Saturday, 1 November 2025

Today was the second of my taxi tours, where I hire a taxi for the day and go to places that are a bit out of the way. Unlike the Hokkaido one in Hirosaki I only had three locations to visit but it was going to take 7 hours to do it, and this time no 1 hour lunch break, no lunch break at all.

The forecast yesterday looked terrible with heavy rain predicted and while I would be in the taxi most of the time wandering through forested areas in the pouring rain still isn’t my idea of a good time, the snow in Hokkaido was annoying enough.

Anyway when I woke and looked out my window it certainly didn’t look good.

ugly weather in Hirosaki

Just before 9am I met up with my driver, Norita Teruo, and we were off to Juniko Lakes, home to the famous Aioke Pond, another blue pond to compete with the one in Biei. According to Norita-san it would take about 3 hours to get there. He doesn’t speak much English but he uses an interpreter app where he could speak into it and it would do speech to text and then language translation. It wasn’t Google translate that I was using so it would have been kinda interesting to compare the quality of the translation of the two but we didn’t do it. As we drove out of town he used red lights to try some small talk via the app. It would have worked better if I could lean forward to read the display better but the ratchet in my seat belt wasn’t playing nice and I was pinned to the back seat until I worked out the magic needed to make it work “properly”.

Anyway we made good time, Norita-san suggested it was because of the lack of traffic and this was probably explained by the weather. Coming down the coast of the Sea of Japan the waves were something and while stopping to photograph them, and the fact that the sea was a dirty brown for some considerable distance due to run off from the rivers, would have been fun getting drenched wouldn’t be so I just observed them from the overly heated car. No idea why the trains, buses and taxis have the heating turned up to the max but I don’t like it and it makes me sleepy.

At the car park as I collected my stuff together Norita-san offered me an umbrella. I showed him that I in fact had one but he insisted that I use his, perhaps he wasn’t wild about the fact that mine is papaya coloured and the one he offered me was black. This is when I learned that he was going to be my guide and was going to show me his favourite places. This would certainly improve time management if he could cope with the fact that I constantly stop. In slippery conditions I mostly look down to see what I’m setting in and then stop and look around, repeating ad infinitum.

So without any more rambling here are some foliage in Aomori prefecture, around the Twelve Lakes (Juniko Lakes).

aoike pond

wakitsubo no ike

don’t mention the bears

still great autumnal foliage here

red and yellow

A walk in the forest

reflections too

it had stopped rain as we left

It’s a spectacular place, even with the rain.

this guy didn’t care about the rain

Next stop was the Takayama Inari Shrine so it was back the way we had come admiring the wind turbines and the wave action again. As I am skipping Kyoto this was my way to get a vermillion torii fix. After another couple of hours we were there. Again not many tourists but also the rain had stopped so it was just windy and wet under foot, much better.

We were just visiting the grounds, mainly for the famous torii but the dragon at the purification fountain was cute, even if it was spraying water everywhere due to the wind.

purification fountain

Inari shrines are Shinto shrines and foxes are associated with them as messengers.

a shrine fox

many torii

there are a lot of torii here

are the foxes judging me?

The last stop of the day was the Tsuru no Mai Bridge. A bit of a double edged sword on this one as it is currently being rebuilt so you can’t cross it, and there is scaffolding, but you get some sense of how it is build. Apparently according to Norita-san it is rebuild about every 20 years and it should be back in service next spring.

not the U Bien bridge in Myanmar but iconic anyway

as if all the steps aren’t enough the bridge isn’t flat

work in progress

Aomori is famous for apple production and the trees around Hirosaki are currently heavily weighted with apples and the harvest is on. I was interested in the cages of apples and so we stopped for a look. A guy came running over saying that while we could photograph them we had to do it from the road. I assume this for biosecurity reasons.

caged apples

apples for juicing

Norita-san said these apples are for juice.

Back to Hirosaki and the end of the trip. I thanked Norita-san for an excellent tour, and I hope he also got some nice photos on his phone.

Tonight’s dinner was at a random restaurant. Was going to have pizza but the place was full so I walked back towards my hotel scoping the restaurants. This funky place seemed more coffee and cocktails but a quick scan of their web site showed it did do food and on entering the smell of the curry got me. On the menu it only said today’s curry but that was good enough to order it.

Today’s curry

Gin and tonic

A lemon peel gin and tonic using a craft gin from Hiroshima.

Today’s dessert

And finally dessert from the today’s special menu. Google translate does a passable effort at a distance from a chalkboard with hand written Kanji.

Ironically for a coffee place I couldn’t get an espresso or any sort of coffee. Can’t explain why but maybe the machine was turned off for the day.