Konnichiwa - Japan Part VII (Tokyo Part II & Hakone)

Well friends, we've arrived at my last blog post on Japan. I know that 7 individual blogs about a single country might seem excessive, but I just had so much to say about this amazing country. This final installment features the last 2 days of our trip that we took in April 2012. Earlier in the trip we visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Hiroshima. During the last 2 days, we traveled back to Tokyo and then spent a day about an hour south of Tokyo in the town of Hakone. 

Home seemed light years away yet with fewer and fewer vacation days to think about, we started to remember reality. We awoke in Hiroshima morning, ate our breakfast of cinnamon croissants and made it to the Shinkansen for our 6:30AM train back to Tokyo. This 5 hour train ride went surprisingly fast (literally. The train was going about 200mph). We used the down time to catch up on some sleep, I read over my lines for the play I was in back home, and we enjoyed the scenery outside the window. About an hour outside of Tokyo, we were able to see Mount Fuji off in the distance. We arrived at Tokyo Station around 11:45AM and dropped our bags once again at the Hotel Metropolitan Marunouchi (where we stayed before), and headed out into the city. 

Having eaten sandwiches and other Japanese mini mart snacks on the train, we headed straight for Ueno Park. If you remember from the our earlier days in Tokyo (read about them here), Ueno Park was empty and the trees were barren. Here's a picture in case you forgot. 

Ueno Park on Day 1

Having seen cherry blossoms all over Hiroshima and Miyajima, we were excited to see if the trees in Ueno park has bloomed too. This time the cherry blossoms were in full bloom and the park was mobbed with people. But what a sight to see!

Cherry Blossoms in Ueno Park, Tokyo

Cherry Blossoms in Ueno Park, Tokyo

It was beautiful everywhere, and people on the sides were picnicing. Then we walked the mile or so to Asakusa (again) to junk shops that were also closed the last time we were there. I bought some more souvenirs plus some ice cream and a veggie meat pie from a street vendor. Then we did a bit of window shopping in Ginza (Tokyo's equivalent to 5th Avenue, NYC). We passed every designer from Armani to Prada and even browsed a multi-story Louis Vuitton (Quick side note. Japanese ladies love their designer bags. The majority of women that we saw walking around the major cities carried a designer bag. The most popular being Louis or Burberry). As much as I wanted to tell myself "when in Rome..." the prices of at Louis Vuitton, even in Yen, were just as expensive as the USA, so if I'm ever going to drop that much cash for a purse, I can do it in the states just as easily. 

Instead we came back to Tokyo Station, checked into our hotel, relaxed a bit, and found dinner. After dinner, we went back to Ueno Park to see the blossoms at night with the lanterns lit. Still just as crowded as the daytime, but a memorable sight. 

Ueno Park at Night, Tokyo

Then we found some breakfast in Tokyo Station for the next morning, and called it a night. Tomorrow would be our last full day in the trip, and also...Easter Sunday. While planning, we took a moment to consider that things might be closed, but since Japan is not a Christian nation, and since Easter is not a state holiday, no one but us had any idea it was Easter.

Our last day was quite an adventure (as if we didn't say that about every day)! We got an early start to catch our 7:30AM Hakuri Shinkansen to Odowara (about 1 hr south of Tokyo). In Odowara we bought unlimited transportation passes for Hakone. Hakone is an area with natural volcanic hot springs that you can tour in a loop using a multiple forms of transportation (train, ropeway, and ship). We started out on a local train that went forward and backward when the tracks “switched back”. We got off two stops before Gora (the main stop) to walk about a mile to the Hakone Kowaki-en Yunessun hot springs hotel. They offered an onsen where you could wear your bathing suit. (Most onsen throughout Japan were gender specific and nude. Not wanting to miss this traditional Japanese experience, but also being terribly shy and modest, we searched out one that was both co-ed and permitted bathing suits. We were delighted to find this place. The only oddity about it was the big sign above the help desk that said they didn't permit anyone with tattoos. Weird, right?)

