We woke up early, grabbed some breakfast pastries and coffee (not the free ones that I forgot had been offered at the rider house, as Meghan won’t stop chastising me for), and headed on our walking tour of the famous Hakodate sights. I won’t recall for you everything that we saw as it’s pretty much what everyone does in Hakodate – marina, morning market, churches, foreigner cemetery. I’ve often heard that Hakodate has a very different feel from many other towns in Japan but from our last, admittedly limited trip to Hakodate, I didn’t get that feeling. This time, I really saw the difference. Being one of the few and earliest port towns in Hokkaido, the architecture and general historic nature of the place really shows signs of cultural meetings and stories told.

The more impressive thing is that Hakodate has done something that many other Hokkaido cities and towns are going to have to do if they want to survive financially in a prefecture whose population is drying up or leaving along with its sources of income. Towns and cities are going bankrupt all over Hokkaido and it’s partially because many of them refuse to shift their economies over to tourism – something that is in veritable endless supply in Japan’s final frontier. Hakodate, whether they feel entitled because of their unique history or simply because they have wised up, has very effectively shift ed the majority of their economy to tourism while maintaining a functioning commercial and pleasure port. They have numerous “local specialties” sold at beautiful bayside restaurants with people lining up to get a seat, dozens upon dozens of parks, and countless points of interest (conveniently explained in two languages).

Of course, most cities and towns don’t even begin to have the history that Hakodate does but that’s no excuse. There’s always something of remote interest, or a specialty food. Hell, put some outside dining in front of a scenic field.  A little charm goes a remarkably long way. Cities like Muroran, where the steel and oil industry are struggling to provide income while a beautiful bay stays wrapped tightly in a blanket of rusted warehouses, collapsing homes and unused docks, need to understand that they have more than one source of income. The longer they wait to figure that out, the more the city center will rust out to nonexistence, and the less certain their future as anything other than a once prominent port town turned scrap pile will be.

But I digress. Hakodate does it well. We walked the sights and stopped for lunch at California Baby, a supposedly western restaurant that specializes in buttered rice with assorted toppings. Meghan had the Cisco Rice (buttered rice with a kind of demi-gras sauce and a sausage with a side of potato salad) and I had a chicken sandwich which was the closest thing to a chicken salad sandwich that I’ve had in a long time. Meghan also had a quite delicious beer that goes by the (translated) name of “Northern Fox Red Beer” which is apparently brewed in Oregon and makes its way across the 44th parallel to (I think) Nemuro. It’s always nice to find a real beer in Japan.

We made our way back to the rider house to pick up our hanami (flower enjoying) gear that Meghan had, in wonderful foresight, packed up the night before. We tossed two panniers full of plates, the stove, tarp and assorted other things onto the bikes and headed to the remains of the famous star-shaped fortress now known as Goryokaku Park. We arrived with a fair amount of sun left and enjoyed the flowers and some beers as we watched young lovers in rented row boats unskillfully navigate the terribly inconvenient, star shaped moat that surrounds the park. Needless to say, hilarity, splashing and scraped boat sides ensued.

As the sun went down, we packed up and headed back downtown towards our area of the woods but decided to stop at the Hakodate Brewery Restaurant for a sampler. We each grabbed a sampler that included three to four beers (all were acceptable but nothing amazing) and shared a plate of very overpriced but delicious fried squid sticks. Squid is one of those foods that I will never look at the same again after leaving Japan. It’s good. Very good. Before Japan, I was back and forth on all things squidy and octopus-like. No longer. Take fresh squid, slap it on the grill for a couple minutes, pour a little dashi over it and you have a straight-up delicious snack. Takoyaki? I won’t even begin to go into my obsession with those tiny, doughy, fried up balls of octopus.

After the sampler and squid, we decided to cycle over to Mt. Hakodate to check out the one thing that everyone told us we HAD to do – see the “night view” of the city. As we approached Mt. Hakodate, the lines of cars became more and more clear. Traffic stopped and we gleefully blasted past them on our self-propelled vehicles. As we got to the base of the cable car (that you take to the “night view” platform), the line to actually go up in the cable car became painfully apparent. Thousands, I tell you, were waiting. So we both agreed to tell everyone that we had seen the night view and it was beautiful and we fired down the street to see if we could make it to a soup curry restaurant, Megumi, we had seen earlier before closing time. We made it. We had soup curry. It was good but our little soup curry joint in Muroran still wins.

We retired to our garage bunk bed and tried to ignore the flickering neon light and smell of gasoline as we fell asleep.

The next morning we got up bright and early (not really by choice), packed up our panniers and headed upstairs to nab the free toast and coffee. There, we chatted with some of the breakfast bikers about what we had seen and done, talked to the mama-san and her husband about bringing bikes on trains (as we had long ago decided we were going to take the train back – being the high-class luxury lovers that are) and met a very nice, but quiet Malaysian undergrad who was studying at, as chance would have it, Muroran Institute of Technology – not ten minutes from our house. I knew that bringing bicycles on trains in Japan was very doable but that a bag (called a rinko bukuro) was needed. I asked the owners of Lime Light if they knew where we could buy some. He said a blue tarp would be fine as long as you wrapped it tightly around your bike. That was good news – but we only had one tarp. So he lent us a bike bag making us promise we would mail it back it him. Amazingly nice people.

We said our goodbyes and thank yous and headed off to the Morning Market to grab some fresh seafood before hopping on our 12:30 train back to Muroran. We saw a little bit more of Hakodate, tried to nab some Lucky Pierot Burgers before lunch, failed, and boarded our Muroran-bound train.

Getting the bicycles on the train was no problem. The only minor issue came in dealing with our reserved tickets. Until then, we had almost always purchased unreserved seats as it was always a bit cheaper. This time we decided to get reserved seats since it was only about 5USD more and we had a lot of luggage. I’m not sure why, but I just assumed that the reserved tickets simply allowed you to sit anywhere in the reserved cars – dumb. So we put all our bags down, settled in and waited for the train to start moving. At about 12:25, I got up to snap a picture of the bikes nestled in the back of the train when a guy who had been awkwardly perched in between cars stopped me and and asked,

“Is this car 1? I’m kind of confused,” while showing me his ticket.
“Yup,” I said. “This is car one. Looks like you’re in the right place.”
“Oh thanks.”
“No problem,” I replied and started walking off.
“Well, what does your ticket say?”
“I’m pretty sure it says car one but I guess I’m not sure now that you mention it,” I responded.
I fished for my ticket, pulled it out and noticed the it did not, in fact, say car one but car two. And actually had seat numbers.

The guy had been standing there pretty much since we got onto the train at 12:10 and HAD WAITED UNTIL THE TRAIN WAS ABOUT TO MOVE TO TELL US WE WERE IN HIS SEAT. I had a small, internal, mental explosion at his ridiculously indirect way of telling me I was in his seat and his inconsiderate timing, thanked him for letting us know (perhaps I’ve become more Japanese than I realize), informed Meghan, and began running all our bags around to the following car as going down the aisle was an impossibility.

We finally got settled. We both leaned our seats back and watched as our four day trip down to Hakodate passed us by in two hours.