Click here to see all of the photos I took on this day.
The best blue cheese and fried chicken I've ever eaten were at an Italian restaurant shaped like a carousel and sitting at the foot of Mt. Fuji. How many people can say that?
As we did on the morning of our Kamakura tour, we ate a quick breakfast at McDonalds and walked the half-mile to the Keio Plaza Hotel to catch the bus to the bus station where we would meet our tour guide and get on a different bus headed for Mt. Fuji. In the lobby of the hotel we saw women greco-roman wrestlers from around the world who we had seen competing in Tokyo on television the night before. We also ran into the same Italian couple we had come home from the Kamakura tour with, but they were headed elsewhere today.
Our tour guide said his name was Harry, but I'm not so sure. He was a bit difficult to understand at first, but after listening to him for a little bit you started to understand him a lot better. He informed us later that he is a school teacher for four days and a tour guide for the other three, and said he also used his computer to make counterfeit money to further supplement his income. He had a very dry sense of humor and often made deadpan jokes that went over very well. Over the course of the ninety minute drive to the base of Mt. Fuji he told us a lot of information about Japan, the culture, and modern society much like our tour guide to Kamakura had done.
We stopped at the visitor center at the base of Mt. Fuji for a short break, then headed on up the mountain. The road to the top of Mt. Fuji is known as the "Subaru Road" because it has seven stops (Subaru is the Japanese word for the Pleiades...that's why the car brand uses them as their logo). A vehicle can only go as far as the fifth stop. If you want to reach the top you must continue on foot. That wasn't on our agenda today.
Part-way up Fuji our tour guide said that we "must make a quick emergency stop for photographs" because the clouds had momentarily cleared from the top and we had a great view. The weather was slightly cool, and the trees up here had already started to turn their fall colors. The ground was entirely comprised of crushed black volcanic rock.
Arriving at the fifth station the road ended in a large cul-de-sac and there were several lodge-type buildings, some shrines, some monuments, and a lot of street vendors selling yakisoba, takoyaki, and stuff-on-a-stick, including entire squid and octopus tentacles.
Since we had such a short period of time here, Erin decided to go shopping while I photographed the scenery. The way the clouds floated through the area was really beautiful, and dampened the sound so much that the crunch of lava rocks beneath your feet seemed that much louder.
After I was done with that, I decided I would buy some yakisoba. I had to wait in line a bit, but it was worth it. Basically, it's soba noodles fried with soy sauce and a few vegetables, with a side of weird Japanese pickles, of course. The air was so damp and cool that steam billowed out of the container the entire time I ate.
When our time was up we headed back down the mountain to eat lunch at a large hotel near the visitor center. There was a pretty large roller coaster next to it, but our tour guide warned us not to try and ride it, as the wait is often over two and a half hours. I wouldn't have ridden it anyway.
Erin and I had elected for the tour without lunch, so while the group went into the hotel restaurant to be educated in a lunch probably not dissimilar to the one we had in Kamakura, we stepped into a strange attached Italian restaurant named "Angelo Mio!!!" that was shaped like a carousel. The front was a bakery (complete with some comically misspelled labels), and Erin bought a very tasty jack-o-lantern shaped pastry which was a bit like a jelly doughnut filled with pumpkin pie filling and dusted with cinnamon and sugar. Then we decided to just go ahead and eat at their restaurant.
I had already eaten yakisoba on Fuji, so Erin and I ordered just a couple of appetizers: The assorted cheese plate and chicken wings. They were both amazing. There were also some french fries included, which were also great. Our tour guide came in to make sure we were being taken care of, which I thought was very nice of him.
After paying (you don't tip in Japan, by the way) we went back out and met our tour group again. When we had all gotten on the bus and were about to pull away, I looked out the window to see several of the hotel staff bow deeply in unison before waving goodbye to us.
Now we headed to Hakone. The traffic was horrible along our intended path (indicated by red lights on highway signs), as it was rush hour on the final day of a three-day weekend, so our tour guide instructed the bus driver to go through some back roads through the community to avoid most of it. This provided for some interesting local color, including some giggling pre-teen school girls who waved at us as we went by and a supermarket called "Potato".
