Fuji and Hakone 12/28/22
Yup, I have a hangover. All the food didn’t help plus mixing all the drinks.
All the toilets here are bidets and are amazing. Even the free public restrooms have them. I’m a changed woman so we will be buying one when we return. Breakfast buffet in the hotel again. We packed and left for Hakone. Local Tokyo train to the insanity that is the JR station. There are a million people running around and there are so many signs, I had to ask be of the many people working for help. There are seriously so many people doing almost a job. Like people just standing around. There were 5 people standing around at breakfast and it’s a buffet.
We got on the Shinkansen and that train is super fun. It reaches 200 mph, leans into turns, and zooms by hella fast. The ride to Odawara was only 20 min, it was so fast I almost didn’t look where we stopped so we grabbed our bags fast and jumped out. I did make a reservation for this train although we didn’t need to since we only have carryons. Note to self for next time. Odawara to Hakone on the Romance train (it’s just nice) then we took another train up the mountain, or volcano, whatever. Off the train and we walked up the hill to our hotel. No taxis for us thanks very much. Because of some wrong turns, we ended up walking past a tiny Airstream where a dude was making coffee and hot chocolate and macha so we stopped in for a drink, we are here to just cruise around
This hotel was old and huge and beautiful. Actually the whole small town runs along a huge river in a valley. The hotel is something you’d see out of a movie. We dropped our bags off and headed up to the main town part of Hakone called Gora. We had no plans. When we got there we saw a cable car to go up the mountain. Sure why not. The cable car took us about a third of the way, then we got on a gondola that took us to the top. The car goes over a huge valley where there are tons of sulfur springs, which the car goes through and it was really hard to breathe. Yep we are on a volcano. Then we reached the top of the mountain and we saw Fuji off in the distance. It really was quite spectacular, I wasn’t expecting it to be so pretty. Part of the tourist attraction is to buy eggs that were cooked in the suponer so they are black. Still warm we broke them open. Eating one is supposed to make you live 5-7 years longer. I’ll take all the help I can get. The egg was warm but tasted like an egg. The burps however have a special sulfur taste. Yum. It was a beautiful blue sky day so the views were spectacular.
Back down the gondola and part of the cable car. We hadn’t eaten so we hit up a brewery in town. It was small and had a lovely view of a garden outside of large windows. The California beer was super light and refreshing. Some meat skewers and __ for a delish meal. Back to the hotel to check in, but not before we risk our lives walking on a busy road with no sidewalk. We saw a woman get hit by a truck yesterday so we know it happens. We ran a bit here and there but we made it. A little woman showed us to our room giving us a little history along the way. When she pointed to the spa I shook my head and showed her my tattoo on my wrist and she giggled no since I’m not allowed in with me potentially being the Yakusa and all. We got dinner reservations for 6 in the hotel. That was only and hour off, I better get hungry by then.
We hesitantly got up from our separate beds (we will sleep well tonight) and walked across the street to the restaurant Kikko-So. I was so tired when we arrived, this was going to be a long evening.