Over to Odaiba again today – the ‘new transit’ across the Rainbow bridge provides a glorious entrance to the area. My plan was to explore the bayside parkland a little more, so I started out at Odaiba Kaihin-Koen station. After encounting a small collective of surf dudes at the station, ducked down to the beach between the Decks shopping centre and one of the blocks of flats.
Its only a small beach, and quite obviously artificial, but it didn’t seem busy – surprising given how close to the city centre it is, maybe people go further afield for their seaside experiences, I can’t imagine anyone in London actually relaxing on the beaches of the Thames.
There is a board store by the beech, full of surfboards.
The beech finished with a pier out over the bay and turned into a normal waterside park, which seemed to be full of couples going for romantic walks. Further along there is a docking pier of some kind – I couldn’t figure out what kinds of boats were allowed to dock there, but there seemed to be all kinds, mostly private pleasure boats by looks of things, but I’m not sure. This gave the park a feel of infill, a space for which noone really could think of a use so they planted some trees, laid some concrete and opened it to the public.
From the headland there was a beautiful view across the harbour to the still functional, but currently idle, dockland over the bay. Huge red and white cranes ready to lift cargo containers 20 tons at a time onto ships.
Around the corner is a fountain, the centre piece of a grand avenue, the Expressway disappears underground inland from here, replaced with a pedestrian promenade, to reemerge on the other side of the bay, there is a plaque explaining the distant skyline.
Before another, more serious dock, I passed the Museum of Maritime Science, built to look like a cruise ship aligned with those in the dock itself, there seems also to be a regular water bus service running across the bay. The map shows a Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation just inland from here but I was oblivious to it at the dockside – a trip for another day.
Not long after this the waterfront is taken over by more cranes, time to head inland. I followed the park until it emerged by a six lane freeway, the choices were to head back, or turn left or right – there was no way I was going to be able to cross that. So I headed back toward Palette Town, following the transit line until it crossed a canal, by which time I was nearly ready to head home.
Following the canalside road was a grim lesson in the seperation of pedestrian and vehicular infrastructure – I was looking up at the dream bridge trying to figure out a way there that didn’t involve scrambling over wasteland or sneaking through an attended car park. There was no connection, as if they’d forgotten to remove this unnecessary footpath from the plans when they’d built the area.
The teleport bridge was the same story, keep the pedestrians contained in their nice safe environment where they can’t get out and into the way of the traffic, but it works the other way around too.
Eventually, I’d come full circle, back to Decks. Time to find a coffee and see what the shops here have to offer. There is quite a collection of import shops, this being a ‘European’ shopping mall. Gods, the Americans export some real tat to these guys. And it seems the Moomins are really big here at the moment. Damn the Finns, they’re everywhere.