Monday, December 12, 2011

The Balance 1,000KM Journey Was To...

A continuation of previous post. We've already travelled for about 1,000KM in a mere 12 hours but it was only half of the journey that we set out to do.
Arriving Tokyo Station at 7.00am, after taking the Sunrise Izumo train from Osaka station; we then took the new shinkansen on the Tohoku shinkansen line - the Hayabusa and made our trip to Shin-Aomori. But that's not the end of our trip! Also, just like to mention here, out of the three new shinkansen rolled out this year, we managed to get onboard two of them. Yeay us!
Had a simple breakfast onboard, egg & tuna sandwiches for Zaini and I and Raimie had a Panda choco bread.

After a 3-hour train ride; it was time to transfer train again and this time for the 
Limited express Super Hakucho train from Shin-Aomori at the tip of Honshu Island to the southern tip of Hokkaido; to Hakodate (good guess, Rurousha!) and completed our journey of almost 2,000KM in a bit more than 24 hours. We cut short our trip in Shikoku literally for this because you see, our 7-days JR Passes were expiring that day and we thought; what the heck! Screw common sense. Might as well do something crazy with it. It's not as if this is gonna be our last trip to Japan anyway. ^^
We were greeted by this sight after coming out from the undersea tunnel that the train used to travel from Shin-Aomori to Hakodate. It was raining in Aomori and snow was falling here!
Arrived at Hakodate Station completely famished so first agenda there was to eat lunch. Fresh seafood, of course!
Walked around the station and viewed some schoolchildren's artwork there.
 Before heading out the check the town area.
and went to the nearby market. Friendly marketplace merchants calling us to check their wares but get this... in Chinese! LOL
Walking around a bit then snow started falling around us and before long it became too cold. Raimie complained his ears are getting frozen so I let him borrow my hat. ;)
As we needed to travel back to Tokyo the same day (or night) to fully utilise our expiring JR Passes, we didn't stray too far from the station. The cold, snowy day didn't help us explore much either. So, after buying massive amount of souvenirs at a nearby shop, it's time to board our train back to Shin-Aomori before taking a train to Tokyo then to Kawasaki where we had our hotel reservation already made at Nikko Hotel there.
But not before getting some Hakodate ekiben to enjoy in our train for dinner later. Yummy!

Crazy, arent' we? *^-^*

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