Now back to my belated blogs. A few weeks ago, we took a weekend trip to Hakone. The city is in the Kanagawa prefecture (the same prefecture I live in) and is about an hour and a half from central Tokyo. We set off early in the morning, and after several train changes we arrived at Miyanoshita. It was quite surreal, stepping off the crowded little carriage onto a deserted platform, and glancing around to see yourself surrounded by forest. The station was charming, and the sea of dried leaves that had collected on the tracks gave it an abandoned feel. Crossing the tracks we walked out of the gate, the attendant not checking anyone’s tickets. We had purchased the Hakone Free Pass ticket – a two day pass for just under 900 Yen that gave us free travel on all Hakone transport.
Down a steep hill we found a town without much to it. There were a few swanky hotels, and aside from the main road running through the centre, that was it. We looked around for somewhere quiet to eat our packed lunch and stumbled upon the Hakone Shrine. Set into the hills and overlooking a sweeping valley thick with forest, it was very picturesque. It was the last week of November, and the trees were such brilliant colours it’s almost impossible to describe them. Autumnal colours filled my camera lens – crimson, burgundy, auburn, ginger, amber, canary, olive and khaki. It was like the hillside was on fire, a polka-dot array of hues merging together. Aside from the sheer range of colours, the overwhelmingly stunning appearance of the Japanese Maple leaves is enough to draw photographers far and wide to the region.
We took a winding route back towards the train station down lanes still damp with the last rain. The train tracks rumbled overhead as the convoy of little compartments passed in a flurry of crisp leaves and rustling foliage. On our travels through the quiet pathways, we found a small clearing that was completely overgrown, thick with brambles and weeds. Sticking out of the wilderness were two wooden plaques, the lumber badly cracked with the signs leaning at uncanny angles, like tombstones in an ancient graveyard. They informed us that this pitiful plot was the site of the ‘000 Library’, founded in the late 1800’s by pioneer Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain, and destroyed by a fire in 1945. Chamberlain was from England, and went to Japan after suffering a nervous breakdown from working in a London bank. He taught at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in Tokyo, but is better known for his work at the Tokyo Imperial University, where he gained his reputation as a student of Japanese language and literature. He wrote several books, but none more popular than his informal encyclopaedia called Things Japanese. The library, situated next to the swanky Fujiya Hotel (which existed in Chamberlains day and was apparently where he stayed for most of his time in Japan) was basically his personal book collection, but judging by the plot of land it’s supposed to have been situated on, it must have been a rather small assortment.
Going back to the train station, we climbed up the steep hill which starts on Tokai road. Near the top, we stopped off at a little café we had seen on the way down, drawn to it not only by the lure of hot beverages, but of a hot foot bath. This part of Japan is famous for its onsen (hot springs) and this little café had pools of clear water, several inches deep, underneath the long dining-hall style table. Patrons order their food and drink inside, then find a space at the table as they wait to be served. The water was very warm indeed – naturally hot – and it was a delicious feeling. Coupled with a tall glass of hot, sweet Yuzu tea (Yuzu being a Japanese fruit that is like a cross between a lemon and a grapefruit) it was a lovely way to relax after our walk.
Mid-afternoon and back onto the train, and a few stops down the line we arrived at Gora. This little town was much nicer than the previous one – we didn’t see much of it but at least it was more than one main road! Gora was just the stop-off point for us to change to a local bus, but as it was still not too late in the day we decided to look around. Walking up a very steep hill, we passed a beer vending machine – the first we’d seen in Japan, though of course we expected to see them all over the place. Interesting to note that it was actually located outside an off-license. At the top of the hill we found ourselves at the entrance of the Gora Park, and as entrance was free with our Hakone Free Pass, we elected to look around. The trees looked magnificent in the early-evening light, and all the more colourful for the glow illuminating them. We went into the greenhouses, which boasted all kinds of flowers and plants (as well as pineapples growing on the ground) and also had a quick look at the Craft House – an art shop where you can also pay for classes to try your hand at glass blowing, flower arranging and pottery.
Our final leg of travel for the day - a bus up to Sengokuhara. Again, another delightful little town – just a shame that we couldn’t stay for longer. Something that made us laugh – even in this tiny little town, we managed to find two Lawson’s convenience stores, just a stone’s throw from each other. With a population of just over 4,000 people, it was a nice little town, though obviously geared at tourism. There were lots of things to do there, including plenty of museums: The Little Prince and Saint-Exupéry Museum, Hakone Venetian Glass Museum, the Lalique Museum and the Pola Museum of Art. Sadly we didn’t have time to visit any of these, as we were far too busy enjoying our onsen!