Along this route we noticed some tall grass much like wheat shining brightly in the evening sun and covering the hillsides. Our tour guide informed us that this area is where the events that the movie "The Last Samurai" were based on occurred, and also that this grass only grows like this for a couple weeks out of the year and many people come to hike through the fields. Sure enough, we ran into some heavy traffic and saw a long line of folks hiking up the mountainside and back down.
We arrived at Hakone a bit late, as three tour buses had left for the same tour that morning and intended to take the same boat across the lake, and the other two groups were waiting on us. We rushed onto the boat and it got underway.
Crossing the lake we saw other boats that looked like pirate ships taking people on tours. Ours, thankfully, was a standard ferry boat. We also saw a red tori gate standing in the water; the first gate headed up to a shrine where samurai used to pray for success. This gate has been featured in Hokusai Ukioe prints.
When we arrived at the other side we only had a few minutes to catch the ropeway (gondola) up the mountain. As we waited, a local merchant gave us a presentation about some trick boxes that are supposedly popular souvenirs.
The ropeway car made Erin a little uneasy due to her tendency for motion sickness) as it swayed every time it passed a major support, but we made it to the top without a problem. There we were met with colder weather than we experienced even on Mt. Fuji. On a clear day you can see Mt. Fuji from this mountain. This wasn't a clear day. There were no trees, but the entire hill was covered in a thick grass. There was a shrine on the far side and several derelict buildings of unknown age and purpose. We were informed that we only had about 10 minutes if we wanted to shop back at the bottom of the hill, and 40 if we wanted to wait until the last ropeway car left. Erin wanted to shop, and in the end I decided to go back down with her, unsure I wanted to stand around in the cold for so long.
After some shopping we met the group again for the bus ride to the train station where we would ride a shinkansen (bullet train) back to Tokyo station. It was dark now, and the traffic was even worse than before. We slowly crept down mountainsides toward a valley town, finally arriving about 20 minutes before the next Shinkansen would arrive. This allowed us to watch a few other shinkansen blow through the station at high speed, which was pretty spectacular. Harry informed us that ours wouldn't be going top speed since we weren't headed so far, and would only reach speeds of 230 kph.
When we got on the train we found that the interior was much like a passenger plane, except that it was standing room only. We weren't thrown back, as the train accelerated slowly and rode very smoothly, and at the next stop enough people exited that we were able to sit.
When we arrived back at Tokyo station, Harry helped everyone get on the train they needed to ride to their respective hotels. He almost sent us by an alternate route, having learned that there had been an accident on our subway line, but we learned that the accident hadn't stopped service, so we went ahead and rode it. I couldn't help but wonder if it had been a suicide.
Back in our familiar Shinjuku neighborhood, Erin wanted to try a couple triangle-shaped things in the AM/PM hot case which I had translated as "cheese in chicken" and "tomato in chicken". She enjoyed them. Then we headed out to explore parts of our surrounding area that we hadn't seen yet, since it wasn't even 8 PM and we hadn't worn ourselves out walking this day.
We were glad we did, because we found a great used videogame and DVD store (where I bought an old copy of Bust-A-Move for PlayStation for 300 yen) and the Yodobashi Camera store where we bought a lot of gashapons and some other videogame related stuff. We also found a kaiten (conveyor belt) sushi restaurant, but I thought it was a bit late for sushi and I decided to save it for another day.
In one store I found a copy of an Ys game for Windows Vista for only 1000 yen. Before I bought that, I saw a copy of The Orange Box (my son's favorite game) for the Xbox 360 and tried to take a picture of its Japanese packaging to show my son. A worker ran over and tapped me on the shoulder, giving me the familiar "X" with his arms indicating that I was not allowed to do that. For some reason, this really ticked me off and I was in a bit of a bad mood for the rest of the evening. Otherwise, it was a pretty good day.
Comments