Bottlenose dolphin BOTTLE DRIVE #2!

Well we are bottle driving our butts off again!  In two days we made almost $200 which will pay for our food for four days.  Everything is expensive in Japan, the food, rental cars, hotel, and we are thankful for every dollar donated.  If you can pledge $50 which budgets us twenty five dollars each for food for the day in Taiji we would be so grateful!

We are both vegan of course and we plan to save money by staying out of restaurants and sticking to the grocery stores.  During our first trip to Japan I have to say it was a bit of a challenge finding vegan food unless there was a grocery store around.  We were in pretty remote small towns for the most part and several times we tried to eat in a restaurant using our trusty Vegan Passport and were quickly sent away.  Everyone was really nice and made their best effort to check with the chefs and double check ingredient lists, but there was literally nothing that did not have some sort of fish or chicken stock in it at least at all the places we tried to eat at.  The grocery store was a different story!  I swear Japan has the most delicious strawberries I have ever tasted.  Sweet, juicy, ripe and fantastic!  We found cereal, Inari, roasted sweet potatoes, dried fruit, chips, roasted chestnuts, oranges and veggie sushi.

After the earthquake struck that was a bit more challenging of course.  When we were back at our hotel in Tono we quickly realized the size of the disaster and that the entire country was going into lock down.  The streets of Tono were deserted, very little was open but we needed to get food and water because we didn't know how long we would have to wait for a flight home.  We set out to the grocery store and found that it was cordoned off and they had brought food out to the entrance way and were rationing!  They weren't allowing anyone inside and what they had brought out was very limited considering we had no kitchen and a lot of what they had was not vegan.  But what we did have was a water purifier which looked very similar to a rice cooker.  All we needed was a bottle of hoisin sauce, some greens, fried tofu, noodles and we turned that water purifier into a soup pot and I have to say it was the best soup I have ever tasted!  Who says it's hard to stay vegan when traveling?

Please keep checking back, we have more pictures and videos to post soon.

Thank you for all your support!

Marley and Carisa
Cetacean Defense League