Toya

Sunday was a travel day. My friends and I hopped the airport shuttle from Kyoto Station at about noon, opting to have lunch once we were at the airport. The Kansai airport is large and has many shops and restaurants, none of which I appreciated the last time I was there, following my 12-hour flight from San Francisco. Because we had time to spare, we grabbed some overpriced food court pizza and looked around. I finally managed to get myself an Osaka Hello Kitty (with her dressed as the Hanshin Tigers baseball team mascot and riding a piece of takoyaki) and also happened upon a new(?) line of Kabuki-themed Kitties. I decided that they were too cool to pass up and bought one (with her dressed as a Tayuu courtesan from the Edo period and carrying a sword). After this we figured that we might as well head to our gate, which we did after the most laid-back security run that I’ve ever been through. They didn’t even ask for my id. The plane was rather like any other plane that I’ve ridden except for that everything was in Japanese, there were practically no soda options on the drink cart and we were given no pretzels. Of course, it was only a hour-or-so-long flight to Chitose Airport in Hokkaido. Once at Chitose, we took a train to the main train depot outside of the airport grounds, where we attempted to buy a ticket to Toya, where we were going to be staying. This is when we discovered that our hotel was a lot further from Sapporo than we had expected. The nice man behind the counter said that we could only buy the tickets from him (instead of from the ticket machine), and quoted us at almost $40 per person, with a travel time of 2 hours. We were stunned. When we asked him if there was a cheaper option, he wrote us out a complicated, almost 4-hour-long itinerary, changing trains three times with our longest layover being a full hour. Those tickets cost just over $20, and since we, as always, had more time than money, we took them. It was a long evening. For our hour-long layover, we hung out in the heated waiting room at the train station, drinking vending machine tea and watching episodes of a show called ‘Pushing Daisies’ that one of my friends had on her computer. Once we finally reached the Toya train station it was too late to catch a bus, so we grabbed a taxi, which took us to our hotel. We were exhausted, but we got into our rooms and took advantage of the hot springs that the hotel had on-site and then watched a little more TV. We fell into our soft, warm beds and I, at least, fell almost immediately asleep.
-The resort town of Toya is a considerable distance from Sapporo, even though our information and that printed in the ‘Lonely Planet’ Japan travel guide give the impression that it is just outside city limits.
-Because our hotel had a hot spring that was open 24-hours a day, the hotel rooms themselves did not have showers.
-When we checked in, we were shown a list of bath guidelines. The one that most caught our attention was the one that stated that we should not go into the bath more than 3 times a day. I would have thought that this was just silly, if I hadn’t also heard from my host sister that some people get so excited about having a hotspring so close and free that they bathe too frequently in the sulphurous water and make themselves sick. I did not have this problem.