We were staying at the Fuji-Hakone Guest House (http://fujihakone.com/en/). On Trip Advisor it ranks #1 of B&Bs in Hakone-machi, a title that it well deserves. As it was a holiday weekend (resulting in extra charges) it was not the cheapest accommodation option, but well worth the price for the location and the service. The rooms were of the traditional Japanese style, with futon beds resting on padded tatami mats. Our room was simply decorated with a charming print of ninja’s scaling a castle wall, and on our bed we found yukata – the comfy robes people wear, especially when using an onsen.
The use of the indoor onsen (hot spring) was free with the room, and for 500 Yen you could book to use the outdoor onsen. The water comes from the nearby Owakudani Volcano. It is geothermally heated, and the onsen at the guesthouse contains minerals including sulfate, calcium, magnesium, and chloride and has a very strong acidity level with a pH of 2.9. The smell in the small, misty room is very overpowering, and coupled with the immense heat it is easy to become dizzy in the bathing room.
Because of the high acidity levels (and according to tradition) you can’t wear clothes or accessories in an onsen – they become easily corroded and colours fade in the water. Guests wanting to use the onsen book a timeslot to use the room privately for 30 minutes, but in public hot springs it’s communal, though usually gender divided. In Japan it has long been believed that use of a hot spring can alleviate certain ailments, such as muscle ache, stiffness in joints, bruises, sprains, intolerance to cold and many others besides.
Using the onsen was the part of the holiday I looked forward to most, and at first I was a little disappointed to discover I would only be able to use the hot spring for 30 minutes. However, having not used a natural hot spring before, I was soon to learn that 30 minutes in there would be more than sufficient – in fact, I began to feel I’d had enough after only 15 or 20 minutes. Before use, patrons must wash themselves, making sure to rinse off all soap and hair products so as not to pollute the spring water. The room was filled with whorls of steam, made all the more noticeable as the hot vapours clashed with the cold air outside. Stepping into the onsen, my foot was instantly enveloped in a tingly, fleetingly-painful sensation. I can’t remember the exact temperature of the water, but it was certainly very hot! Fresh water that was fed into the pool through the lion’s head spout was so hot that you couldn’t touch it directly until it had mixed with the cooler water. Rather than getting used to the temperature, I found that the water felt increasingly warmer and warmer – and as such the window that opened into a small walled garden was pulled back farther and farther. After 20 minutes (and feeling a little light-headed) I tentatively made my way out of the pool and back to the shower where I rinsed off the sulphuric smelling water. As for the healing qualities of the water, I can concur that after my hot spring experience I felt very relaxed, as did my muscles, and my skin felt very clean and smooth. We enjoyed the onsen so much that we got up early the next day to use it before breakfast. If I lived near an onsen, I would certainly make an effort to visit regularly in the hopes of long-term health benefits. The Japanese are such healthy people and they live to such a ripe old age – if they say the hot spring is good for you, I’m convinced it must be so!
One of the best things about the Fuji-Hakone Guest House was how helpful the service was, in a variety of ways. As Sengokuhara is quite a small town, we worried about finding somewhere good for dinner, but it turned out our fears were in vain. At the guest house, we were given a portfolio of local restaurants, complete with map, summaries, opening times and English menus. Amazing. There were several good restaurants listed, but we plumped for the Chinese ‘pot-sticker’ restaurant (pot-sticker being a strange mistranslation of dumplings.)
The China House restaurant (http://chinahouse.web.fc2.com/) specialised in dumplings which were a cross between the Chinese Jiǎozi and the Japanese Gyōza. I had the ‘corn pot sticker set’ which included six sweetcorn and meat dumplings, rice, miso soup and pickles (1,050 Yen) and Sasha had the ‘Chinese noodles set’ (1,250 Yen) which included four plain dumplings, rice, pickles and noodles (which were served in a soup with a generous helping of hearty slices of meat.) It was just a small, basic restaurant but with a warm, family feel. The waitress was jolly and even with being located sort of in the middle of nowhere, there were several families enjoying themselves in the restaurant. The prices were very reasonable and it was lovely to eat some Chinese food again – a wonderful surprise on our Hakone trip.
