Kansai! Lake Biwa

One of the best moments of the trip was definitely the time we spent on the lake Biwa. Biwa or Biwako is the biggest lake in Japan, but still it feels that not many Japanese has actually been there. It also seems to be a little bit rare to swim in lakes in Japan, so I have received many eyebrow rises when telling that we spent two evenings on the Omimaiko beach in the south parts of Lake Biwa. We picked the beach just by googling results and weren’t disappointed. We drived our way to the beach over mountains which also offered us nice view over Lake Biwa.

Omimaiko was very long beach with some trees giving us a little bit protection from the sun during day time. Water was as warm as the air at the first day (around +35 Celsius degrees), because there had not really been any wind or rain for many days. After sun set the water was warmer than air and we sat in the even long after we stopped being able to see what was on the sand close to our feet. After dark we also played with some small fireworks.

We spent in total two evenings at Omimaiko beach, but second day was windy and water was colder, though you can’t really say that it was cold. But towards sunset the waves rose pretty high when you think that this was a lake, but I guess you could say that Biwa is a like more like a sea (without salt). At the first day we weren’t really able to see the opposite side coast, only some very blurry shadows stating that there was mountains on the other side. Second day we saw some fireworks in the horizon confirming that there was life too.