00:03 John Daub: Hello, good morning from inside the ferry going to Hakodate. Right now I'm the only one on the ship except for maybe the captain who's up there on the deck. I thought I would show you a little bit of a Japanese ferry before we take off. This is what would be considered third class. It's just an open space where you can lay down, this being a pillow. There's some storage for life jackets here and over there you can put your luggage. So this is where I'll probably be crashing on the other side. The carpet area is very soft, really good for lying down. And you take off your shoes there.

00:58 John Daub: There's also this which I guess would be like a seat. Second class. These look like really comfortable seats. And some more vending machines. You get your array of drinks and the prices are the same as on the mainland. So yeah, it's not too bad getting a drink here on the ferry. Good morning. Can't live stream the bathroom. They said there's a shower in there that people can use. Alright, here we go.

02:14 John Daub: One reason that I wanted to take this particular ferry at 4:30 in the morning was because I wanted to see the sunrise. This ferry marks the end of Honshu Island. Honshu is Japan's main island. It's massive. From all the way down in Yamaguchi-ken over three weeks ago up through Hiroshima and Shimane Prefecture and Tottori, Hyogo, Fukui, Ishikawa, Toyama, Yamagata, Niigata, Akita, Aomori. Loads and loads of prefectures that I came through to get to this point. And now I'm going straight there. You can see the sunrise at 4:30 in the morning. It's actually 4:20. The boat launches in about ten minutes from now. You can hear underneath in the hull a lot of the trucks coming aboard and the truck drivers will be coming on.

03:29 John Daub: But this is just a really symbolic sunrise for me because this marks the end of Honshu Island and the start of Hokkaido Island where I'll be hitchhiking up to Wakkanai. So I've got another week left on this amazing trip. I'm glad that you could join me on this very short boat tour. Again, this is a normal passenger ferry for cars and vehicles, but they also take people that want to go across. Most people these days are taking the Shinkansen, right? They take the bullet train to Hakodate. But you can also take the ferry which is so much cheaper. It's only $15 for this. What's cool about it is that you have all this space.

04:20 John Daub: I'm going to come back up here and film for the Kickstarter DVD for the Only in Japan hitchhiking. I'm going to come out here and film when the boat is in motion. But there's not going to be any 4G signal so I can't do any live streaming. It's chilly right now. It's the end of April in Aomori. There's a cold spell going through. So one reason I didn't camp. You can see my breath. It's a chilly morning to say the least. But it's cool. I love this change of pace. I've been on the road on the highway for the last month and now I'm on the sea.

05:21 John Daub: And another reason why I didn't want to take the train or drive underneath the tunnel—not that that's not cool, it is cool—but I want to feel the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean. This is where the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Japan meet on the Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu. I want to feel that underneath my feet on this boat. It gets a little rough where the two meet in the middle of the sea. So that's going to be a highlight for me personally. A lot of trucks take this route because again it's cheaper than going through the tunnel. I've been staying in here for the last few hours waiting for sunrise or for this boat to launch. The trucks waiting to get on various ferries. Some of them will be getting under this ferry. There's Kuroneko Yamato (Black Cat, Japan's UPS), delivering packages. They're getting onto the ferry.

06:33 John Daub: This is another passenger ferry. This is the Blue Dolphin over there on the other side. That's another option that I could have taken. But I decided to take this one because this one leaves at 5:20 in the morning and arrives at 9am. The one I'm on arrives at 8am and I want to get to Hakodate early. You can see the boat is spewing probably diesel fuel or something. Here's some of the rescue boats. In case something happens we are equipped with rescue boats. And since there's only like 10 passengers I heard, there should be plenty of space on the rescue boats. Here comes the crew. Live feed is going to end soon because the boat is going to take off and I'm going to lose signal.

08:36 John Daub: I just wanted to get a chance to introduce you to the Japanese ferry. As you can see in the beginning, they have different various classes even though this is only a 4-hour trip from Aomori to Hakodate. If you take the Blue Dolphin I think it's 20 minutes faster and you pay maybe 30% more. So I'm happy to take the slow boat. Why not? We have such a beautiful sunrise. For a 4-hour tour—Gilligan's Island. And this boat is not going to crash and leave me at a deserted island somewhere between Hokkaido and Aomori. You can't hitchhike on a deserted island. No one will pick me up. I'm excited. I love boat tours and this is a really big change of pace. It's a beautiful sky. Oh there's some mountains over there. The sun is coming up. You can see there's some snow up there still. You can see the beauty of Aomori. It's just a really lovely prefecture. I'm going to be back here in the fall. Actually I've been working on a new episode about Tohoku and I want to be back here in the fall.

10:50 John Daub: The biggest challenge that I've had today was getting a ride out of Hirosaki and I got that. And then my shoes fell apart. I'm wearing fake Crocs right now and the fake Crocs are not comfortable. You can see the glue is just about dried on my hiking boots. I had the soles on my hiking boots come off. And you can't hike without hiking boots. Well you can, but I want my boots. And I bought some rubber glue or cement at the store a few hours ago. I dried the bottom of it and put the cement into the rubber soles and then glued it back onto the leather. So let's see if that bonds. But that was a challenge. And here again is the north of Aomori. We're here in Aomori City and the ferry is right here and it's going to depart to Hakodate.

12:52 John Daub: Here's something to get you excited. Hakodate has one of the best spectacular night views in all of Japan. It's number one in all of Japan. Night views. Forget Tokyo. It's Hakodate all the way.

14:43 John Daub: Open water. Honshu. The vessel's name is Hayabusa Number Three. They still got 4G signal I guess, probably last for a while. But there we're approaching the city of Aomori. See that? That's the city center. There's the bay bridge and the Aomori Sanban-kan building. How cool is that? And that's the mountain that I climbed for an episode of Only in Japan when I showed the snow monsters and the Aomori extreme airport snow plowing. I went to the top of that mountain. That's spectacular.

16:25 John Daub: Alright everybody. I just wanted to share with you this boat experience. That's a tour of a Japanese ferry. It's pretty simple. It's just a 4-hour tour. So see you in Hokkaido. I'm going to live stream again later from Hakodate. Have a good night or a good morning. I'm going to try to get 3 hours of sleep. I didn't sleep at all. So have a nice day and see you soon. I'll leave you with a couple of seconds of the beautiful and very spectacular city of Aomori as I depart to Hokkaido. Ciao!