The next morning (after an invigorating day-break onsen) we left the sleepy town of Sengokuhara and were travelling once more. A bus back down the winding hills to Gora, then we joined the queue for the funicular tram heading up to Sounzan. We went early to beat the crowds, and although I’ll admit the line behind us was much longer than the line in front of us, the tram was still packed. We chugged up the hill, stopping as several stations where a few people tried, mostly in vain, to get on the tram. Reaching Sounzan we were greeted by a dramatic view, which we enjoyed momentarily before getting back into the queue for the next part of the journey (all covered by the Hakone Free Pass.)
The cable car queue was fairly long, but worth it for the experience of floating high above the hills through the mountainous terrain. Once again we were treated to a majestic display of colours on the trees below, with a clear blue sky edging all our photographs. After the obligatory scenery shots, I was busily photographing my bottle of Koiwai coffee (my favourite brand of milky bottled coffee) when a passenger behind me gave an almighty gasp, and I turned around to sounds of much commotion. As we rose over the hill, Mount Fuji had come into perfect view, and all travellers on the cable car were scrabbling for the iPhones, iPads and cameras to capture the sight. It really did burst out of nowhere – remarkably so given the size of it – and the vista was a splendid thing to behold. I also made sure to take a good bird’s eye view shot of the scene below of ridges cut into the hills with steam billowing all around.
The valley at Owakudani is relentlessly simmering and belching our vapour, caused by a volcanic eruption that happened three thousand years ago. There are lava formations all over the place, and a winding pathway leads you through the geothermally heated waters to malodourous pools where eggs are boiled until the shells turn black. As is traditional for tourists, we bought a box and tentatively peeled back the chalky black shell to reveal… an egg. The taste was almost entirely unaltered, and the smoky hint I detected was probably just in my mind. Not really being a fan of boiled eggs in the first place, I wasn’t very impressed. However, the ethereal mist that came tumbling down dusty bleached rocks and pampas grass with the milky warm waters was something truly spectacular, and it looked very other-worldly.
After pootling around and taking lots more photos of Mount Fuji, we got back into the cable car queue and sailed down to Togendai, the last stop and the northern edge of Lake Ashi. After a mediocre and overpriced lunch at the only restaurant in the area, we hopped on board the Hakone Sightseeing Cruise. The boats are modelled after the seventeenth-century man-o’-war (a ship armed with cannons and propelled primarily by sails) and they looked equally charming and tacky at the same time. Over thirty minutes the boat crossed the lake, stopping first at Hakone-machi and then our stop, Moto-Hakone. We had a short rest at the lakeside before setting off on the Sukumo River Nature Trail.
The hike, which was steep in an uphill direction to begin with and then steep in a downhill direction after that, was a pleasantly quiet passageway through the dark forest, which got increasingly dark as the evening drew in. It probably would have been sensible to cut the walk short earlier than we did, as by the end we were treading carefully by the pitiful light of my mobile phone. When we did come to the end of the path, that was another mistake altogether – by this point along the road, the bus was already full and had no room for other passengers. When we had been waiting for 30 minutes or so in the cold and the dark, and the bus pulled up only to tell us ‘no room, wait for next bus’ we were furious. Thankfully, it seemed that the driver called the office and they put on another bus for as, as the bus that eventually did pull up to the stop (which was, by the way, in the middle of no-where) was completely empty. So we thawed out on the bus to the station, and after that caught trains for an hour and a bit until we were safely back in Shin-Yurigaoka.
What a trip! Hakone was delightful – even though it was a holiday and fairly busy at the tourist spots, we had a relaxing, peaceful time, thoroughly enjoying our onsen experience and our wonderful guesthouse. With so many museums in the area (some reasonably priced, some certainly not!) it’s an area that I could visit for a week without getting bored of the peace and quiet. As its quite out of the way, and my time in the Tokyo area is coming to a close, sadly I don’t foresee another visit for quite some time, but the area come highly recommended and it’s certainly worth the effort of getting there. Thinking back to being stranded on the side of that bloomin’ mountain in the cold, and how stressed and annoyed we were at the time, I’m happy to reflect that it didn’t mar the enjoyment of the holiday, and I will always look back on Hakone fondly. That’s all for now – sayonara!
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