After arriving in Kochi, I walked 10 minutes to EN Hostel and checked in (one night, ¥3140/$30). Normally I'm happy staying at hostels, guesthouses, or capsule hotels since all I really insist on is a place that's clean and safe, and I've yet to find one that isn't in Japan. Again, this isn't a great picture, but it is the only picture I got of the room. There's really nothing remarkable or unique compared to other ones, but it's quite comfortable and has plenty of space. One other person was in the 8-bed room, a long-distance cyclist.

Normal Western-ish breakfast at the hotel the next morning.


The Sunday market in Kochi is one of the best in Japan (in my opinion, but it's a popular opinion among those who have been there). Every Sunday half of one of the large streets downtown is closed off and turns into a market, probably half local produce and the rest a mixture of food stalls, handicrafts, antiques, plants and more.




Very good but unlike any taco I'd ever seen or eaten before.


Fun fact: 33°33'33"N, 133°33'33"E is in a river in downtown Kochi (older photo)


Kochi is a prefectural capital, albeit a small one, so it has the expected selection of attractions like an art museum, local history museum, zoo, botanical garden (very good), castle (one of the 12 original ones in Japan), and so on. Some of these were temporarily closed and I'd been to some others on previous trips, so after a quick walk back to the tourist information at the station for ideas, I decided to go to the Shikoku automobile museum, which is also near the zoo in case it was closed or small or uninteresting.

Local train to Noichi, a couple stops east. The eastern part of the Tosa Kuroshio railway has different characters for every station, and some of the trains have all of them together.



Pokemon manhole cover which have been appearing in many smaller cities all over Japan.


Automobile museum. It was open, and was not small, and certainly not uninteresting. I didn't get a picture of the outside but it's basically a single very large room with probably 50 cars and 20 old bikes. I'm not that into cars (almost all my knowledge is from watching Top Gear) so I can't say which is most impressive or significant, but I do appreciate the design and engineering. Most of the collection was Italian sports and rally cars, a few F1 cars, and some other European and American cars, and then a section of historical Japanese cars. It's a private collection but I didn't get any more details on who assembled this collection and how. It wasn't crowded when I was there, but a group of about a dozen bikers arrived right as I was leaving.






Since I didn't have a huge amount more time to spend there, instead of going to the zoo I headed back to Kochi, bought a few souveniers for coworkers, and took some pictures of the trams. It's the second longest tram network in Japan after Hiroshima, and most of the trams date from the 1970s-1980s and are still clean and well-maintained, but noisy. There are some new trams as well but very few.



(I'm an airplane, not a tram!)


Kochi station (older picture). Goodbye for now...


The smiling station and train characters on the left are the JR Shikoku's mascots. To the right are Anpanman characters, one of the most popular children's book/TV series in Japan. There are a lot of Anpanman-themed things (such as the train earlier) because Anpanman's writer was from Kochi.


The return route was the same, to Okayama then the shinkansen back to Shin-Osaka.

Kochi -> Okayama, Nampu 20, 15:13 - 17:41
Okayama -> Shin-Osaka, Hikari 522, 18:26 - 19:46

More inaka-zushi from the market


This looks like a boring picture of the countryside. But the red cranes here are the Marugame shipyard of the Imabari Shipbuilding company... which is where the Ever Given was built, the one that got stuck in the Suez Canal earlier this year.


And to finish, crossing the Seto-Ohashi bridge again. It got dark before leaving Okayama so I didn't take any pictures of the shinkansen this time.



That's it for this trip report - thanks for reading through to the end!
It attracted a bit more attention that I anticipated, so any feedback is welcome, or feel free to ask anything if you want to visit Kochi sometime (eventually, unless you live in Japan already).