Day 18 in Japan: mostly in trains



On 1 September we hopped onto a streamlined very fast train in Hiroshima at 9.15. We got out of a small all-stops local train at Kawaguchiko at 5:30.

Why Kawaguchiko? I'm glad you asked. The person who bought our JR passes decided in his dubious wisdom to buy a two-week ticket. This meant that if we wanted to avoid paying the full fare of travel from Hiroshima back to Tokyo we had to get moving today. Our Tokyo apartment wouldn't be ready until 5 September so our thinking was to go somewhere there'd be plenty of things to do for a couple of days, and since we'd had so many shrines and museums, somewhere that promised bike rides and bushwalking looked good. Somewhere near Mount Fuji, we thought, and the Five Lakes area sounded more accessible and possibly cheaper than other possibilities. We settled on Kawaguchiko. The helpful people at Hiroshima Station gave us an exact series of trains to catch -- not something they just looked up in a book and told us, but a laborious process of considering many possibilities, writing down destinations in pencil and rubbing them out again, two people looking up schedules in books and one consulting his computer screen, making proposal and counter proposal. Of course the fact that we didn't understand a word made it all the more fascinating. Perhaps it would be just as complex to map a train journey in any similarly populous region. But we preferred to see it as a magnificent theatrical display of willingness to get everything just right for us.

So we got a lot of reading done had some excellent bento-boxed food, arrived at Kawaguchiko, checked into a hotel just across the car park, went for a walk along the lake shore (ko means lake), had dinner at the Ali Baba Indo Restaurant, where we had a pleasant chat with a Nepalese waiter, who said his goal was to get to Australia, and the day was over. The salient aural impression of the railway station area is of the electronic tunes that played constantly over loudspeakers at the traffic lights, one tune when the lights were green one way, another for the other way.

Even though this photo was taken some time in the next three days, it gives an idea of the salient visual impression .



The season when it's generally agreed to be safe to climb Mt Fuji had ended the day before we arrived.

Posted: Thu - October 2, 2008 at 07:56 PM           |

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