Hello friends! This post should have been posted earlier this week but life and work got in the way. I’m a bit more refreshed after my staycation (short post about what I wore there – including my thoughts on a convertible yukata) and so I finally have the energy to post this!
I’ve probably told this story before but it’s entered family lore so I will probably retell it until I lose my memory. When I first went back to Singapore, my family asked me to plan our vacation to England. Since this was the first time I went there since I was about two or three, I went a little overboard.
By that, I mean that I created a schedule which was timed down to the minute just so I could fit in everything I want to do. My family didn’t even last a day.
However, I have to report that I’ve made great progress in NOT vacationing on a schedule because I recently went to Chiba, Japan, for a Church trip and did minimal planning (and what I planned… we largely did not do). One reason for the minimal planning was that this wasn’t actually a vacation – our days were packed with university visits and Church visits. However, we did have two free days before our flight home, which is where I could have gone crazy. This time, though, I managed to hold back. One day was spent travelling to our hotel in Narita and just resting after all that we did. The other day was spent at Sawara.
Sawara is a charming town about 30 minutes by train from Narita station (this is not the same as the Narita International Airport station). There were trains departing from Narita every hour or so, and our hotel bus was leaving for Narita station about every hour or so, which meant that depending on the hotel, you could have a long way at Narita station for the train. Thankfully there are shops around the station, if you want to grab some snacks, and the overall journey wasn’t too long.
Initially, I had two plans for Sawara. The first was to take a taxi to the Suigoi Ayame Park, which was supposed to be really beautiful in late May/early June (I was hoping there were a few flowers already blooming in early May). The second was to see the town center, which was known as a “little Edo” for how well it has been preserved.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to go to the park. I was hoping to get a taxi from the train station, but there was only one taxi (which we didn’t get) and Taxi Go does NOT work in the vicinity of Sawara station so not as to compete with the taxi stand. There was, thankfully, a visitor center very close by, so we walked over to get a map of the town. The ladies staffing the center actually recommended that we skip the park as it wasn’t in full bloom yet and she didn’t think the taxi fare (probably about 4000 yen from the station to the park) was worth it at this stage. So instead, we headed down the road towards the historic town center.
The walk was meant to take five or six minutes, but we took much longer than that as we stopped at various shops along the way. My aunt spotted a tea shop and went in to look at some matcha, while I got thoroughly distracted by a beautiful kimono. We realised that this kimono shop was selling children’s yukata for half-off and had a fun time choosing a yukata for my niece, and then I found a second-hand kimono that was also half-off! I didn’t want to make a rash decision so I put it aside first and we continued on our walk.
After that, while walking through a building, we saw an exhibition of flowers and stopped to take a look. It turned out to be a clay flower exhibition and we really just marvelled at the talent involved in making these flowers and spent some time voting for our favourites. I don’t even know how long we spent at those three stops, but I was quite happy at the fact that we managed to stumble across these gems instead of me just looking at google maps and rushing us through just to get to our intended destination.
The intended destination, by the way, is beautiful. We went during Golden Week, which I would assume is the peak season but it didn’t feel too crowded. I noticed that some of the most popular restaurants were fully booked, but we did manage to find a small, old-fashioned sweet shop that also served unagi don for lunch, so I think if you go in off-peak season, it would be a lovely town to wander in without feeling like there are too many people around.
I think the town was most crowded around the area where the float was travelling. Sawara is famous for its floats and has a grand float festival held twice a year – in July and October – but I saw online that they brought out one float for Golden Week (there is also a float museum if you are interested in going!). The next most crowded area was probably the area where the boats were; we initially considered going on a boat ride down the river, but there was a pretty long queue and we decided to just walk around.
The path down the river is flat and easy to walk. The shops are mostly restaurants/cafes or souvenir shops (including one shop that specialises in sweet potatoes – the samples were delicious!), and there are even a few homes. One of the homes was even selling some pottery out of the door, which I thought was a really charming scene. The lady who was there was really friendly too, we chatted a bit about my mamianqun, which I’ve realised is not very common in the less touristy parts of Japan.
If you want to do more, I know there’s a museum around the historic town area, and I heard there’s a small visitor center that you can do a tour at as well. We didn’t do any of that, but spent a half day just walking around the city center. The only thing you might want to keep an eye on is the time of the train, because they run in hourly intervals, so it wouldn’t be fun if you missed one. We had to go back before we were bored because I was trying to catch the hotel bus, which is probably one of the less-fun parts of using a hotel bus as the mode of transport. Of course, we still had time to stop by the kimono shop, because I ended up buying that summer kimono! I really hope that means that I can practice wearing kimono in Singapore, because this one is meant for hot weather.
Honestly, I really loved Sawara and would love to go back again. I also heard of another small town called Sakura which is supposed to have a very good museum attached. This makes me want to explore Chiba as a travel destination in its own right because I realised I have missed SO much it has to offer and I think it would be a good place for slow travel as well.