Shiinikku Doraibu!

Scenic drive. I'm not sure if I just coined this piece of Japlish myself or if I actually picked it up in a tourist pamphlet, but it is a well-known fact that doraibu are right up there with popular weekend activities in Japan. Sometimes it's nice to get away and go off to discover new places you haven't been to, so last weekend, my friend and I decided to spend the weekend at an onsen hotel at Lake Toya, but the spa holiday turned into a series of explorations!

On the way to the hotel we stopped by a Canadian- themed restaurant, which had been recommended to us by a Japanese friend. The interior was very "Western", but like most places with a western feel to them, extremely overladen with wood sculptures, paintings, porcelain and rustic decorations. If you see a picture or the Canadian-style restaurant, you immediately can tell it's got to be in Japan, even though the decoration  is Western. Still, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I like the care and attention to detail, with which these theme restaurants are often constructed. Everything looks kinda random, but you know that probably a lot of planning has gone into it. Plus the food was delicious and the view of the lake epic

The same was true for our hotel room, which overlooked Lake Toya.

  The hotel's hot spring did too. It's a sight you can't take your eyes off. We stayed at Toya Sun Palace hotel, which has a great onsen and amazing food, but is also very family friendly. That means, it is swarming with children and you sometimes end up feeling a little out of place as a lone traveller. As we were also the only foreign-looking foreigners staying at the hotel (there were plenty of Asian tourists there though), this feeling manifested itself very strongly. It was very relaxing regardless. I even got a foot massage (painful but it worked) and there was super mario in the rooms!!

Outside the hotel you could admire some illuminations. To me the whole concept of looking at a collection of light bulbs was relatively new. Sure enough, around Christmas there are plenty of illuminations installed in every major Austrian city, but people rarely see them as a major tourist attraction. On the contrary, they complain on how kitschy and energy-wasting they are, so it was interesting to see how people around here travel to different places just to see the illuminations. The illuminations at the hotel were quite impressive though, if very random at times (see rabbit on the right) and accompanied by very creepy music which was probably intended to heighten the atmosphere.

The next day we decided to take a detour via Muroran, because I had heard that it had a very nice bay. Muroran is by the East coast of Hokkaido, about an hour North of Lake Toya. I expected an atmospheric harbour town such as Hakodate or Otaru, but the town's silhouette turned out to be dominated by oil refineries and steel works. It was shockingly reminiscent of 19th century Liverpool or some place. When we drive further into town, we found it pretty desolate. Nobody was out on the streets and a lot of the shops and restaurants seemed to have shut down permanently. That's a great shame, because if you drive higher up the hills surrounding the bay, you have a fantastic view of the natural harbour that is Muroran. I can easily imagine a lot of people wanting to go there if not the factories and steel works would ruin the picture (and air). That's some pretty bad town planning right there.

Muroran seen from the other side.

Ironically, I looked through a Hokkaido tourism magazine at work the day after, which featured a six page special on Muroran's night view. "Night views"  are quite popular in Japan and there's even a ranking of which towns have the best ones (Hakodate is number one btw.). You typically go to the place, climb a viewing platform located on a mountain, hill or high building, take a picture of the "night view" and then go enjoy some local specialty (these were naturally listed in the magazine as well). Now what was new to me was that the article wasn't endorsing Muroran's normal night view, but it's "industrial night view". In other words, people should visit Muroran and look at its factories when it's dark. The article said something like. "When the refinery's safety lights come on, they illuminate the night like a thousand precious stones." I can't deny the eerie attraction of an illuminated oil refinery, but making "industrial illuminations" a selling point? We'll see if it works. Notable was, however, that the article didn't feature a single picture of Muroran by day. It did, however, feature a list of Japan's most spectacular "industrial night views". Kitakyushu further down south came in second, number three I couldn't read the kanji for, I'm very sorry.