Sawayaka Walking in Arai (3) - Vegan sweet in seaside festa

After leaving Kinokuniya Museum, we walked through residential area until we came to Shinsui Park near Hamana River. As it was a hot day, many people took a rest and drank water.

Then we walked along the river, the water of the river wasn’t very clear,

but trees cast shadows, and I felt the smell of the sea.

It was about 4.5 km from Kinokuniya to the final sightseeing spot Kaikokan. I began to worry about if I could manage to walk. I wanted to have something cold. On the premises of Kaikokan, they had an event called South Hamana Lake Autumn Festa with music, stalls, and activities.

This is Kaikokan. It is a facility to provide various activities such as catching fish, grilling eel, making handicrafts with shells, etc. On that day, there were some activities with fish.

This facility is not especially vegetarian-friendly, but I expected to find something to eat in stalls outside. In many Japanese events where various food stalls are set up, you may have a chance to try some vegan traditional snack. This time, I found unexpected kind of sweet, warabimochi-bar.
Warabimochi is my favorite sweet made from bracken starch. Usually it is a jelly-like sweet eaten with soybean powder, but warabimochi-bar is a frozen sweet like a popsicle.

As there were two kinds of warabimochi-bar, I chose the one flavored with Mikkabi mandarin orange. The other was flavored with soybean powder as ordinary warabimochi.

Look! It contained real mandarin orange.

Until then, I had never eaten orange-flavored or frozen warabimochi. It was very different from warabimochi I had known. Though it was sweet with the flavor of mandarin orange, the texture felt like konnyaku, a jelly-like food made from konnyaku yam roots. It may be partly because that this warabimochi was so big that I had to bite into it as with konnyaku. Ordinary warabimochi is bite-sized. Anyway, I was very interested in this new type of warabimochi. I hope I can see their stall again in some other events.

It was refreshing to look at Lake Hamana for a while.

There were some children swiming in the lake. It was like summer. On my way back to Arai-cho Station, I saw some flowers. Are they morning glories or convolvuluses?

It’s a pity that I don’t know much about flower names.

There was a road with fine pine trees. Arai had several spots that reminded me of the history of Tokaido Highway in the Edo Period. Pine trees are also drawn in ukiyoe paintings of Arai.

It was so hot that I saw warnings for heatstroke in several places on the course (even on the map). I was relieved when I got to the station after walking about 8.0 km.