After my visit to Tokyo, I took a train to Hakone in the hope of catching a glimpse of
Fuji-san. The area is developed to cater perfectly to day trippers from Tokyo. There's a circuit route including travel by boat, ropeway, cable car, train and bus that covers all the sights in the area. I wasn't quite sure the circuit would work out in one day, so I booked a room somewhere in the middle of it.
When I arrived , the sky was overcast and winds were picking up, but I started anyway. My first stop was the old highway that connected Edo (which is now called Tokyo) to Kyoto. Looking at the rough stones you can see below, I'm not really sure if the road actually deserves the name "highway"...
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| Part of the old Edo-Kyoto highway |
Next was the checkpoint museum. One display in the museum said that the checkpoint was built mainly to keep women from escaping from Edo, and that those who tried were sold off as slaves. This made me wonder -- was Edo really such an evil place that they effectively had to imprison the women there?
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| Rebuilt Hakone checkpoint |
After the checkpoint, I had planned to get on a boat to cross Lake Ashi. However, when I arrived there, everything was closed up and a sign said that the boats had stopped for the day due to heavy winds. So... I backtracked and made the circuit in the other direction to get to my hotel.
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| The cable car leading to my hotel |
In the hotel, I found a few vending machines I hadn't seen before:
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| This one sells hot meals 24/7... |
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| ...and this one has tooth brushes, razors, towels and soap. |
There was really nothing to do around my hotel (not even a convenience store to be found...), so I just relaxed in the hotel's onsen for a bit and went to bed early. That way, I was able to catch the first cable car to the top and continue with the ropeway journey in the best early-morning weather. The first stop of the ropeway was Owakudani volcanic valley.
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| View from the ropeway down Owakudani volcanic valley. |
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| Small ropeway to transport eggs up the hill - you can see one of the egg cages is just being sent up |
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| Owakudani's signature item: eggs boiled in one of the volcanic pools and blackened by the sulphur contained in the water (and that's why they need a ropeway to send eggs up the mountain). They sell them in packages of five for 500 Yen, and of course I had to get one! The eggs taste like regular boiled chicken eggs, but the blue-black shell looks really cool :-) |
After Owakudani, the ropeway continued down to
Lake Ashi. The journey offers a great view of Fuji-san - provided the mountain doesn't hide his face in a cloud cover. The cloud cover was just breaking up as I went down, and I figured I was pretty lucky in having seen a bit of Mount Fuji.
At the shore of Lake Ashi, there is really nothing to do but cross over to the other shore in boats that are dressed up as pirate ships:
On the boat and on the other shore, it turned out I was even more lucky: the cloud cover over Fuji-san cleared completely, and I was able to get some great pictures with myself and Fuji-san :-)
It was still pretty early when I left Lake Ashi, so I decided to make a stop at
Hakone Open Air Museum before hopping on the train to Takayama. The museum turned out to be absolutely gorgeous - it alone would have been worth the trip to Hakone! It is an art museum, consisting mostly of sculptures set in a beautiful park. Combined with perfect weather and cherry trees in full bloom the visit really was a stunning experience. Check out the pictures below:
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| This was probably my favorite sculpture in the museum (well, part of it, anyway). Inside the sculpture you could climb to the top using a narrow spiral stair. The colored glass laid inside the walls was beautifully illuminated by the sun outside. Gorgeous! |
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| Near the sculpture above, there was a free hot foot bath, fed with water from a hot spring. Sitting there... |
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| ... and gazing out over this amazing sculpture garden... life just doesn't get more perfect than that! |
And, finally, here are some more impressions from the garden:
I could have spent hours there admiring the combination of art and nature... But as I had a train to catch I had to leave after just about two hours. Luckily, I still have the memory of this perfect place - and the pictures to serve as a reminder! :-)
