ferries

I thought a ferry was a small boat, open on all sides, fat bottomed, sometimes with a viewing deck. Some ferries are like this. Other ferries, like the Shin-Nihonkai ferry I took from Tsuruga in Kansai to Tomakomai in Hokkaido are massive ships! Real ships carrying cars and trucks and cargo and other enormous metal things besides. The passengers, like myself, are the least of the ships' concern. The big money must surely be in the enormous metal things it ferries and passengers are an afterthought, some icing on top. This is why travelling by ferry can be so cheap, I think. The trip we took by ferry cost a fraction of an airline ticket and even a train ticket. I am now Shin-Nihonkai's no.1 fan and not just because I'm a cheap skate but because I'm a cheapskate who likes to feel posh.

On Shin-Nihonkai one can feel incredibly posh. Fancy a stroll on the promenade madam? Only with pleasure. The promenade is a carpeted corridor on the ship's port side. It has wicker chairs and tables where you can sit staring out of door sized windows onto the sea. Having never been at sea before I thought sea was blue and quite flat (except for around the edges). Some sea is like this perhaps. Other sea, the sea we sailed, is turbulent and grey. Everything is grey, the sky, the spray and the deep water itself - it was the most beautiful, terrifying grey of all. Thick and dark like graphite, glowing with a matt brilliance on its choppy peaks. I could have looked at it for hours. Staring into the endless deep can make one quite chilly and in that case madam, please retire to the bathhouse. Here, like in traditional Japanese onsen you shower yourself off before getting into a huge communal tub of pleasantly sweltering water. I had that deep, almost painful realisation of a truly unique experience as lay I lay there in a huge tub of hot water staring out of a port window onto the ocean and Japanese snowy peaks beyond.

After a soak, what better than a massage? The ferry's two coin operated massage chairs were my first experience of such things. They are ridiculous! They have metal knobs and twiddlers hidden in their lazy boy upholstery. They start gently and can build to Swedish Masochist levels of abuse. Not only do you feel quietly ashamed of enjoying the touch of a robot, there is, or at least there was for me, the public humiliation of the wobbling and jiggling. In Japan men and women alike are not ashamed of public preening in the windows of trains. Similarly, the shame of public wobbling and jiggling at the hands of a maniacal robot does not phase them (eating whilst walking and drinking standing up on the other hand, are things to be embarrassed about). I enjoyed the chair but not entirely. I couldn't stop imagining what I looked like - the picture was alternately dishonorable and very funny.

Ah, so the massage perhaps not to Madam's tastes. Please take yet another dip in the bath to rid yourself of the experience and then partake perhaps, in a meal from the galley restaurant (paying special attention to the nifty rubber bottomed crockery - so that your soup and coffee don't slide away from you).

Yes, I enjoyed my ferry trips so very much! Thinking back I have almost forgotten the two port towns they left from, Tsuruga and Tomakomai, grubby and sad they seemed to me. The experience was like smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiched between to stale pieces of wonderbread. In such instances, why lament the bread if in your mind, you can simply eat the filling with your fingers?