The complex was enormous. They had numerous pools both inside and outside that each featured something different. The largest indoor swimming pool looked like one you would see in any hotel or public swimming pool, only the volcanic thermal activity underground heated the water naturally, so the temperatures felt more like a hot tub than a regular swimming pool. A salt water pool kept us afloat in another pool, and a sweet honey water pool tingled our senses. One pool especially creeped us out. Have you ever seen those pools filled with little flesh eating fish? This place had one! And there was a huge line. But once again...when in Rome...right? So, we stood in line (it actually moved quite quickly) until it was our turn to stick our feet into the ankle deep tub of carnivorous fish. Some ladies sat in the water with their feet and lower shins completely covered in these little beasts. The entire experience creeped me out a little too much, so I held my feet in the water just long enough for a few fishes to nibble, freaked out and then pulled my feet out of the water....and repeat. The only let us stay in that pool for about 5 minutes, and that was plenty of time for me. I'm glad I tried it once, but it was soooooo weird.

Outside, they had even more of these specialty baths, and the ones that had attracted us to the facility in the first place. Each small pool featured a different liquid. They had coffee, wine, green tea, charcoal and sake. Some were neat, but they were mostly foul smelling baths with bright neon colored water. 

Wine bath - the water in reality was neon pink and not dark red

We still had great fun even though we only spent 1-2 hours there. One of the coolest things from this place were the watches that they gave us. The watches served as locker keys, but they also acted as a bar tab. So you didn't have to walk back to your locker to fetch your wallet for lunch, you could walk into the food court and use your watch to pay. Then at the end, you turned in your watch and paid your bill.

After the hot baths, we continued our day around the Hakone loop. We took the same train from the morning to Gora where we caught the ropeway that took us up the mountain. At the top we could see Mt. Fuji and walk around the volcano with sulfuric gasses. 

Mt Fuji

We hiked around a bit, and chuckled at the signs that warned us of the poisonous gas that came out of the mountain and not to stay in this area too long. 

Toxic gas seeping out of the mountain

Since it was Easter, we spent 500Yen (about $5.00) for 5 black hard boiled eggs cooked in the sulfur water. Have you ever seen a black egg before? It started out as a white egg, but once they cooked it in the poisonous sulfur, it turned a dark black color. Inside the shell, however, it was just a normal cooked egg. LUNCH! Yum!

Sulfur cooked eggs - for Easter!

We did some souvenir shopping, took the ropeway over the mountain, and then took a pirate ship across the lake. Yes, a pirate ship. Think I'm kidding?

Hakone Pirate Ship

Once on the other side, we took an incredibly crowded bus back to Odowara and then the Shinkansen back to Tokyo. We dropped our treasures and wet bathing suits off at our hotel, ate our last noodle bowls and tempura for dinner, walked around the neon lights and gaming parlors of Akihabara one last time, bought some breakfast and settled in for our very last sleep in Japan. 

We were so sad to see this trip end. There is so much we love about the Japanese culture and the people. Everywhere we went, we found them so very kind, respectful and helpful. I highly encourage anyone to visit Japan who is interested in taking their first steps at exploring Asia. Having now been to Japan and other parts of Southeast Asia, I recommend that your first trip to the Asian continent be a place like Tokyo or Singapore over Thailand or Malaysia. Not that I don't recommend visiting those countries, but for the timid traveler like myself, Japan is a great way to get acclimated to this part of the world.

To sign off on my blog about Japan, I'll leave you with some funny signs that we came across throughout our 2 weeks in this amazing place. Sayonara friends! Stay tuned for my next blog series on the exotic Persian nation of the United Arab Emirates. 

Saw this inside a Starbuck bathroom

Posted in our hotel bathroom

Seen just about everywhere we used a public restroom. Really? Toilet paper for sale?

For those of you who need the sound of running water to lend a hand....

A sign of encouragement outside a temple.

That extra little "to" made us chuckle

We're pretty sure this sign was about cameras. ;)

I don't even know what they were trying to say here.

Thanks for reading!

- Foxy the Traveler

Konnichiwa - Japan Part VI (Miyajima)

Welcome to Part VI of my blog series on Japan. On our first day in Hiroshima, we spent our time touring historic Hiroshima, visiting the Peace Memorial and Hiroshima Castle. Our second day in the Hiroshima region, we journeyed off the coast of the main island to a smaller island called Miyajima. We "slept in" until about 7AM that morning, but since we went to bed the previous night around 8PM, we had plenty of sleep. (Remember, we were up around 4:30AM to catch the train from Shin-Osaka to Hiroshima, so we were exhausted that evening. 

