All good things must come to an end, so I had no option but to head toward Osaka to return my wonderful expeditionary vehicle. But I don't have to do that until 5 pm, so I woke up early and left Otsu headed for the Osaka Aquarium, which Normita heartily recommended. According to Google Maps I was but an hour away, so I figured an hour and a half would be plenty.
But I didn't take into account the duplicity of Google Maps, which first of all is in collusion with the turnpikes of Osaka and thus always tries to funnel you through toll roads and bridges. I of course always choose the routes with no tolls, select and study my route, and go merrily on my way. But here enters the other evil tendency of Google Maps, which on its own decides to change the route on the fly, presumably to save a minute here and there, so my carefully planned route suddenly has a sharp turn to the right, and if I am not alert I will not discover that I have been put into a new toll-road route until it is too late.
Osaka is like Los Angeles, with lots and lots of freeways, 75% of which are toll roads. All of a sudden you are trapped on the toll network, and it is practically impossible to escape, because the only off-ramps lead to a new toll road! I spent nearly an hour trapped in the rat maze, with the added insult that it was raining and the wind gusts were pretty strong. Fortunately it was early enough that I did not have to deal with heavy traffic.
Finally I escaped the maze, and took another hour, and all my acumen to stay on streets, before I reached the aquarium, about 30 minutes before opening time. I had time to wipe down my bike, write a postcard for Ronnie (which I just fished out of a soggy pocket), and line up to buy my ticket.
Osaka has a pretty good aquarium, although I am not going to rate the best in the world (as did Normita). They present it as a clockwise tour around the Pacific Rim, from Japan, to the Aleutians and the Arctic, to Monterey Bay, to the coasts of Ecuador and Chile, to Antarctica, to New Zealand, to the Great Barrier Reef, and back to Japan. A neat idea, although they skipped some interesting places like Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the South China Sea on the west, and the coasts of Canada, the Northwestern US, and Mexico on the east. Keeping a collection of representative fishes and invertebrates for any given place has to be pretty hard, so they have to be admired for what they have done.
An escalator takes you up to the 8th floor, and from there you descend a ramp that gives you a look at many levels of the one big central tank, where the treasures of the collection are kept: Two whale sharks, a few giant rays, and any number of sharks and schools of silvery fishes. Other, slightly smaller tanks hold the collections of dolphins, seals, penguins, and tropical fishes. The big tank is mesmerizing, and since my Zen had been shred to ribbons by the Osaka freeways, I was happy to sit at mid-level in the tank and be soothed by the gentle music and the hypnotic marine ballet unfolding before my eyes.
DJ, you would have loved to see the spider crabs from the Arctic, with legs a meter long and bodies the size of a Faby bread loaf!
Seeing so many fishes (and listening to the excited voices of kids looking at them) made me think about the fascination that bio students have with marine biology. On the other hand, some fishes are pretty ugly, or have odd symmetries, so you have to look them in the eye and ask, What strange trick did natural selection play to get to something like you?
The jellyfish were fascinating, as always, but I have seen better displays in the Monterey Bay and Seattle aquaria.
I was surprised that the visit to the aquarium took only an hour (plus half an hour looking at the shops), but it is pretty clear this is a crowded attraction, so they certainly work at keeping you moving. The bad news is that at 11 am I found myself with nothing to do. So I battled Osaka one more time to get to my hotel, so I could drop off my backpack, and then went looking for that Hokusai museum I had talked about on my first day in Osaka. I landed in the middle of the biggest people crush one can imagine. Of course, 1 pm on a Saturday, in the biggest shopping area of Osaka! I had to escape to the periphery of the shopping district, where I parked in a small street pretending I was a bicycle, and on foot went to search for my museum.
I found it but was disappointed. The drawings were attractive, but they were not by Hokusai, and they were not landscapes. They were drawings of actors in kabuki plays, with sad long faces, just like the one I made when I found there had been no truth in advertising. Rats!
Well, after a delicious lunch of roasted eel (the most delicate and delicious fish imaginable) I took to the streets again. It has been drizzling all day, so driving the last 20 km to EZ Moto Kensai, on the other side of Osaka, was a challenge (in which Google Maps did nothing to help me). But I got there at the end, and with great sadness locked my helmet and key in the lock box, gave my trusty motorcycle a parting salute, and a bit sad headed for the metro and my hotel.
It was a fabulous trip, of 2,900 km or 1,800 miles! I should have driven a couple of times around Osaka and Kyoto to make a round 3,000 km, but I would have probably gone insane by then. I will always remember this as one of my grand adventures.
Finis
No comments:
Post a Comment