Road Trip Diaries

I got up at a reasonable hour, I bought a “Hakone Free Pass”, which gets me to Hakone and lets my ride around on its myriad forms of transport as much as I like.

The train wasn’t comfortable since I didn’t pay the surcharge for the fast, comfortable, pink “Romance Car”. My early start and late night (I drank some beer in my room and bragged about Japanese hardcore gigging to Dave on IM until 1am) caught up to me, so I did as the locals do and napped on the train. Hakone is the terminus, so this was no great risk — indeed, as I boarded a conductor roused a young besuited man who had slept through arrival.

Behind the touristy street of souvenir sweet shops by the station, there is a pretty stretch of river, and I sat beside it eating bento.

Hakone is a pretty, mountainous volcanic region. To deal with the slopes, the local transport company runs all sorts of services, and I used many:

• train
• bus (on a road with many hairpins and one loop)
• pirate galleon (or, ferry in disguise)
• cable car replacement shuttle bus
• cable car (the Japanese call it a ropeway)
• funicular railway (the Japanese call it a cable car)

The high point of all this was Owakudani, “Hell Valley”, an area of hot springs and volcanic steam vents. Here, for the tourists’ benefit, they hard-boil eggs in the volcanic mud so they shells turn black. The inside looks and tastes like an ordinary boiled egg.

Fuji-san is visible from Owakudani. Further down the valley, and visible from the “ropeway”, the springs are industrialised — whether for sulphur extraction, piping off to baths, or both, I don’t know.

There are many funicular railways in the world (some of which claim to be more unique than they really are, in their marketing material), but this one was the only one I’ve seen with more than two stops (top; bottom). This one had 12!

The last stretch of railway was a switchback system. Each station was an opportunity to change direction, with the points sending the train to the downhill branch. I caught on straight away, but some people seemed concerned that we were just shuttling back and forth between two stations.

Also, the stations were the only places with two tracks, so the train had to wait for the train coming in the opposite direction before continuing each time.

My plan was to wear myself out with the circular public transport route around the area, then soak away the aches in a onsen (hot spring bath). The Tourist Information centre directed me to an onsen, and I took a shuttle bus there. When I got there, it turned out to be a moderately swish hotel, with the baths on the 8th floor. Waiting for the lift, it occurred to me that this was almost certainly going to be a “play at being Japanese alongside other gaijin” scenario, so I left, and walked back along the shuttle bus route to the station — which probably did me a lot more good than the bath ever did.

I was glad I had, too, because as soon as I got on the train, for the 2 hour ride home, I realised I was shattered. Even the easy metro journey from Shinjuku to the hotel was daunting. When I got back, I drew myself a bath, and had a diluted onsen experience in the comfort of my own hotel room.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Japan 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.