, but at one stage must have been fine for people to smoke in. I guess maybe you still can smoke in some of the rooms, because the cigarette smell was quite strong. Steve and I tuned it out pretty quickly, but the girls are so not used to any kind of smoke, and they made their discomfort very clear. 

Anyway, we managed to survive another night there. Steve and I went and picked up a hire car in the morning for our next adventure, which gave us a rather delightful break from carrying all the bags around on trains. Stay tuned!