Hi, apologies for my recent hiatus. I've been in the throes of one of my periodic horrendous head colds for the last week and haven't felt like doing anything except lying in bed blowing my nose. But to pick up where we left off...
After packing up Tuesday morning we visited our hotel brunch buffet for breakfast before taking a taxi to the train station to begin our westward journey away from Tokyo. It was to be our first time on one of the "bullet trains" and because we'd bought the upgraded JR Railpass we were able to reserve seats in a "green car" (basically first class). It was super nice: perfectly on time, fast, smooth, quiet, plenty of room, power plugs in the armrests so you could charge your devices, and beautiful views out the windows.
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| Just some of what was available for brunch. I think I went back at least 3 times. |
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| On the "Shinkansen" platform (the name of the bullet trains). |
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| View from the train |
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| We nearly had the whole car to ourselves! |
The Shinkansen has a top speed of about 180 mph. Alan had an app on his phone which we checked once or twice and showed us doing about 165 or so. There were many tunnels. Sometimes on this leg of the trip it felt like we were underground more often than above ground.
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| Arriving in Hakone |
Hakone is a small-ish town (relative to anywhere else we went) with a tourist orientation due to its proximity to Mt. Fuji and its many "onsen" (baths fed by natural hot springs, about which more later). We actually left our Shinkansen train in Odawara and thanks to Alan's very useful guidebook we got special transportation passes for the Hakone area which allowed us to ride the local trains, some buses, a boat, a "ropeway" (tram, happily not made out of rope) and a funicular. First we took a local train from Odawara to Hakone, then caught a bus to a stop "near" our hotel. It turns out we had to hike quite a ways down from the bus stop to our hotel's location near the river and it was a pretty warm a humid day and a bit buggy. Interesting nonetheless. Arriving at the hotel we were too early to check in so we left our luggage with the front desk and went out sightseeing.
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| Downtown Hakone |
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| The forested hillside between our bus stop and our hotel |
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| Almost there! |
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| Oops, still got to go down a ways, I guess. |
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| Very steep hills in Hakone! |
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| In the hotel lobby. |
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| Heading back "downtown" to catch a bus for sightseeing, rather than hiking back up the hill we'd just come down. |
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| The bus took us to a lake, where we caught a boat across the lake. |
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| A little snack while we wait for the boat. |
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| Here comes our boat! |
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| The clouds came and went. We were hoping for a clear view of Mt. Fuji (but this is not it). |
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| I was pretty interested in the forested hills, with all the terraced trees canopies layered on top of each other. |
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| There's our destination at the far end of the lake. Mt. Fuji is supposed to be off in that direction, though we were never able to see it due to the low clouds. |
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| Here you can see the lake we'd traversed, with our boat still at the dock where we'd gotten off. Now we're riding the "ropeway" (happily made with cables instead of ropes). |
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| Here's a thermal area which is related to the natural hot spring baths the area is famous for. |
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| This is probably the shot which best shows the network of pipes tapping into the thermal vents. It looked pretty haphazard, like it had probably developed piece by piece over many years. |
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| Going back down now, but not where we'd come up from the boat. It turns out we were making a large loop back to our hotel around a loose collection of mountain peaks. |
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| Riding another train back toward Hakone from a different direction. |
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| Back in Hakone again it was only about 5:00 pm and our dinner reservations at our hotel weren't until 7:00. Time for a beer and a snack before heading back to the hotel to check in and get ready for dinner. |
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| That night we had our fanciest dinner of the trip. We had a private dining room in our hotel and had a "kaiseki" meal, which is a fancy multi-course meal notable for the effort put into the preparation of all the different dishes. |
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| Anyone else see Buddha? |
And that was that! The next day we left for Kyoto (which Alan pointed out is an anagram of Tokyo), but that's another story for another day.
