An International Incident

Day 4 Thursday 12th August 2010. Takahama Japan.

Rainy today. When you buy a house through the court system you have to find the last owner and request him to take all this belongings away. You can’t just throw it all away even if it is shit. Our house is chock full of the last owners shit so we have to track him down. If we can’t we at least have to prove that we tried. The court documents had an address for him but it was from over a year ago. The way to do this is to send a registered letter to this address.  Off to the post office we went. Ideally we wanted a photocopy of the envelope with the stamp on it but the post office girl told us we can’t use the copy machine 2 metres away from her. It’s only for the staff. OK. We will take it to a public machine. No. once it’s stamped it can’t leave the post office. A catch 22 situation.  Bugger! So we decided to have an afternoon off and go on a bit of an excursion.

Turn on my flash nav system now in the K truck and decide to go to the beach. 89kms to the North coast on the Sea of Japan. Normally motorways here have horrifically expensive tolls on them. Last year some papershuffler in Tokyo decided to make some motorways free for a trial period. Luckily the one we wanted to use was one of these. So we hit the road. At the first toll gate we have to stop and the man in the box gives us a ticket. When we get to the other end of the toll road we have to hand over the ticket to another man in another box.  He puts it in his machine and up pops 0 yen on the display. He then gives us a receipt for 0 yen. Just because the road is now free, doesn't mean you can get rid of the toll gate staff it seems.  Instead of just opening the gates and letting everyone drive straight through these guys stop you to tell you don’t have to pay anything and give you a ticket that you can swap for a receipt for Zero yen. This is classic Japan!

Shizuka at Wakasa Wan

Anyhow, the beach was pretty nice. The sun was out and the water was stunningly clear and there was hardly anyone there. All the land along the waterfront road is privately owned and the locals have turned most of it into carparks, which, of course, are not free. I guess I can’t blame them for gouging the tourists but there’s no fucking way I'm paying NZ$12 to park here. So I just pull over and park on the road. There’s bugger all traffic and we'll only be a few minutes. Out comes the old dear who owns the little guesthouse in front of which we've parked. She starts muttering and pointing at my truck.  

I pretend I'm Australian

"Gday...no understand you....sorry."

Old bee looks at Shizuka.  Shizuka pretends she's a Korean American. 

"Nice beach you've got here!!" She says in English.

Old bee looks disgusted and shuffles off back to her place. 

I'm not sure why, but we both got a lot of pleasure from this. 

Takahama beach. Sea of Japan

On the way back we drove through dozens of tunnels.  In one of them the road was yellow…how cool is that?  

 I was so thrilled and excited I beeped the horn. The echo was tremendous and caused us both to break into a fit of laughter. So I just leaned on the horn button for the whole length of the tunnel. What a noise. Shizuka was giggling hysterically by the time we got out the other end.  The yellow road tunnel…..the coolest tunnel in Japan.