Moerenuma madness – Moerenuma Park, Japan

Woke up seriously bloated this morning. Not surprising really given the volume of food we consumed yesterday! Feeling a bit like the Goodyear blimp trying to navigate our tiny hotel room…bouncing off corners and finding the tying of shoelaces to be an exercise in extreme futility…

We had to transfer through to Asahikawa later in the day, so we decided to spend the morning at Moerenuma Park, just outside the CBD of Sapporo.

It took a couple of decades to build Moerenuma Park (on top of old landfill apparently), but it was eventually opened to the public in the early 2000s. Spread over almost 200 hectares, the park is clearly segmented into areas for both recreation and art, and often a combination of both. Initially I was a little skeptical, but after jumping on a bike (for the first time in years!) and cruising around the numerous pathways it all came together brilliantly.

From a photographic perspective I honestly could have easily spent days exploring the numerous sculptures and other designs incorporated into the park. Rather than try and explain it, here’s a collection of images to give you an idea of how it looks…

Some choppers that flew overhead in formation…

On our way back to our hotel we thought we’d also drop into the Sapporo beer museum (because we obviously hadn’t had enough yesterday). We ended up tasting three beers each, one of which we had tried before, but two that aren’t released very widely. Sapporo Black was our favourite, but I’m not sure that I’ve seen it in Australia.

Lunch was at a little restaurant within the beer museum complex and was in the ‘yakiniku’ style, where you’re provided with bowls of raw meat and vegetables and you cook them up on your own sizzling hot plate at your table. Really tasty and really healthy (if you ignore the beers consumed immediately prior!).

We then walked the rest of the way back into the centre of town, picked up our bags and caught our train through to Asahikawa.

We got into Asahikawa fairly late in the afternoon, so we got ourselves settled at the hotel and then found another ramen restaurant (Matsuda) that was chockers full of locals and had ourselves another couple of ramen bowls!

Looking forward to a day of hiking up to Mt Asahidake in the Daisetsuzan National Park tomorrow!