Sitting in Narita with hours to kill, I thought I'd try to get one more post out. I'm way behind, but I decided it is time to give my audience what they really want, some FOOD PORN...

Travel to Osaka was a short Shinkansen hop from Hiroshima. The trip was made to feel longer by the accumulated exhaustion catching up to us after a week of ambitious tourism and lots of walking in not always gentle terrains. Our energy level results in not much tourism stuff and fewer pictures.

As I wrote before, Osaka is a good place for side trips. Since we've been to Kyoto and Nara many times, we decided to go to Kobe where we've never been.

We had a day to do more wandering in Osaka before heading off to Sapporo. Marie' was off to Kyoto to visit friends and we tried to figure out what we might want to see in Osaka without too much work. The couple of things that popped up were the Tsutenkaku Tower, the Osaka equivalent to Tokyo Tower, sort of, and Dotonbori, the riverside food/tourist district. Off we went...

This will be a bit different post. Because of timing and weather, the wanderings in Sapporo itself were limited. We always planned to spend a good bit of time at the Sapporo Brewery, but the weather was a disincentive for some of the places we wanted to go; Sapporo is surrounded by a lot of nature which is nice in good weather, but.

About a half-hour train ride from Sapporo, Otaru is a popular side trip for tourists (both Japanese and foreign). It is most famous for 3 things:

Time to move on from Sapporo to our other Hokkaido destination, Hakodate. Naturally the weather decides to be spectacular - after a week of not seeing sun, it came out with lots of blue...

Hakodate is the Hokkaido city that we've most visited. Past visits were mostly in the snow, flying up from Tokyo to cross country ski and wander the city in the snow. It is far more interesting and historical than Sapporo - more like Otaru, but bigger. The city has built up the historic areas directly focusing on tourism, both foreign and domestic.