In the last blog post, I wrote about how we just about caught a ferry to Sado Island. What I omitted was this: We didn't actually bring a car to Sado Island. We kinda assumed it would be feasible to bring a car to the island via ferry. What we didn't check is the price to transport a car to the island. Now for the kicker: Transporting a semi-large car (which we sadly got from the rental company) would have cost us the equivalent of 240€. We were not ready to spend this amount on transporting a car to an island for just two days, so we left the car in Niigata in a parking garage and took off without it.

Check out an interactive map of the places I visited here. I will update this map as I continue my journey. This post is about day 3.

We were worried that the buses might not run on the weekend. Since it was a Saturday and we would be arriving quite late (after 6pm), we were afraid that we might not be able to catch the bus that would have taken us to our accommodation. We tried to call the bus company on Sado Island the morning of the trip, but with my limited Japanese it was quite difficult to find out if the bus was actually running or not. (A simple question like "When is the last bus from the port to xyz station?" in simple Japanese was answered with a good 30 seconds of... intermediate Japanese).

We decided to improvise and might have taken a taxi if nothing else had worked out. But when we arrived, there was a bus waiting for us, perfectly timed with the arrival of the ferry!

Our host was very friendly and even picked us up from the bus stop. We had a 30 square meter room (huge for Japan) filled to the brim with hi-fi equipment, old records and speakers from various manufacturers. We also had a huge 85 inch(?) TV, a complete living room set and a bunch of other stuff.

We were a bit surprised by all this, ate dinner and went to bed.

The next morning we explored Sado Island and the area around our accommodations. The island has many cafes, bars, restaurants and shops of all kinds. Near our accommodation there was a second-hand shop run by an old lady. The things there were so cute and affordable and the old lady gave us a handmade bag at the end.We were lucky because the farmers' market was just being set up as we took our morning walk.In Sado, there are several of these arcades that all look the same and are smaller than the typical shopping arcades found all over Japan.A typical street in Sado Island.The main goal of the day was to see this mountain. It looks vaguely like this mountain from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The mountain looks like that because people dug into it by hand to get the gold it contained. Sado Island is famous for this gold mining, which is no longer going on. Mining stopped in 1989.

To actually see the mountain, you have to visit the gold mining museum. The museum itself is not that exciting, but it explains how Sado Island became what it is today.We ended our visit to the gold mine with a gold covered ice cream. Kind of gimmicky, but that's typical of Japan sometimes.