shodoshima

This past Wednesday, we went to Shodoshima, it is a tiny island which is part of Kagawa prefecture.

They are known for shoyu, tsukudani, somen and olives, their sister city is Milos, Greece.

From Umeda it is 2 hours by bus to Hinase, where we caught the ferry.

Before the ferry, we had a little time for lunch...which was a bento.

I enjoyed this, a little of this and that. (click on the photo to see what was what)

The ferry ride was a little over an hour and on the way we passed several tiny islands which people have their second-homes. Even if we've never visited Greece, it sure looked like it from the boat. (Sorry the windows weren't the cleanest)

During the ride, we tried an olive gummy, made from the oil extracts of the Shodoshima olive...140 yen, it had a slight citrus taste, but overall we thought it tasted kinda funky.

The tour we initially wanted to book checked-out the shoyu makers and you could see them harvest the olives, but this was sold out, so we ended up hooking up with a day-trip, which only visited two areas.

The first was an Olive park.

Unfortunately we only had 15 minutes here.

We did have enough time to sample some olive oil and try the olive soft serve. You can't tell from the photo, but it is a light green. The base is a vanilla soft serve with ground up olive leaves to make a "matcha" of sorts...250 yen...different but delicious.

I also picked up some of their olive tsukudani and Japanese tapenade, from their gift shop.

The olive tsukudani is made with some goya and tastes just like the goya tsukudani that I've made before, except with more olives than goya.

The tapenade has lots of ginger in it and is great on baguette.

Then about 10 minutes away is the ropeway for Kankakei (Kanka Gorge), the second place we visited.

The wait to go up was 40 to 50 minutes (can you see all the people waiting?! we also heard that the wait to come down was 2 hours!!).

Thank goodness the weather wasn't too cold, but by the time we arrived here, it was already 3-ish, so the sun was kinda already starting to set.

We were kinda worried we wouldn't be able to see anything from the ropeway.

But, it was fabulous! we were very lucky to be right next to the windows.

I took a short video which you can see here.

The only sad part of this ropeway ride is that after all that waiting, the ride is only 6 minutes!!

Then we had 40 minutes to kill while we waited for the bus to come up the mountain to pick us up.

It was fahreezing but the view was really beautiful.

We tried two "different" ciders while we waited...olive & shoyu. The olive version had 1% olive extract and tasted like 7-up while the Shoyu version kinda tasted like cola except it had a medicinal aftertaste (eep!)...200 yen each.

We were also kinda hungry so we shared this okonomiyaki...600 yen, which would have been good had it been warmed, but it was cold & hard as rock (boo!)

Then it was time to head home. We caught the 17:30 ferry. On the ride back, we tried a local shoyu senbei...190 yen, this was sweet-salty, addictive.

It was a great tour, though our schedule was quite packed. We also received some gifts from the tour...this somen & some olive hand cream.

Hope you enjoyed this trip as much as we did, have a nice weekend!

p.s. today is a National holiday, Kinro Kansha no Hi, which I've written about before, here.