Today, like every other day, Sarah is blogging. Alan is commenting in red.
We had a nice sleep in this morning, enjoying the last of our really nice bed in our really nice hotel. It was sad to say goodbye to the king size bed, soft pillows, the spa bath and the view of the tower, but by midday we were on our way to the station.
We could choose three ways to get here; local train for 80 minutes, Romancecar (which is another form of train) for 60 minutes or fast Shinkansen for 30 minutes. We took the Shinkansen. Luckily we didn’t have any problems with train crashes or track work like we experienced yesterday. After arriving in Odawara,, we bought our three day passes to get around the transport in the area and then boarded the very slow train to Hakone-Yumoto. Thankfully we only had to go 4 stations so it didn’t take too long.
After stepping off the train we wondered what on earth we were doing here. The Hakone / Mt Fuji area is huge and I chose to put us in an area close to the main train station. However, it is obviously not where other people stay as after walking around for 90 minutes this afternoon, we realised we are the only westerners here.
We took a small local shuttle from the train station to the hotel for 100 yen each and I’m glad we did. Hakone-Yumoto is not a flat place and there is a very large incline up to the hotel we would have had to drag our bags had we taken the 10 minute walk to the hotel. Hakone-Yumoto is a tiny little country town nestled in the mountains. There is a train station, hotels, one street of shops which mostly sell Japanese sweets or fish, Japanese restaurants, a 7-11 convenience store and not too much else from what we can tell. They’re obviously not used to seeing white people around here.
The hotel is nice and they knew us by name when we walked through the door, again, obviously they don’t get westerners staying here. This is the only place on the trip that I booked direct with the hotel and I had been emailing Ken. It was Ken who met us at check-in. Japanese born but from the accent, American educated. It was actually the best English we’ve found our entire trip.
The room, although not as nice as Tokyo, is reasonably spacious, the beds are comfortable and unlike Osaka and Hiroshima, we have two pillows each AND they aren’t filled with rocks. We don’t have a spa here either of course, but the shower was pretty nice anyway. And apparently there are hot springs somewhere closeby which you can bathe in. Yes, they are one floor down.
After dropping our bags in the room we decided to go looking for some food. We asked Ken if he had a map and said we were off to look for some food. He seemed a little shocked. Once we started wandering around, we could see why. Before leaving the hotel Alan had picked up a brochure for the Toy Museum, not for the museum itself but for a picture of a hamburger on the front for the Museum’s cafe. After walking to the station wondering if our dinner tonight would be from 7-11, Alan saw the sign for the Museum and after a very very very steep climb up a road, we found Go Go Wimpy. A delicious hamburger, fries, onion rings and a drink each was had for a very reasonable price. From what we could see, Go Go Wimpy is the only non-Japanese restaurant in all of Hakone-Yumoto, so we were glad to have found it. The walk to it was extremely steep though and it was hard enough for me to get up there let alone Sarah. The guy at the counter spoke not a word of English so there was a bit of a language barrier happening but the chef did speak some English so we got our message across.
By the time we had finished eating, it had started to drizzle and we walked back to the hotel in the rain. My dad would refer to it as “mountain weather”. The afternoon was cool, the sky was grey and there was light misty rain in the air. We’re surrounded by steep mountains on both sides here and I thought we could stumble across Closeburn at any point during our afternoon walk. Only my family will know what that means.
There is no internet in our room and Ken wasn’t sure whether it actually worked in the lobby but suggested we bring the laptop down and try. No, it didn’t work but then he managed to find another cable for us, obviously running off their own computer system, for us to use. After a quick check that it indeed did work, we returned to the room. Alan had a quick nap as he intends on camping out in the lobby tonight to watch the soccer. I’ve been having soccer withdrawals so being Saturday I’ll see what I can find on the net later tonight. I am so glad I came to Japan prepared with enough tv shows on the laptop to watch otherwise we’d be going stir crazy with no internet in the room, no English speaking TV and nothing to go out and see.
The area here is very quiet. Tomorrow we hit the very large Hakone tourist area. Hopefully the rain, which is still falling, will stop overnight and we might get a nice close up view of Mt Fuji.
Trivia for the day…. Our hotel here has a French name and there were big movie posters hanging in the Go Go Wimpy restaurant with their titles written in French. It’s odd as there certainly doesn’t appear to be any French people here or French restaurants or anything of that nature.
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