Showa Kinen Koen
Showa Kinen Koen is a large park not too far (i.e. a couple of train journeys) from Seiko's folks house. According to this website (http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3034_showa.html) the main draws are the displays of flowers, gardens and spring and autumn tree displays. Not for us. None of that stuff was out in December, and the big pond in the Japanese garden had been drained for the winter. We still went back for a second day, because for us, the best bit of the park is the Children's Forest.
This is a massive play area, with some really imaginative stuff in it. I love the dragons. These are built from concrete (with I assume a metal frame inside) and are finished in a mosaic of all sorts of ceramics, including roof tiles and soup bowls, and while I'm sure art lovers and health and safety executives are gasping in horror, kids (and adults!) are encouraged to climb all over them. They are the coolest thing in the park, if not in fact in the entire world.
And then, there are these bouncy hills. I've seen similar things in Britain, but they tend to be quite flat. These things are steep! Because it was the school holidays they were too crowded with kids for adults to get a shot, but I've been before years ago and can attest to the fact that if you bounce too high and fail to land right on the peak of the hill, you acquire a horizontal moment that means next time you land further down the hill, at a steeper angle, and can end up pinging off sideways. Massive fun! The kids played for ages.
After the dragons and the bouncy hills, the rainbow hammocks seem merely very good. And that's not to mention the Pyramid of the Sun, a stepped Inca temple that wouldn't be out of place in Disneyland, or the roller slides.
When we returned a few days later, we rented bicycles and spent most of the day cycling. The park has 14km of dedicated cycles tracks, which are actually cycle dual carriageways joined at large roundabouts. There are parking facilities every couple of hundred metres, which mean you can cycle to any area of the park, stop and look, then carry on. It was a really nice, different way of viewing the park to walking though it, because the cycle tracks and walking paths are completely separate. I'm sure they've been separated to allow both cyclists and walkers to relax in the park, because everywhere else in Japan cyclists and pedestrians share space (often with cars too).
And it's all finished off by views of sunset over Fuji.
This is a massive play area, with some really imaginative stuff in it. I love the dragons. These are built from concrete (with I assume a metal frame inside) and are finished in a mosaic of all sorts of ceramics, including roof tiles and soup bowls, and while I'm sure art lovers and health and safety executives are gasping in horror, kids (and adults!) are encouraged to climb all over them. They are the coolest thing in the park, if not in fact in the entire world.
And then, there are these bouncy hills. I've seen similar things in Britain, but they tend to be quite flat. These things are steep! Because it was the school holidays they were too crowded with kids for adults to get a shot, but I've been before years ago and can attest to the fact that if you bounce too high and fail to land right on the peak of the hill, you acquire a horizontal moment that means next time you land further down the hill, at a steeper angle, and can end up pinging off sideways. Massive fun! The kids played for ages.
When we returned a few days later, we rented bicycles and spent most of the day cycling. The park has 14km of dedicated cycles tracks, which are actually cycle dual carriageways joined at large roundabouts. There are parking facilities every couple of hundred metres, which mean you can cycle to any area of the park, stop and look, then carry on. It was a really nice, different way of viewing the park to walking though it, because the cycle tracks and walking paths are completely separate. I'm sure they've been separated to allow both cyclists and walkers to relax in the park, because everywhere else in Japan cyclists and pedestrians share space (often with cars too).
And it's all finished off by views of sunset over Fuji.
posted by Tony @ 15:25
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