Bus trip to Cape Soya

Monday 19th April
Bless the Japanese hot spring baths! If you suffer from sleep problems, I have found the answer. Those baths knock me out for hours. As before, I had the whole bath, which is like a small swimming pool, all to myself. What luxury! Before I got in, I did have a naked conversation with a Japanese lady who was just leaving and she managed to communicate that the bath was great. She was so right and I slept like a log.
Well, as you can probably tell, we made it back from Cape Soya and we can now boast that we have stood at the most northerly point in Japan. We went to the bus station and I asked in my best Japanese for two return tickets to Cape Soya, and much to my delight, the man at the desk gave us two return tickets to Cape Soya. Wow- I'm getting braver by the minute! He told me in Japanese that the bus leaves from Gate 2, so that's where we went and hey presto the Cape Soya bus arrived and off we went. The bus followed the coast from Wakkanai to the Cape giving us a great view of the calm ocean along the way. The day was fine and slightly sunny so the 45 minute bus trip was very enjoyable. At Cape Soya we stepped back out into the chilly air (3 degrees at 9.00am) and did the necessary photo shoots to prove we'd really been there. We visited the souvenir shop, as you do in these places, and hopped back on the next bus back to Wakkanai.
When we got back we had a few hours to kill before catching the train back to Sapporo, so we went for a stroll around the town and observed the locals going about their daily lives. There were many snow mounds around the town where the ploughed snow had been banked up, and also large piles of snow between the houses which are very close together. It will probably take weeks for all of this snow to melt. Eventually, and only because I was looking for a loo, we found a coffee shop which turned out to be a bit more than that. It had a very nice lunch menu but, as expected in Wakkanai, no English-speaking staff. There was a photo of something yummy looking on the menu which John fancied, so I was able to ask what it was. I needed the phrase book for the answer, which turned out to be 'sea urchin'. John turned that one down in favour of a burger patty with salad. I don't know what his problem was - sea urchins don't have tentacles! I order the noodle and rice ball lunch, which involved some sign language, pointing and a bit of amateur Japanese. The girl at the counter was asking me what I wanted inside the rice ball and she was suggesting 'ume' (sounds a bit like oomay). I had no idea what that was, but the older lady at the counter suggested I have salmon, so that's what I ordered. When we got back to our table, I looked up 'ume' in my dictionary and found out that it was that pickled plum thing that made John pull an awful face a few days ago. Phew - lucky escape! We had a relaxing time over lunch, watching the boats in the harbour and generally taking it easy until it was time to wander over to the railway station. As we were leaving the cafe, John tried to tell the staff that we were from Australia and they had no idea what he was saying, so I pronounced it Japanese-style and they suddenly understood. John's kangaroo impersonation helped to reinforce the idea. The 'ume' girl also mentioned koalas, so I gave her a koala bookmark from the stock I keep in my bag for just such occasions. She was delighted and we didn't need to speak the same language to have a very friendly exchange.
I had planned to use the journey back to Sapporo to have a good snooze, but, even though we'd seen the snowscape the day before, we were still fascinated by it, so no snooze for me (John is another story). We had to stop again for deer on the tracks - several times on this journey. I'm not sure, with all the space they have to roam, why they want to be on the railway tracks, but they were busy getting in the way today. At least they redeemed themselves by posing for a photo. Much of the land is open agricultural land, but how they grow things in these parts I don't know. They'd have to really get cracking once the snow melts to raise a crop before the next snows arrive.
Back at the same old Sapporo hotel, we caught up with the washing, checked train times for Wednesday and generally blobbed around. Tomorrow we're taking on the beer factory and/or sake museum. Kampai!!