We were up early on our last day in Tokyo, headed for the Hakone area about 90 minutes outside the city. We had decided on this area as we’d been told that you get the best views of Mt. Fuji from the nearby Lake Ashi. Oddly enough, the day in Tokyo dawned bright and clear and a light sprinkle of rain overnight had cleared out the air to provide us with a long-range view of the mountain from our apartment. That turned out to be a good thing.
So it was off to the familiar Shinagawa Station to catch the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Odawara Station. The train barely seemed to pick up much speed before we arrived after 27 minutes. The Hakone area is a major tourist destination close to Tokyo and as it was a Sunday we expected the place to be rather crowded. Maybe we were a bit early as the bus from the station to our hotel wasn’t overly full – which was a good thing given we had three large suitcases to lug around. I lost track of the number of stops before ours but I’m guessing it was around 40 or so, most of them hotels. It seems this is a hot springs area and each hotel has been situated to take full advantage of the resultant spa baths, rather like Hepburn Springs in Victoria.
Our hotel was, to put it mildly, non-descript. A boxy affair that looked like it had been built by the Russians in the 1960s.
Hakone hotel
It gave good views over the valley below and had the added advantage of only being three or so stops from the end of the bus line and the lake. Robyn had booked the hotel through the tour group in February and was told at the time that we had been lucky as the hotel was offering a dinner, bed and breakfast package at that time. The trouble was, as we found out at reception, that our voucher didn’t mention this. That didn’t matter as I was traveling with a lawyer, and five minutes later we had all the requisite meal coupons to cover us for our stay. I’m not sure if the bloke at reception realised Robyn was probably right after all, or just gave in to the inevitable.
After check-in we headed down to the lake, grabbed a spot of lunch and then our place on the tourist “pirate ship”; basically a tourist cruise ship decked out to look vaguely piratical. The day was clear, the lake was calm, and Fuji was clouded in. We started to make jokes about the scenery artists moving the clouds in for the day so the tourists wouldn’t get over-excited.
Will tentatively contemplates the pirate's life
A brief stop at the end of the lake for an ice-cream (the wasabi flavour was sold out unfortunately), a barbequed squid on a stick and it was back on the boat for the return trip.
Waiting for the grilled squid
Robyn finds a new friend with a better beard
It seemed too early to head back to the boring hotel so we opted for the Hakone Ropeway, a cable-car to the top of a nearby hill. On the way up we read that you could pass straight through the first station and get the best views of Fuji around in a long section between towers before the second station. It was still bright and sunny where we were but only the shoulders of Fuji, about 30-35 kilometres away, were showing above the surrounding hills. We didn’t spend long at the second station before Will and I spotted a break in the clouds and the top of the mountain. We rushed back to the cable-car for the return journey but the scenery artists had finished their latest cloud motif and Fuji was gone again. On a clear day you CAN see Mt. Fuji, but not this day.
Fuji in cloud
The dinner that Robyn had scrounged for us turned out to be Western style with a choice of beef or “Toady’s fish” – I went for the beef, the others for Toady’s surprise.
Toady's fish
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