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My husband and I spent 10 days travelling around Okayama and Hiroshima, thus we had ample time to explore other part of Okayama (prefecture) besides Okayama (city) and Kurashiki (city).

So we rented a car in Okayama and ran for about an hour to reach Ushimado in Setouchi city.

Ushimado beach was a small beach but there were only a few people and it was quite different from the beaches I’ve experienced in Kanto area (neighbor prefectures to Tokyo). To tell you the truth, I lost interests in the beaches in Japan since I saw rubbishes and too many people very often in my childhood. It’s been for years that I didn’t feel like going out to the beaches in Japan. I even forgot the general rules of “how to use” the beaches in Japan. What do I mean?

Normally there are Umino-ie (seaside houses) along the beach side that offer us a room to change clothes, a shower room and a parasol and a divan bed for a fee as well as sell some food and lease some swim tubes. We paid 700yen for the parking near the beach, paid for one of the Umino-ie to be allowed to use a shower room and a change room as well as one of their sets of a parasol and a wooden chair for 1000yen in total and rented a swim tube for 500yen.

According to my husband, it’s so easy to come down to the beach from the parking and the charge is quite reasonable. I have no idea how many years I’ve been away from Japanese beaches (for the purpose of swimming) and everything he said sounded quite unfamiliar to me. :p

We stayed at a small inn and joined their sea kayak tour to go to a very small island (uninhabited island) and it was a great fun.

We were floating with our life jackets. ^_^

Because it’s Setonaikai (Seto Inland Sea) the waves are very soft and tranquil, almost like a lake or something.
You can see Okayama is facing Seto Inland Sea. We were able to see Shikoku

If you’re not sure where Okayama is, here’s a whole map of Japan. ^ ^

One of the great things about travelling in Japan is that we can enjoy specialty dishes at each location.
Besides fresh fruits like peach and grape, and fresh fish like mamakari from Setonaikai, Okayama offers some interesting dishes like Demi-katsu, Ebi-meshi, or Buta-kabayaki. Honestly they are not really my taste, but we tried them of course.

Demi-katsu

Demiglace sauce over tonkatsu (deep fried pork). It’s served as a donburi, so the Demi-katsu is over rice. I tried only a few bites from my hubby’s half sized Demi-katsu don, as that was enough to me. I prefer normal katsudon and normal tonkatsu to Demi-katsu or Miso-katsu (Miso-katsu is a specialty dish from Nagoya.) :p

Ebi-meshi

Small shrimps are inside the fried rice that is seasoned by some worcestershire sauce and demiglace sauce. It was interesting, but just OK to me. ^ ^;;

Buta-kaba-don

Sorry this may look ugly but we sometimes bought a local bento to eat as a casual dinner or breakfast, as eating out fully at proper restaurants would cost us too much. Also I didn’t feel like eating a big Buta-kabayaki dish because it’s using pork back ribs and I imagined that it’d make me feel sick if I eat it a lot at a time. A small bento like this was enough for me to check what it tasted like. Again, I’d prefer Yakiniku-don or Buta-karubi-don or something. ^ ^;;

Shio (salt) Yakisoba

Unfortunately I missed oyster in the dish because it’s off season, thus shrimp was there instead.

Next post is about my trip to Hiroshima.
Cheers,
Kirin