Sendai

Well, we’ve left the wildlife of Hokkaido behind now, and have started back south into Honshu. Admittedly, the north part of Honshu, where its still pretty cold and overcast though. We decided to break up out return to Tokyo with a stop off in Sendai – a bustling town on the east coast of Japan. It’s a nice place – lively and modern, and has a few lovely shrines and old castle ramparts on a wooded hill just outside town.

The real attraction in the area is Matsumashima bay though – a large sweeping bay filled with loads of tiny islands of various shapes and sizes. This is (by some Japanese rating scheme that I don’t know anything about) ‘one of the top three views in Japan’. At least according to the tourist office and both club, who proudly write this information (in English) on the front of their caps. Hmm. Not that these adventurous sailors were doing anything particularly interesting when we visited, as no boats were allowed out due to high winds.

I don’t know about other ‘views’ in Japan, but the bay itself was a lot of fun. Actually I’d argue that I’ve seen much better views elsewhere, but the walk along the lake and chance to explore a few islands was really nice – and very Japanese. The best part was the way some of the islands closest to the shore were linked by bridge to the mainland – so you’d get a lovely red arched Japanese bridge to walk across on the way to have a look around the island. The little islands themselves were covered in pine tree woods, and inevitably housed a nice wooden shrine or pagoda, and one even had the ruins of some stone Buddhist temples.

The best island to explore was actually quite large. It was linked to the northern edge of the bay by a bridge about 150 m long. We turned up quite late, and so were lucky to be let across. The island it led to took us a good 30 minutes to run around before dusk fell.

Anyway, its back down south towards Tokyo next, as we don’t have too much longer in Japan before leaving for Beijing. We do intend to stop off for a night in a small town called Nikko first though, and then spend 4 nights in Tokyo itself before we leave. Japan is a lot of fun to explore!