After going one stop in the wrong direction, we made our way to Miyajima by taking the JR ferry. I've mentioned before how great the transportation system is in Japan. This continued to be true in Hiroshima. Our JR passes weren't only good for city metros and intercity trains, but also for this ferry ride that took us to a completely different island. 

As our ferry approached the dock of Miyajima, we saw this awesome tory gate in the water. The ferry driver explained that in low tide seasons, you can actually walk out to it, but alas, it was underwater as we approached. 

Like Nara, the presence of tame deer shocked us! We saw them everywhere, and they passed us without any hesitation or alarm. Unlike Nara where little old ladies sold deer "cookies", we didn't see any deer food for sale, but the deer still didn't fear people like they do in the USA. We also noticed that finally, the cherry trees were blooming everywhere! The first 7/8 of our trip had barren trees and mostly cloudy skies, so it really excited us to see some blooming trees, even if only for a few days. 

We made our way to the Miyajima ropeway (think ski lift sans snow). Miyajima has a small town at the base of the mountain, and then hiking trails throughout the rest of the place. We'd been walking all over Japan for almost two weeks now, so our feet hurt every day, and our legs ached (want a secret way to lose 10lbs in 2 weeks? Eat only rice and noodle bowls for your meals, and then do nothing but walk for miles and miles everyday. I'm kidding! Although this is what we did, I don't recommend it for a long term diet solution. Haha!). On a normal day, we would have welcomed a nice long hike, but fatigue kept us from channeling our inner adventurers. Instead, we took the ropeway to the top of the mountain and enjoyed roughly a 1.5km hike down. 

One of the first things we noticed as we began our descent were the signs warning us against vipers. Vipers? Yes, the slithery, venomous snakes. Uh...on second thought, maybe we don't want to go for a hike. I don't like snakes anymore than Indiana Jones! But we convinced ourselves that we're only in Japan once, and that as long as we stick to the established path, we'll be fine. We actually did see a snake (not entirely sure what kind), but it was off in the grass and moving in the opposite direction of us. It's a good thing too, because if it were moving toward us, I would have completely freaked out. 

For those of you who are metric to english conversion experts, you know that 1.5km is roughly a little over a mile. And since we were walking downhill the whole way, we didn't expect the hike to take us too much more than 20-30 minutes. That is, of course, until we got lost. 

Up to this point, we didn't have many problems with the language barrier. Ordering in restaurants proved to be our biggest challenge...until we went hiking on Miyajima island. We assumed incorrectly that all paths led down. Well, maybe not incorrectly, but we misunderstood how to take the shortest path down. We had no reliable map, and all of the signs we encountered along the way, looked like this:

But as long as we kept heading down the mountain, we assured ourselves that we would eventually reach the bottom. After a full 90 mins of hiking downhill, our legs shaking, and our tummies rumbling, we saw this sign and completely lost all fatigue. Our laughter became uncontrollable and the sign forever cemented our love of this place. Now what you have to realize is that up until this point, we constantly chuckled at the misinterpreted signs throughout Japan. Wanting to be helpful, they would often try to translate Japanese signs in English, but they would lose just a few words that made the whole translation terrifically comical. This sign took the cake as our favorite. 

We finally reached the bottom, and the only thing on our minds was where to find food. We picked up some french fries and shrimp cakes from a food truck along the path back to town. We then stopped to visit the worlds largest rice scoop on our way to get some ice cream (chocolate and cookies and cream or as the Japanese lady said, "cookie and vanilla"). 

World's Largest Rice Scoop

We headed back toward our hotel around 3pm, and stopped at the massive Fukuya department store for some souvenir shopping and to find dinner. Aside from the horrifying dinner we had in Osaka, our dinner this particular evening was also pretty bad. We wound up at an Indian restaurant purely by accident and ordered chicken curry. This literally meant a bowl full of goo, about 4 small bites of chicken and a bunch of rice. It's not that it tasted bad, it just wasn't much food besides the rice. 

See anymore chicken in the dish? Nope? Me either!

After dinner, we picked up some breakfast for the next morning and headed back to our hotel. A high speed bullet train the next morning would take us back to Tokyo for the last 2 days of our trip. I would say they were 2 of our favorite days, but the whole trip was so amazing, it's hard to say which days we liked the best. The last two days, however, were pretty awesome! You can read all about them HERE. 

Thanks for reading!

- Foxy the Traveler