2010-04-06 35 136

Location

Today's location is in (or next to) a building (a barn or similar) in a small settlement that is probably part of the town Kaneda.

Country: Japan; Region: Kansai; Prefecture: Shiga (JP-25); City: Hikone

Expedition

ダナタル

After visiting Kinkakuji temple and the shogun's Nijō Castle and a picnic in the imperial garden, I left the group and went to the train station. This time, I didn't have to change trains and I could ride directly to Inae station. During the ride, the Japanese woman next to me offered me a chocolate, which surprised me very much but made me happy. At Inae station I got off and set out towards the hashpoint. I had to find a way to cross the train tracks first, but with my maps and a big one in front of the station that was no problem. I had a nice walk until I reached the area near the hashpoint. From the satellite map with very low resolution I knew that there were buildings nearby but I didn't know how the hashpoint looked like. My chances to reach the hashpoint dropped when I saw that the spot was not in a field but instead someplace in the buildings/gardens area.

I walked along a track that went past the hashpoint, then turned back and walked around the settlement. There were people working in the gardens near the hashpoint and I didn't want to answer any questions in Japanese, so I kept to the track and tried to look innocently, however that might be possible as an European in the Japanese countryside. Then I took a track through the settlement, hoping it might lead me nearer to the spot. It did, but not near enough. The nearest I got while walking along the track was about 10 metres. Because of the aforementioned innocent look I was trying to preserve, I didn't step right up to the building to look through the windows. Also, I didn't know exactly where north was, as the street layout in my head told me the tracks would run about northnorthwest-southsoutheast and my gps tracklog display was more like northwest-southeast, so I was a little off whenever trying to point to the hashpoint. As I found out later, reality was right. Accepting the defeat, I turned back, but since my primary goal of geohashing in Japan had already been achieved, that was not too hard.

I might have reached the next train back, but i didn't want to hurry. In the end, I missed that train by only 3 minutes, I even saw it pass me. Instead I took the following one. While waiting for it I searched for a hashcard but didn't find any. Back in Kyōto I hurried through the main shopping streets while the shops were closing, annoyed that I only found them too late on my last day. Then I used a complicated bus-bus-walk-bus combination to get back to the youth hostel barely in time for the last remainder of dinner and the announcement of the next day's plans, which consisted of travelling to Nagoya and Okazaki for the rest of the trip.