Journey to Obara

Although Nagoya is by far and away the closest large city to Aichi, it was still a fair distance to travel — a 45 minute, 20 stop train ride to start with, from Osu-Kannon Station (although at least it didn’t involve any transfers, just sitting on the Tsurumai Line past the end of the line, at which point it turned into the local Meitetsu-Toyota Line that led to Toyotashi Station in Toyota, a small city in Aichi about halfway between Nagoya and Obara.

And then I had to transfer to a bus! A bus! I expected to have to learn to ride on one in Kyoto, as Kyoto’s bus system is apparently quite robust (and train system comparatively weak), but with Akira driving It was never necessary. So this would be my first bus experience in Japan. The bus queue was quite easy to find, as I made sure I knew what the kanji for the bus that I had to take (the one heading for Kaminigi — 上仁木) was, and in the end I just followed the crowd to where the long queue was:

It wasn’t actually that long queue though, it was the shorter queue in the foreground. I joined the long queue at first since it was the same bus interchange stop point, even though it was the wrong queue, but I went to the right line after I saw that the other bus for the long queue, that arrived first, had a completely different destination, both in Japanese and in English. Otherwise this blog entry would have looked very different.

Soon, the correct bus arrived and I hopped on board with everyone else, including a couple groups of people that were very obviously tourists.

We entered from the back door of the bus, which thankfully accepted IC (integrated circuit, I was curious) cards, so my Suica card worked on it for tapping on and off the bus. Otherwise there was a little ticket dispenser that one could take a ticket from and pay according to a matrix when they left the bus… this sounded all very familiar by now, and I realized that I had already learnt the entire system by taking the Nagano and Ohmi Railways earlier in the trip. The one catch was that I was pretty sure that the machine wasn’t actually dispensing any tickets when we got on board, I suppose it didn’t have to though since it was the very first stop, and it probably defaults to maximum current fare price if one doesn’t have a ticket.

The bus rumbled through the city and then the countryside. At some point, the bus filled up with students with their cute uniforms and pre-workforce hope and innocence, and then they all emptied out again long before we tourists arrived at our stop. That left the impression that we were passing through several distinct municipalities on the bus, though I wasn’t really following the route on the map.

I made a serious mistake on this trip, which was thinking that I could use some of that time on the bus to work on my blog, so I brought along my laptop, which doesn’t actually fit in my bag very well (its heavy, and bulky, and about a quarter of it sticks out the top of my bag). I tried to do it on the trip here and got a little headache for my efforts, so I stopped doing it after some time before it got any worse. I still had to drag the thing around with me though. At least I didn’t bring its power brick, which also happens to be a literal brick in size and weight.

Anyway, I took a picture of the matrix from about 80% of the way through the bus ride — we were heading to stop 37, Obaraokusa, and we boarded at stop 1.