“Make mine a double!”

I wake up (as most people usually do in the mornings, unless you’re either dead or you work the night shift) and go through the usual routine of getting ready, eating breakfast and watching some TV.

I meet Phil and Christine downstairs in the hotel lobby, and we head off towards Sapporo Station.

Today we’re off for a trip to Otaru and then onto Yoichi to visit the Nikka Whisky Company distillery (Hokkaido Plant) which is roughly about 50km west of Sapporo City.

After a slight detour into one of the shopping malls under the station to get something for lunch, we catch the train and head off.

We get to Otaru and have a bit of a wait for the train that takes us onto the final part of our journey. While we wait, we eat lunch, watch a platform guard move on a couple of very scruffy looking Australians who’ve decided to sleep on the floor and watch a train driver on the other side of the station doing his safety check. This involves him doing a lot of pointing at various parts of the train and saying the name out loud while his superior looks on (Wheels! Check!)

I’m not usually a fan of train journeys in general (well, not here in the UK) but this one takes us along the coastline with some amazing views out to sea.

We arrive at the Station, locate the distillery and decide to take the guided tour. Unfortunately this guided tour is all in Japanese, but with Phil translating, I get the general idea of what’s going on.

At the end of the tour there’s an opportunity to taste (and of course buy at the gift shop!) some of the whisky and apple juices that they produce. And rather nice it is too! :D

We leave the Nikka plant and take a walk down to the ocean through the outskirts of the town (it reminds me of some of the little sleepy seaside places back in the UK) and spend a short while at a tiny patch of beach with dark grey volcanic sand. I pick up a few small rocks and some shells as souvenirs, which I put in the rather large pockets of the combat trousers I’m wearing and make strange clonking sounds all the way back to the station for the return journey (When I get back to the hotel, I notice that the constant rubbing of the rocks has given me several large bruises on my kneecaps!)

After a quick trip back to the hotel to freshen up (and to try and remove rather a lot of sand out of my pockets) we all meet up again and Phil and Christine take me for Yakitori (skewered chicken, pork, etc.) at a place called "Kushidori" (which means "skewered chicken” funnily enough :O)

Here we eat until we can eat no more and discuss the merits of opening up a Yakitori place back in the UK! (we all agree that it would be most popular!)

I return to the hotel once again and pack my luggage, meeting Phil in the lobby. Because of the early start tomorrow (trip to Tokyo) Phil has kindly suggested that I leave my case at his place, and he’s here to explain things to the hotel staff just in case they think that I’m going to leave without paying the bill. We walk out without them batting an eyelid, but as they already have my credit card details (I booked online) they probably don’t care.

A quick twenty minute walk to Phil’s house, and as it’s rather late now we’re trying to be as quiet as possible when going down some of the smaller back streets (but this is practically impossible when you are dragging a case with hard plastic wheels over some slightly dodgy sections of pavement and the odd tram line or two)

I leave the case (which probably takes up about a fifth of Phil's tiny flat!) and successfully find my way back to the hotel (Probably the first time this has occurred without too much hastle!)

I'm getting the hang of this navigating around Sapporo business! Yay!

Too bad when I come back from Tokyo I’m going to be somewhere new…