Sagami Bay

Golden week is in full swing now, and the weather has turned out incredibly hot and sunny (unknown phenomenon during most public holidays).

Today I had a wonderful walk, from Shinzushi along the coast to Kamakura (again).

Shinzushi is the end of the second branch of the Keikyu line, that splits off from Kanazawa-hakkei. It is what people here call a small village, which simply means it is not as big as say Yokosuka. The road from the train station to the beach is very obvious (and straight) when seen on google earth, so of course I never found it. However, I did find a small little path running along a carp-filled creak. The carp were a bit bigger than what I would expect for the 30cm of water in the stream, but I guess they don't mind. There were also lots of schools of tiny little fish.

As all streams run to the sea, even in Japan, I followed it along through a nice residential area to the beach. The beach was packed full of families come to have picnicks, and who had brought along tents, grills, games, kites... A bit further along the coast was a small area of very hard clay, uncovered by the low tide. There were of course the usual clam hunters, but what I found most amazing was the unbelievable number of hermit crabs. Every single tidal pool was packed full of hermit crabs.

At this point, the road went into a tunnel, and so I went up a small valley with a very nice path meandering through the forst along a tiny stream. At the top, the path came out in a small parc with a look-out point, and some peacocks, rabbits, geese and japanese macaques in cages. And from the look-out point you could see, to the south Shinzushi and it's nice residential area, and, to the north, the japanese equivalent of Monaco and Cap Ferrat squeezed into one.

But as this is still Japan, the villas did not have any great walls or gates around them, and the big Plaza hotel complex was hosting a flea market out front. Why not....

From there it was an easy walk along the Kamakura beach. And as this is the Sagami Bay, there is a lot more wind than in Tokyo Bay. and who says wind says pleasure sailing, and ... wind surfing. Intensive wind surfing. But this is Kamakura, which is always crowded, and it's Goldan Week to boot. And the only reason the wind surfers could make it to the water is that BBQing is forbidden of the beach at Kamakura.